Suddenly, it's all about Mary. Our president has become ubiquitous overnight. You cannot open a newspaper or switch on the news without bathing in her there-there maternal wattage. After years of redundancy-by-prosperity, she is back playing mother to the nation, with gusto. It's as if she woke up one morning to hear George Lee announce, "I told you so, folks, the recession's here" and, like Tupperware lunch boxes, she has rediscovered her usefulness.

Unlike Mary Robinson's championing of the margin­alised, Mary McAleese was the cheerleader of the main­stream throughout Ireland Inc's hedonistic splurge, with the honourable exception of her work on Northern Ireland.

The Ireland she embodied was Catholic and capitalist. She majored in leading trade delegations around the globe, mopping up mega-contracts for the boom-meisters. Once in a while, she paused to scold the rest of us about our dependence on alcohol or our addiction to shopping but she never managed to disguise her own admir­ation for moneyed success. Rich businessmen swooned in her expensive tax-funded court.

In 2004, before the political establishment withheld the people's democratic right to choose their own president, some of the country's wealthiest tycoons and property developers had pledged their financial support for her re-election campaign. A campaign HQ in Ranelagh was already donated by a smitten benefactor. More and more, she felt like one of them, not one of us.

Now, in a climate of adversity, she is presented with an opportunity to salvage her legacy. The avalanche of revelations from the banking and public sectors of fat-cat duplicity and self-enrichment have sharpened the appetite for a parity of esteem in this exasperating little country of ours. People want fairness. And that need requires a focus. And our president should provide it.

Under the constitution, the president is entitled to address the oireachtas but she has done that before and, frankly, it was a rather mediocre day out from her ivory tower in the park. Love-ins are like that. They tend to stimulate only the participants.

There is, however, another provision in Bunreacht na hÉireann for the president to address the people directly, subject to consultation with the Council of State and on condition that her speech is approved in advance by the government. Neither codicil would prove an impedi­ment to an articulate, instinct­ively compass­ionate woman whose outstanding cv attribute is her ability to emote for Ireland (remem­ber Omagh and 9/11).

If Brian Cowen will not speak to us face to face, it behoves Mary McAleese to do so. There is a time when the non-political, almost exclusively symbolic, function of Uachtaráin na hÉireann can fill a void. That time is now, when a bewildered, fearful nation wants somebody to take us by the hand and reassure us that we will weather this economic winter together.

As a former broadcaster, Mary McAleese is at ease in front of a tv camera. Were she to sit before one now and talk to us as the first among equals, it would prove a defining moment in this springtime of hope against hope. If I were Brian Cowen, I would be down on my knees begging Fianna Fáil's surrogate daughter to do it.

I write this as someone who voted her into the áras way back in the last century. I thought she would be brave, radical, edgy and, within her constitutional restraints, subversive. Instead, she has been a bauble on the state. With 30 months left of her 14-year reign, this is her chance to do something truly meaningful for Ireland and to reclaim the relevance of the presidency when all the state's costly indulgences are being forensically scrutinised. It's her chance to prove the value of the highest office in the land.

jmccarthy@tribune.ie