Derek Nally is understood to be taking advice from two of the best media pundits in the business: Gay Byrne's former producer Mr John Caden and his long-time friend and RTE colleague Mr Eoghan Harris.
Mr Caden is Mr Nally's director of publicity. Both Mr Harris and Mr Jim Gahan, Mr Nally's press officer, yesterday denied to this reporter that Mr Harris was advising the Nally campaign. However, Mr Harris has told other journalists he is "doing a bit of work with Derek Nally".
He told this reporter yesterday he was "a very, very strong supporter of his campaign". In his Sunday Times column last weekend, Mr Harris said he was giving his first preference vote to Mr Nally "because he has a record of standing up to subversives, both the sort that wear balaclavas and the sort that wear sharp suits".
Both men are known to be extremely unhappy that the daily press and RTE have failed to investigate independently Emily O'Reilly's report in the Sunday Business Post, based on a Department of Foreign Affairs memo, that Prof Mary McAleese had expressed pleasure at Sinn Fein's electoral performance and allegedly indicated she could have countenanced voting for that party last May, in the absence of an IRA ceasefire.
Asked yesterday for his response to Mr Nally's acceptance of Prof McAleese's denial during a debate on Tuesday night that she was sympathetic to Sinn Fein, Mr Harris said: "I think Derek Nally is an old-fashioned gentleman. When he found himself in the hallowed portals of Trinity College Dublin being asked to call a woman a liar, he found himself unable to do so. But he's made it clear he still has problems with the memo."
Mr Harris and Mr Caden go back together to the late 1970s, to a time when Prof McAleese was also working for RTE as a television reporter. At that time there was "considerable ideological tension" within the station, says one senior RTE executive.
This was caused by a belief among some producers and reporters - many of them Workers' Party supporters - that RTE's early pro-nationalist coverage of the Northern conflict had been too simplistic, and an attempt was made to straighten the record by putting over the unionist viewpoint.
Mr Harris and Mr Caden were outspoken advocates of this approach. Prof McAleese was also working in RTE then, co-presenting Frontline before moving on to the flagship current affairs programme, Today Tonight. There she clashed frequently with its head, Mr Joe Mulholland, over issues such as the coverage of the 1981 Maze prison hunger strike.
In an interview in Fionnuala O'Connor's book about Northern Catholics, In Search of a State, Prof McAleese says she had "a dreadful time with the Workers' Party, people who now hold very prominent positions in RTE - whose idea of coming to the North was to talk to unionist politicians whom they cultivated in a really obsequious way, to talk to other Workers' Party people and then come back to Dublin and tell what was happening in the North."
Neither Mr Caden nor Mr Harris worked with Prof McAleese at this time. The former says he had no contact with her other than lining up with her in the canteen queue. The latter had been moved out of mainstream current affairs programmes some years earlier and was working in Irish-language programmes like Feach.
However Mr Harris, a powerful, even charismatic personality, was very influential at meetings of the RTE branch of the Workers' Union of Ireland, which organised producers. Its meetings often turned into "intellectual slugging matches" between supporters of the Workers' Party, usually led by the superbly articulate Mr Harris, and those with sympathies closer to Sinn Fein and smaller left-wing republican and Trotskyist parties. The ideological clashes often turned into ugly personal attacks. In the middle of this Mary McAleese, never one to shy away from a fight, argued forcefully that one had to see the IRA as a product of its environment, rather than condemn it out of hand. Not surprisingly, the opposition saw her as an unreconstituted, hardline nationalist.
In the mid-1980s Mr Harris caused considerable controversy with a document called Television and Terrorism, in which he argued that terrorism could not be defeated by even the toughest questioning or presentation of facts by journalists. In this he also invented the phrase "hush puppies" for that wide circle of journalists and others who, he alleged, were IRA fellow travellers.
By the late 1980s much of the poison caused by the ideological clashes of a decade earlier had gone. However Mr Harris's training films were still having an effect on a new generation of young producers, and his brilliant "role plays" as a Sinn Feiner being interviewed continued to convince many that Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act was still necessary. Mr Harris, then a member of the Workers' Party and its predecessors going back at least to the early 1970s, was involved in Proinsias De Rossa's successful campaign in 1989 for the European Parliament. In 1990 he lent his considerable media skills to the Mary Robinson campaign, and the following year advised Fine Gael and John Bruton.
Mr Caden's most recent claim to fame was his departure from RTE after 28 years for a short-lived involvement with Radio Ireland as its controller of programmes.