McAleese candidacy turns into test for our society

In some respects, a presidential election is a contradiction in terms. It is a conflict from which a figurehead above conflict is supposed to emerge. It is a process dominated by the political parties which is meant to produce a nonparty political symbol of the nation. It is, increasingly, a dirty war that is meant to create a gracious and serene image of Irishness.

Bizarrely, the least powerful public office now has to be won by enduring the most vicious campaigns. Both in 1990 and now in 1997, the presidential campaigns have been infinitely nastier than any general election.

And, to some extent, those contradictions make a kind of weird sense - ours is a deeply divided, restless society that still hankers after a cosy consensus. We want broadly incompatible things, and thus no one can quite satisfy us. If the presidential candidates resort to bland, abstract lovey-dovey language, they earn our contempt. We abuse them for not discussing real issues. And when real issues emerge - nationalism, the North, the nature of the Irish consensus - we complain that things have got too mean, too political.

In the disillusioned, insecure state of Irish society, we have become almost impossible to please. This presidential election has, after all, produced an extraordinary set of options. It is being fought - mostly - by people of real substance, people who have been deeply enmeshed in the stuff of civil society over the last decade.

And much of the criticism of the political parties in this regard is deeply unfair. The Dail parties have allowed the mould to be broken, and two candidates to be nominated by county councils. Fianna Fail and Labour have been criticised for not putting forward Albert Reynolds or Michael D. Higgins. But what would we have said if they had chosen those candidates? That they had missed the point of the Robinson Presidency, that they were being conservative and predictable, that they were just trying to grab the office for their own purposes.

And so what if Fianna Fail came up with a green Northern nationalist? Who do we expect them to run, Conor Cruise O'Brien? We in the Republic never tire of telling Ulster Unionists that they must recognise the legitimacy of nationalism, even while retaining their legitimate right to oppose it with vigour. Can we not do the same ourselves, and accept that it is quite proper and legitimate that one of the five options facing the electorate should be a candidate who is in many ways typical of the Northern Catholic middleclass which we pretend to regard as our own people?

Doesn't Fianna Fail deserve credit for the fact that, for once, they have lived up to their own rhetoric and put forward an outstandingly articulate and able representative of the kind of Ireland they aspire to?

At one level, indeed, the problem is not that Mary McAleese seems to have been somewhat ambiguous in her attitude to Sinn Fein, or to have been a strong Catholic nationalist. It is that she was misled by our supposed desire for a "non-political", consensual campaign. She decided to present herself not as what she is - a superb articulator of a major Irish political tradition (green nationalism) - but as what the spin-doctors think we want from a President: a tea-towel philosopher, a builder of bridges in the air, a slightly politicised version of the Housewife of the Year.

Instead of being what she is - a leading and highly distinguished member of one side of a bitterly divided society - she chose to present herself as something else. She conjured up a Northern Ireland that is simply incredible to most people. A North in which nice unionists pat rising Catholic stars on the back and support herself as "one of our own". A North in which nice Catholics just can't get enough of those friendly, goodhearted Prods with their really cute sashes and tattoos.

And this just doesn't ring true. I believe Mary McAleese when she says she has never voted for Sinn Fein or supported violence. I don't believe her when she claims to be awash with support from unionists. If the North is the kind of place where the hearts of most Protestants really leaped for joy at the rise and rise of a supremely selfconfident Catholic, why all the fuss about discrimination and sectarianism?

How can her memories of being intimidated out of her house as a young woman be matched to her rhetoric of growing up amidst the love of the Protestant community?

And this is the great irony of the rows about Mary McAleese. What has really made the North an issue in this campaign is not the dangerous and disreputable leaking of Foreign Affairs briefings about her views. It is her own evasion of the reality of life in a sectarian society. It was she who treated the North as a no-go area, who evaded its realities by inventing a fantastic and frankly incredible view of the place. It was she who, by trying to invent a Northern Disneyland, suggested that there was something unpalatable about her real experience as a Northern Catholic.

And yet, it is hard to blame her, for she and her handlers have been picking up the contradictory signals that a confused electorate is sending out. The "I love the unionist community" stuff is, at one level, what we want to hear from presidential candidates - a visionary pretence that Ireland is a place where we all love each other, where there is no hatred, no anger, no division. But when we do hear it, we know at some level that it is a lie, that this island is riven with divisions - sectarian, political, economic.

The one good thing about the whole business is that Mary McAleese's candidacy has, by force, been wrenched out of the realms of meaningless metaphor and turned into a stiff test of some of Southern society's shibboleths. The real Mary McAleese - complex, contradictory, as inevitably involved with the dark ambiguities of conflict as anyone in her position would be - is now the candidate who will shape the election.

The Southern electorate is thereby forced to answer a very awkward question - how close, after all, does it want to be to actual Northern nationalism?

If Mary McAleese wins the presidency, we will at least have learned something about ourselves. We will know that we are indeed willing to accept Northern Catholics, in all the complexity and ambiguity that 30 years of conflict have created in their collective psyche as belonging to "us". And we will know that the impossibility of using the presidency as a bridge to the Protestant community is a price we are prepared to pay for that act of acceptance.

And if she doesn't win, we will be able to judge ourselves by that fact, too. Through the last fortnight's bizarre turn of events, this campaign has given us the ability, at a crucial time, to find out what we really think about the North.