Do you feel a rumbling beneath your feet? You should. It's Aras an Uachtarain moving up the Richter scale. Deer keep falling over and trees are toppling. Slates are falling off the roof and oops, there goes a Doric column. And I don't like the look of that gable-end. It looks as if it's about to break its moorings any second and come crashing down.
What's up? The McAleese Presidency has begun, with seismic majesty. Barely more than a month in office, and our new President is conducting herself with the delicacy of the San Andreas fault an hour before it upends San Francisco into the blue waters of the Pacific.
One wonders amid all this ground-quaking: has she an adviser? Does she talk to anyone who understands how other people feel - which, I suspect, is not in the least how Mary McAleese apparently feels? Or is this adviser the person who stares back at her when she brushes her teeth in the morning?
Pain-sharing
For most of us feel self-doubt, and we hurt often and easily, and hurts leaves bruises. These are not qualities which many of us associate with Mary McAleese. Oh, to be sure, she might say, she shares our pain, and all that; but does she know what pain actually is in order that she might share it? Or is all this hugginess and pain-sharing part of the caring rodomontade which so many politicians feel obliged to utter in this age of emotional Winfreydom?
Let's go over the territory of the Presidency again. It's a small enough job, but with a massive salary and a whopping pension and a nice house. Mostly it involves signing bills which pass under the presidential snout, and snipping ribbons here and there, and looking agreeable. It does not consist of policy-making; and it does not consist of altering a country's destiny; and it does not consist of making one's mark on political processes, or even commenting on them.
Most of all, it consists of delicacy, both in demeanour and towards other people's feelings. Because of the exquisitely sensitive nature of the feelings of so many people in this island, it is prudent to step out seldom from the presidential home, and then to step out carefully.
This last weekend Mary McAleese stepped out of the Aras with all the care and delicacy of an Orange march down the Ormeau Road - one of whose distinguishing marks is the absolute self-belief in the rightness of its actions. But the nationalists of the Ormeau Road don't share those perceptions; and there are many in Ireland who do not share Mary McAleese's perceptions of what it is right for her to do.
During her visit to Belfast, she did not meet Joe Hendron, the almost heroic guardian of democracy in West Belfast through the long dark night of a quarter-century of sectarian war - but she did not invite him to her inauguration either. Joe Hendron is not worthy of her almost-royal handshake.
Life sentence
But Bic McFarlane is. Bic McFarlane met the President in Ardoyne last weekend. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of four Protestants in the Bayardo Bar on the Shankill Road in 1975.
Now, I admit, the business of meeting people when you are President is not easy; whose mitt do you grab and pump, and whose do you not? And what if your "theme" is bridgebuilding? Are you not likely sooner or later to shake hands which have split blood?
No doubt you are; and that is why the process is extraordinarily delicate, and is taken after much consultation, and why the hands that are shaken on official rostrums are carefully vetted hands. What bright soul vetted the rostrum in Ardoyne and declared that our Bic, whose gang, after slaughtering two elderly men and two teenage girls, returned up the Shankill Road taking potshots at any convenient bluenoses who got into their sights, was just the lad to be shaking the hand of the President?
Was this policy? Or was it Presidency by happenstance, which is what you get when impetuosity becomes the guiding principle by which the Presidency is conducted? Either way, for the President and Commander-in-Chief of the Army of this Republic to shake Brendan McFarlane's hand at this particular juncture was not wise. It was unwise, not merely for whatever hubris and approval he gained from the deed, but also for the perceptions that handshake caused. For he is not seen by Protestant eyes as some neutral representative of Irish nationalism. He shed much innocent blood; and what, precisely, would Irish nationalists make of Queen Elizabeth going onto the Shankill Road and pumping the paws of sectarian butchers like Johnny White or Basher Bates?
Balancing act
No doubt Mary McAleese thought some careful balancing act was being performed when she took communion at Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin two days after her foray to Ardoyne. If she thought that, she's smoking something that doesn't normally grow in the Phoenix Park. Those nice people who attend Divine Service in that cathedral are as uncontaminated by the rancours of Ulster as it is possible to be; no deed in that cathedral, no omission, will enter the scales which minutely and endlessly weigh injustice, unfairness, imbalance in the North.
There is another point, and quite as important. No matter what she thinks of it, Catholic teaching on the matter of taking communion in a Protestant church is, apparently, that is against canon law. The law might be ridiculous - indeed, I think it is (whatever the value of that opinion) - but it is surely not the duty of the President to flout the rules of her church so publicly, is it?
A campaign to alter church rules simply should not be led by the first citizen of the land; such campaigns are the proper business of the plain citizenry. For what debate is possible when the President takes sides on such an issue, and one on which she was certainly not elected?
A word in your ear, Bertie. Sit on her, if you can, or this Presidency will end in tears; and you'll be the one shedding them.