The most remarkable thing about Gerry Adams's otherwise unsurprising comments on the presidential election (Pat Kenny Show, RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) was that they were so perfectly clear. For understandable reasons, this is rarely the case with his utterances, and Thursday's chat with Pat was no different. When the man begins a reply, as is his wont, "Well, our position on that is perfectly clear", this is generally prelude to a verbal mudslide that leaves the original question nowhere to be seen.

Sometimes the evasion is amusing. C'mon, Kenny asked in the course of a long interview, surely people are entitled to posit a special relationship between the IRA and Sinn Fein when so many former members of the IRA turn up as party activists? Adams wasn't having it: "Many were also members of the Legion of Mary, of the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association . . ." Say it ain't so, Gerry.

But for some reason he decided to be clear about his preference for President (though he went on to say he'd "no great gra" for any of them). I won't attempt an explanation, having heard Shay Healy on the Sunday Show (RTE Radio 1) achieve new heights of silliness trying to do so. Perhaps, said Shay, Adams was sending "a coded message" to Sinn Fein supporters that it was okay to back Mary McAleese. Hmmmm. I can just picture the SF cryptographers in Parnell Square, still huddled over the three-in-one, playing and replaying the tape.

However, unless you adopt a fairly twisted conspiracy theory, Adams was obviously displaying confidence that, for the public at large, he's come in from the margins, that his "endorsement" is not to be regarded as a sulphurbreathed kiss of death. By yesterday Adams knew that this had proved to be, at best, a dangerous calculation. Back, briefly, with Pat Kenny, he said the reaction had little to do with the election, and more to do with scuppering the peace process.

So what is the underlying issue in this election? Radio listeners will be forgiven for thinking it's all about RTE programme conferences from about 17 years ago. (Were they as fraught and blood-splattered as some of the gatherings accompanying the current "reorganisation" of Radio 1? That's another day's story.)

A few weeks ago on Radio Ireland's Sunday Supplement, Eoghan Harris cited Mary McAleese's alleged agenda when she was a journalist at those conferences: she wanted to do Northern stories, he said (ahah!), stuff about Lenadoon, discrimination etc.

Last Thursday's Liveline (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday), an interview with the candidate, saw McAleese hit back at the old Workers Party gang in Montrose. She told Marian about one run-in, when she told a meeting she expected that Bobby Sands might win the by-election he was contesting. Her view was shot down - and thus RTE didn't have cameras at the count.

Harris's days as the State's chief agenda-setter apparently aren't past. On that same Radio Ireland programme some weeks ago, he announced his intention to turn this presidential election into a referendum on the National Question. That one seems to have been a cinch. Judging by his performance on this week's Sunday Supplement, he's enjoying the job. He pointed with pride to a cartoon in the Sunday Business Post that showed him as a ventriloquist, with Prionsias De Rossa, Mary Robinson, John Bruton and Derek Nally on his lap. His only complaint was that it didn't reflect the fact that Nally "has got off my lap". Nally had failed to go in for the kill, said Harris, who enlivened his rant with references to military tactics at Vinegar Hill and such like. Even the slew of phone calls to the programme from listeners who said he'd turned them in favour of McAleese didn't disturb his equilibrium. As host John Ryan read their comments, Harris could be heard intoning: "A Sinn Feiner . . . another Sinn Feiner . . ."

Hey Radio Ireland, give this guy his own programme! (Maybe then people would stop listening to him . . .)

No more will we listen to Tom Rooney, a fine play-by-play commentator mainly heard doing rugby on Radio 1. His death, at just 41, was suitably and beautifully mourned on Saturday Sport, with clips and warm words from Roy Willoughby bracketed by Elvis singing In The Ghetto and the sound of Rooney's favourite ballad, The Galway Shawl. Well done.