The Fine Gael candidate was never the favourite to win the presidential election but with her feisty campaign and personal appeal, Mary Banotti had a good outside chance of pulling it off. Then FG, in the person of leader John Bruton, shot itself in the foot and the necessary transfers vanished when Labour nominee Adi Roche plummeted.
Both Bruton and Labour leader Dick Spring are damaged. Banotti has an immensely enhanced profile which should secure her European seat in 1999 and Roche has said she will return to her worthy Chernobyl work, no doubt a sadder and wiser woman. It is said in Fine Gael that Bruton had no option but the Northern and Sinn Fein angles on which to fight Mary McAleese. They also privately question the timing of the arrest this week of a FG adviser to the last government in connection with leaks, an event which caused huge delight in FF.
While McAleese's right-wing conservatism was touched on by Labour, as far as FG was concerned, the North was the issue. By choosing it, FG galvanised FF into action and moved supporters of all four other candidates who disliked partitionism into the McAleese camp. The attack on her, the FG leader's association with unionist sympathisers, the anti-nationalist sentiments being expressed and the leaks and smears which linked the FF/PD candidate with Sinn Fein annoyed so many that any doubts they had about McAleese were put aside. Some who had never voted FF before now did so.
And there were doubts - worries about her connections with the SPUC-ers, as opposed to the Shinners, her reported arrogance, ambition, singlemindedness and so on. But she won and is, as the BBC pointed out, the first person from the UK to become the President of a modern European state.