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interview is that, taken as a whole, it did indeed trivialise what are, in this and other civilised societies, grave criminal offences. The big question now for this society is not whether or not we will have a gay president but whether or not we are serious in our distaste for paedophilia.
    Waters’s opinion would prove to be the central logic and argument for anyone engaging in the debate about Norris’s fitness to run for office.
    In a society that had been dominated by the Catholic Church for decades, and that had recently begun coming to terms with the sexual and physical abuse that had been meted out to children in its care and with the systematic cover-up of abuse by priests, Norris’s apparently questionable attitudes to paedophilia provoked outrage.
    That same weekend Eoghan Harris, a former political appointment to the Seanad, gave Norris his public imprimatur, having sat beside him in the Seanad, where he witnessed how he had spoken about child sex abuse with genuine grief. Fourteen years earlier Harris had provided perhaps the most memorable sound-bite when he railed against the candidature of Mary McAleese, labelling her a ‘tribal time bomb’. As he wrote:
    So let me break a story that is staring you in the face. Isn’t there something slightly sick about a society which approaches former terrorists with appeasing smiles, hand outstretched to shake hands which have spilled blood, but is ready to round on a good man like David Norris who has never spilled a drop of Irish blood or even hurt the proverbial fly?
    On the opinion pages of the Sunday Times the columnist Brenda Power revealed that Helen Lucy Burke was herself the subject of appalling abuse the previous week, when Twitter had come alive with comments directed at her age and sex, saying she was an ‘attention-seeking bag lady’ and a ‘vicious little old woman.’ According to Power,
    it would be a truly sorry day for this democracy, and a poor look out for the quality of presidential candidate we can expect, if Norris is hounded out of running for the Park over some designedly provocative comments he made ten years ago.
    Norris was putting his best side out for the Sunday World , saying that he remained confident and that he had received countless messages of good will and a warm reception in Limerick and Clonmel, where he had been canvassing.
    When things are taken out of context—I know myself it looked bloody awful. But it depends on how the Irish people perceive me, and I can’t second-guess them. Time will tell.
    In the Sunday Independent , Jody Corcoran wrote that it was a ‘sad truth’ that attacks on Norris were sparked by his homosexuality.
    It is only because Norris is a homosexual that the media feel free to ask him about matters related to sexuality; but because other prospective candidates are not homosexual, the media has not, and will not, ask them about such deeply personal matters … When the issue of sexuality is coupled with politics, as we know, it can be lethal, so lethal as to possibly now derail the Norris campaign for the presidency.
    And that would be a great shame because, of all of the candidates, Norris is so far the most interesting and, potentially, the best to do what can be a difficult job.
    The following Wednesday, 15 June, Norris convened a meeting of his election team for six o’clock. Thirteen people turned up at his campaign headquarters, beside Davy Byrne’s pub in Duke Street, including his campaign manager, Liam McCabe, and director of communications, Jane Cregan, who was on leave of absence from her post as events manager at Iarnród Éireann. The meeting was prompted by a phone call from the Daily Mail , who had contacted Norris to say they were going to rerun an interview he had given to them a year earlier. ‘David Norris with the team made a decision to deal with every issue as comprehensively as possible, to get out there and set the