Trust a teenager to ask the searching question. At Loreto College in Kilkenny yesterday, Adi Roche answered three of them, after a few intakes of breath from her election team. The candidate had told 150 transition and Leaving Cert students about her vision of the Presidency when question time came. There was a brief pause and student, Michelle Burke, stood up. "During Mary Robinson's term of office, at the height of the troubles in Northern Ireland, she shook hands with Gerry Adams," she said. "What would you have done?"
"I would like to think I would have taken the same risk," Ms Roche answered quickly. "I think if I was to be asked to do that in the future - if it was for the greater good of Ireland - and it meant shaking hands with a whole range of different people then I would be prepared to do it."
Her handlers smiled, but the teenagers showed no mercy. One down and two to go.
"If you don't happen to win the election," Orla Geoghan asked next, "who would you like to see win it?" Ms Roche smiled. "I do not allow negativity into my space," she said to laughter. "I wish them all the best of luck, but I hope I'll win."
And finally the question that produced the longest answer. "During the summer you said you weren't going to run for the Presidency. What made you change your mind?" Ciara Comerford asked.
It had been a long wooing process, Ms Roche said. She had turned down offers from other parties for months and then people she met through the Chernobyl Children's Project started to tell her she should run. The man who would become her director of elections, Labour's Pat Magner, telephoned her and asked her to give them a final hearing.
It was the "biggest decision she ever had to make", she said. So she took a favourite six-mile walk and "asked the man above". The answer that came back "was overwhelmingly yes".
During an earlier local radio interview, Ms Roche defended her position on live cattle exports after the interviewer asked her how she expected to win the farming vote. She said she wanted to see the trade made more humane, but did not wish to see any jobs lost.
The Presidency was "not about power", she said, when asked to size herself up against the Government candidate. "It's not about decision-making. It's about listening to the will of the people."
Asked about the negative publicity when former project workers criticised her, Ms Roche said the critics had numbered "11 to 12 people out of something like 8,000 people". She had been overwhelmed by reaction to her at a public meeting in Waterford the night before, she said. "Last night something very special happened."
Earlier in Kilkenny town centre, the Roche team picked up some transatlantic support. Three elderly American women stood curiously at the back of the Computech office as Ms Roche presented certificates to the students. "Is that her?" one of them asked, comparing the election poster her friend was holding with the real Ms Roche.
They had heard about no other candidate since they arrived, Sally Bedrosian from Tampa, Florida, explained. Their tour guide, Frank Nolan, "thinks she's absolutely outstanding" and they decided to get a poster, ask her to sign it and present it to him.
"I hope that's going up in the window of the bus," Pat Magner warned only half joking as he eyed the placard-mounted poster. "Otherwise it's an expenditure we can't afford." The ladies assured him it would.
At the O'Neill Centre for children with cerebral palsy, Ms Roche highlighted the difference between her campaign and the more high-octane pace of the Government candidate. She spent five minutes coaxing a smile out of 19month-old Richard Young. He finally responded - as all children seem to do with Ms Roche - with a gummy grin.
At the McGrath Community Centre, which had been until last year a rundown schoolhouse, a women's group was sitting down to sandwiches and soft drinks. "We've arrived just at the right time," Ms Roche said as she walked straight up to the table. All the women smiled and laughed.
"Fair dues to you all," she said as the team hustled her on. "Hopefully, we'll be seeing you again," and then, as if to prove she has become a different kind of campaigner in the last few weeks, she added, "don't forget to give us your number one."
