Damien Scallon sits in his hotel room listening to his wife talking on a late-night radio show. The interviewer is berating her, sighing loudly and asking her the same controversial questions over and over again. Damien Scallon is "very, very upset".
A few miles away in an RTE studio a commercial break comes on. Presidential candidate Dana Rosemary Scallon offers the headscratching broadcaster Vincent Browne a glass of water. "I thought he looked a bit sick", she explained later.
Relaxing before the final Prime Time debate, Damien describes his campaign experience as "interesting". He smiles. "Interesting", his upturned mouth suggests, doesn't even begin to describe it.
Damien is one of five people who have been uniquely placed during this campaign. Walking the obligatory three steps behind every candidate there has been a man or woman shaking every hand, listening to every speech and smarting from every smear. Joan Nally, Sean Dunne, Martin McAleese, Tania Banotti and Damien Scallon will not easily forget the past six weeks.
"I was very, very upset", Damien repeats, still on the subject of Vincent Browne (who subsequently issued a public apology). "I don't know what I would have done if I had been in the studio."
This was one of a few occasions during the campaign that Damien had thought: "Wouldn't it be nice to be back sitting by the pool in quiet, peaceful Alabama."
He is glad, though, that they never "chucked it all in". Dana has "gained people's respect", he says. "They may not agree with her. But some people who took her as a joke before this are giving her their No 1 vote." And he didn't mind being referred to as Mr Dana one little bit.
Joan Nally, wife of Derek Nally, is, she maintains, the sensible type. "I tend to go along with things", she says. So, when her husband revealed that he was thinking of making a bid for the Aras, she did what she usually did: "I said `that's fine with me'. I have never stood in Derek's way before."
It all happened so quickly. One minute their home town of Bunclody in Co Wexford was covered in celebratory bunting and balloons. The next her husband was being accused of attacking Mary McAleese. "And, you know, he never did. He asked her to clarify her position", she says.
She never felt worried or concerned for him as he spoke on radio, in public and on TV. "I know he is well able to cope with it and I don't worry about questions that are put to him", she says.
She enjoyed the canvassing; it was "like nothing I'd ever done before". Did anything her husband said during the campaign embarrass her? The comment about legalising prostitution, for example? "There are some issues I disagree with Derek on", she says. "But that is not one of them."
Joan will now go back to her job with Derek's security firm. "Everything will return to normal, but it might take a few weeks", she says.
Martin McAleese, husband of Mary, declined to comment for the purposes of this article. The mildmannered dentist, spoken of in flattering terms by those journalists covering the campaign, is described as "very media-shy".
The spotlight does not sit easily on Sean Dunne, Adi Roche's teacher husband, either. He confesses he is "quiet and introspective" but talks freely about his feelings for his wife.
Each night at the end of a hard campaign day he would tell her: "You are absolutely wonderful, amazing, and I'm so proud of you."
He discovered new reserves in his wife as she handled the controversies which beset the beginning of her campaign.
"My admiration for her as a human being, as a partner, has risen to heights I'd never imagined. Like any couple that goes through difficult times, and there were difficult times during the campaign, our relationship has been strengthened by the experience", he says.
Tania Banotti wears a big round badge embossed with "Vote My Mum. Mary Banotti Number 1". She says that she and her mother are "very similar". Tania took time off from her job as a UN volunteer working with Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip to help Mary Banotti on the campaign.
Highlights, she says, included the ploughing championships. "My Mum standing knee-deep in mud with Charolais bulls and the campaign team thinking `Just what are we doing?' " Bad times were the car crash in which a woman died. Her mother, she says, has emerged from the campaign "with her reputation not just intact, but enhanced".
"My Mum is a very good loser", Tania concludes. "Whatever happens, she will go to the inauguration and she will hold her head high. She will be able to say `I ran a good campaign, a clean campaign and I didn't stoop to any silly tactics'.
"She did the best she could, and you can't ask for more than that."