By 9 P.M., there was an expectant buzz in the hall. About 1,000 students had gathered in the hall of NUI Galway's student centre for the largest, and probably the youngest, hustings of the presidential campaign. The impending attendance of the four candidates - the absent party being Dana, Rosemary Scallon - represented a triumph for the college's Political Discussion Society, which had organised the event around the theme that "there is no greater calling than public service". Obviously the call wasn't loud enough, because the candidates were nowhere to be seen.

By 9.15 p.m., the buzz had taken on the threatening undertone of a beehive sensing the approach of a bear. By 9.30 p.m., slow handclaps echoed around the hall. By 9.40 p.m., the tolerance of the students was starting to wear very thin and there were mutterings of dissent in the air.

They might have been even less tolerant had they been aware of what was going on in a back room, as representatives of two candidates engaged in bickering so puerile that it would have provided sufficient justification for lowering the minimum age of potential candidates from 35 to 11 and holding any future hustings in a playground.

The problem was that Mary Banotti was late. Representatives of the Nally and McAleese camps wanted the debate to proceed in alphabetical order and were unwilling to allow Banotti to speak if she arrived late in the debate.

Representatives of the Roche camp, in an admirable attempt to ensure that the debate went ahead before the election itself, offered to swap speaking order with Banotti. The other camps were having none of it and threatened to pull out, until it was pointed out that this would leave the floor to Roche.

A compromise was reached: Banotti would be allowed to speak if she arrived before the start of the question-and-answer session and the order of the other speakers would be decided by lottery. In the end, and probably proving the existence of a Supreme Being, the names came out in alphabetical order and the candidates entered the hall to face the mainly student audience.

What was surprising, in retrospect, was how easy a ride the candidates got from the students - particularly the Government candidate, Prof Mary McAleese. After all, the Government had effectively disenfranchised a large section of the student population by deciding to hold the election on a Thursday instead of a Friday.

In another country, such a blatant infringement of the right of a large section of the population to vote would have led to rioting in the streets and the pillorying of candidates who had not raised the issue publicly. Instead, all of the candidates received warm - and, in some cases, enthusiastic - applause. Perhaps the Q&A would raise some sparks. Then again, perhaps de Valera would come back from the dead and light up a spliff at the back of the hall.

McAleese spoke first, leading with an anecdote about her then husbandto-be dancing with Moss Keane in UCG. It sounded a little manufactured and lacked a punchline, but it was as close as her speech got to a human element.

She effectively defused any questioning on the Sinn Fein issue by pointing out that leading SDLP members had come out in support of her only an hour earlier, "every one of them saying that in no way had I ever, ever run a Sinn Fein agenda". She spoke of her father's poverty, of her view of public service as an antidote to the "corrosive cynicism" which had crept into the popular perception of public life, of her "modest" contribution to the peace process. It was an impressive performance, if devoid of even a spark of genuine warmth.

Derek Nally, who spoke second, has perfected the gruff but kindly excopper image he wishes to project, coming across like a Hibernicised Inspector Morse forced to tell the grieving relatives that little Betty won't be coming home due to a nasty encounter in the woodshed.

"I'm not a lawyer," he said at one point. "Neither am I a politician. I claim to be nothing more than an ordinary man. But I know right from wrong."

Following a burst of applause, he spoke out in favour of openness in public dealings and against the passing of the proposed referendum on Cabinet confidentiality. He performed well but this was not his constituency of voters, as he later admitted with a smile. His silverhaired appeal tends to strike a chord with your more senior punter and some of his supporters appeared to be distinctly elderly.

Adi Roche took to the stage with a broadside against the leaking of Government documents. "The power struggle between the two large parties has dragged the Presidential election into a morass of accusation and counter-accusation," she said, accusing them of viewing the Presidency as a "political life jacket".

Her speech was a mostly successful attempt to shrug off allegations of excessive touchyfeelyness - though beside McAleese even a modicum of warmth glowed like a campfire in the tundra. "No Belarussian border guard has ever described me as "touchy-feely'," Roche observed, before moving on to speak of the need for a concrete commitment to children and the marginalised in society. It was unfortunate for Roche that the impending arrival of Mary Banotti distracted the attention of the audience from the former's speech (which was probably 90 seconds too long anyway). Banotti rolled in on the dying wave of Roche's applause, hands waving in a grand entrance. She had the potential to make a real impact. She blew it.

Mary Banotti comes across as a decent woman in private. In public, she is betrayed by her politician's instincts, replacing sincerity with a hard, dull gloss. Her address began oddly, pointing out the primacy of the artist over the politician. "There is no piece of legislation that will move me as Mozart's Piano Concerto does, no amendment to a section of a Bill which gives you the feeling down your spine of seeing a Michelangelo for the first time," she said. Um, come again?

The speech deteriorated from there, into a paean to Lemass and Costello and some vague rhetoric about the new Ireland. It was dull stuff, the only bright note being her observation that she had built up a network of contacts all over Europe, including Palermo. Who did she know in Palermo, one wondered, and would it lead to chaps called Vincenzo paying visits to undecided voters and applying pliers and hot wires?

The quality of the questions during the subsequent Q&A was appalling. A flock of sheep which had eaten and digested any newspapers in the preceding week could have expectorated a better selection of questions between them. True, the issue of student voters came up, but no one appeared willing to pursue the candidates unduly on the issue. What was a Sinn Fein agenda, asked one questioner. Where would you like to go on your first junket/ State visit, asked another.

Actually, the responses to that question might bear some examination. Adi Roche, not surprisingly, opted for Belarus, but at least she entered into the spirit of the thing and picked a country, as did Mary Banotti who opted for a visit to Britain. Derek Nally, after some humming and hawing, decided on the "emerging countries" from the old eastern bloc. But Mary McAleese . . . Watching her trying to be spontaneous was like watching a fish trying to pick up a stick with its fins. She said she was tempted to pick Northern Ireland, which was almost funny, before her spontaneity program crashed and she had to fall back on RAM.

Searching Memory Banks . . . Starting Job. "The (click) first (whirr) country that (bzzz) would invite (click) me. I (click-click) think that State (whirr-bzzz) visits should (beep) come about that (whirr) way, rather than (boop-boop) being preempted (CLICK)."

If McAleese is elected, we will probably be able to upgrade her when Windows 98 comes along.

Overall, the evening was more notable for the achievements of the PDS in organising it than the contributions of the candidates themselves or the passion of the students in attendance. Of these, it was hard to tell which was more disappointing.