It was as polished as all her performances, and the audience at the Mansion House in Dublin gave Mary McAleese an enthusiastic round of applause. She told members of the National Association for the Mentally Handicapped in Ireland about her profoundly-deaf brother John, and two cousins, one with Down's syndrome, the other autistic.
Her mother and aunts had "trundled from meeting to meeting" of associations and help groups, and her mother would remark that it was always women at these meetings. These women had "great worries about what would happen to their children".
She understood the problems, she told the audience, of changing attitudes and "telling the story until you feel you're boring people with the story". The carers had to work, "even when you're tired, or beyond tired".
Prof McAleese seemed to more than empathise with her audience. "But I don't really regard this as an appropriate forum in which to do a promo," she added at the end.
Susan Stein, representing her sister, Dana, told the audience more directly: "Dana loves all of you."
Representing Adi Roche, Fergus Finlay said the issue was one of human rights, "not of sympathy, pity or charity". The 2,500 mentally handicapped people on waiting lists for care represented 10 per cent of a section of society "in urgent need of an expression of a right".
Given the talk of voting pacts, Mr Finlay said he would make a statement on the subject. Prof McAleese looked at him intently and journalists' pens jerked in preparation.
Every candidate should make a pact, Mr Finlay said, that whoever won would urge the Government to do something about the problem on Budget Day, December 3rd, which was also the European Day of Persons with Disabilities.
"Fergus, well done," a woman said afterwards. "You said the best thing. It's a pity that the canvass is on."
The canvass, and the no-fly exclusion zone set up around Prof McAleese, were certainly still on. As she was ushered into a room in the Mansion House for a BBC interview the rest of us were ushered out. "Could we keep this private?" her PR woman said.
Then an ABC crew who said they had been trying to interview her for a week were given a moment as she climbed into her car. The men from Down Under came away slightly shell-shocked.
Asked why she wanted to be President, Prof McAleese gave them what journalist Chris Clark described as an incredibly patronising answer. "Why wouldn't anybody want to be President of a wonderful country like Ireland?" she replied.
"Is the Sinn Fein thing well and truly dead?" another fearless reporter lobbed in, as her head disappeared into the car. The candidate rolled her eyes and said grimly: "I think actually the bones are pretty well ossified by now."
A quick tour of the National Youth Council exhibition in nearby Buswell's Hotel, and it was wall-to-wall Marys. There was Mary Robinson smiling from the literature of the Community Games, Mary Banotti talking about Europe and another smiling Robinson shot on the No Name club.
Martin Collins from the Youth Section of the Irish Traveller Movement joked that he would bring a few vans up to the park to see her. "Bring a busload up," she said, smiling back.
And then she was gone for an afternoon off before her appearance on Six-One News. Perhaps they were going to put her in a quiet sun-filled room and bombard her with soft-focus pictures of smiling journalists and soothing whale sounds.
