The Fianna Fail/PD presidential candidate, Prof Mary McAleese, yesterday urged her Independent opponent, Mr Derek Nally, to reflect on the advice he was getting following his attacks on her and his apparent U-turns.
"One would need to ask is this an agenda," she said in Co Tipperary. "If somebody did decide to aim for a target, I might not be the least obvious one. But if he is being advised by people, it might be worth his while reflecting on that advice, as to whether or not he is enhancing his own profile."
Having questioned Prof McAleese's moral assumptions and her fitness for office on foot of the leaked Department of Foreign Affairs memo which, Mr Nally implied, showed Prof McAleese to have Sinn Fein sympathies, Mr Nally said at a public meeting on Tuesday night that he now accepted her denial of the memo.
But in the early hours of yesterday, he repudiated this and agreed with one of his advisers, Mr John Caden who, in an article in yesterday's Irish Times, insisted Mr Nally did not accept her denial.
In a statement issued yesterday at 12.56 a.m. Mr Nally said that while he was "disposed" to accept her denial, he wanted the Government to publish the memo so the public could decide. Last night, the Department indicated its opposition to this proposal.
Prof McAleese also opposed publication. "Is he [Mr Nally] saying that any secret document of this nature is amenable to be put into the public arena?" she asked.
She went on: "I accepted his 360 degree U-turn on Tuesday night in front of a live audience of several hundred in Trinity College and the emphatic nature of it."
As for his subsequent statement just a few hours later, she was briskly dismissive: "I have nothing to say to it except that people should be asking Derek Nally for a statement that is understandable on this issue. As far as I'm concerned, the subject is closed."
However, Mr Nally disagreed. There was no confusion, either in his own mind or in his camp, about the remarks concerning Prof McAleese's alleged sympathetic view of Sinn Fein, he said in Listowel, Co Kerry, yesterday. He maintained that during the debate in Trinity, Prof McAleese categorically rejected suggestions in the memo that she was pleased at Sinn Fein's showing in the Westminster election and that she would not participate in the Northern Ireland local elections unless there was a pact between Sinn Fein and the SDLP.
Mr Nally said he had been quite willing to accept that rejection.
Any confusion arose, he said, from the fact that almost five hours before the Trinity debate, Mr Caden, his communications director, had agreed to write an article for The Irish Times.
When Mr Caden later realised that he [Mr Nally] had accepted her assertion that her comments quoted in the memo were taken out of context and were inaccurate, the statement was issued in the early hours of yesterday setting out the position. In that statement, Mr Nally said he agreed with Mr Caden's "analysis". However, he said the affair still needed to be cleared up. The only way of doing this, he added, was to release the memo.
???ein was refusing to condemn acts of violence on both sides of the border and before a ceasefire was announced.
There were three points to be made about the memo, he said:
it was compiled, apparently, by a friend of Prof McAleese's;
the author was a senior official;
such officials were not given to writing inaccurate accounts of meetings or conversations.