Even in the UK, where there's seldom a link between the place and the candidate, you can listen with delight to the accents of people on the spot, like the returning officers. And in Ireland, too, the nuances of expression between the north and south of counties and between the different parts of the cities and between the corners of the country most remote from each other bring home the point that, though political parties are generalisations, politics has its actual existence within people, and each of those people is different. Which is an obvious point, and you may say a banal one, but one worth returning to from time to time.

Insensibly, as the night went by and each place-name awoke its cluster of associations . . . Kansas City, Baltimore, Arizona (where an anti-gay marriage amendment was defeated), Manhattan, the Hudson Valley, Ohio, Tennessee . . . the listener's mind filled with awe.

Isn't the whole thing amazing? Even conceding the very worst about the conduct of US elections . . . and who will ever be happy about the count in Florida in the Bush v Gore election? . . . and above all, the influence on them of obscene amounts of money, they seem to me to be one of the great accomplishments of the human race. This is especially so because the US is not a place with a long-settled homogeneous population like, say, England.

It is made up of innumerable different individuals formed immediately or distantly by cultures which are in countless different relations to the idea that power should be mediated through the secret ballot.

There they all were, thronging the polling stations . . . Hmong, Kazakh, Quechua, Hawaian, Irish, Iranian, Greek, Greenlander . . .

every kind of person. Thinking about them reminds you that the word 'America' . . . as used for years now, and with increasing desperation, in phrases such as 'America Out!' and 'America Warmonger!' . . . does not refer to the people of the US. Certainly, there is a link between each voter and the power-cliques that shape and execute US foreign policy. But the link has to stretch so far and is kept so obscure that surely almost every individual voter thinks he or she is performing a pristine and momentous act.

And so, in this election, they were. I realise that the capture of Congress by the Democratic Party doesn't change much out in the world and that freshly-spilt blood is flowing through sand and rubble in the usual hellholes.

I don't know how long it will be before there is some kind of re-calibration of US action in the world. But I do know that there's a breathing space now in which to absorb the lesson that a righteous crusade perpetrated by Washington, through the medium of weaponry, on cultures it doesn't understand, is bound to fail.

Perhaps, even, there's a chance that some of the shadowy establishments that run US foreign policy will square up to the greatest difficulty of all, which is the US's role as Israel's guarantor no matter what illegalities Israel commits and no matter how cruelly oppressive Israel becomes. But I have no real hope of that, and while the condition of the Palestinians remains as it is, the world will be full of people who say the Israel/Palestinian tragedy is the reason they viciously hate the United States.

Nevertheless, the sum total of anti-Americanism in the world has been greatly reduced by this election, and that is a marvellous thing. The last US presidential election must have shaken the faith of many people around the world in the American people. How could they have re-elected Bush and the gang that surrounds him? Now one can see that though the behemoth that is US public opinion is sluggish (Newt Gingrich and co weren't able to get it moving against president Clinton for his capers with Monica Lewinsky), it is not stupid. It woke up, and pawed the ground in front of the administration. I can only hope Karl Rove's blood ran cold.

Anti-Americanism in general is a cover for a wide spectrum of beliefs and feelings. At one end, it is based on a true revulsion of values and religion-based distaste and on primeval hatreds, such as anti-semitism. But at the other endf well, I always think of a photo I saw of one of the leaders of the 9/11 terrorists in which he is sitting on his mother's knee like an infant, though he is a grown man. At that end, anti-Americanism is not about politics or policy, it's about envy and profound self-hatred. How Mohammed Atta must have longed to be internally free, and yet how he must have feared freedom, and how the conflict must have enraged him.

But whatever about other countries, it never sat easily on us here in Ireland to be anti-American. We know the relationship with it we want to have. We see ourselves as specially knowledgeable about the United States, specially grateful to it for its role in our history and in Anglo-Irish politics, and specially open to its cultural influence. The first steps out of Iraq were taken in polling booths across the US last Tuesday and, simultaneously, the rest of the world repositioned itself too. Though it doesn't matter to anyone but us, so did we. We were able to take our first steps back to the way it used to be . . . to loving the US, and admiring it.