This shouldn’t be coming from me, but what the presidential election really needs is a candidate I wouldn’t dream of voting for: a serious conservative Catholic. There are enough uncommitted members of the Oireachtas to nominate one. It is important for Irish democracy that they use that power.

The presidency boils down to two things: morale and morality. By morale I mean the nation’s capacity to feel proud of the person who represents us to ourselves and the world. The president should be a class act – dignified, articulate, impressive and possessed of sound judgment about when and how to intervene in controversial issues.

But the presidency is also about morality. The last three holders of the office – Mary Robinson, Mary McAleese and Michael D Higgins – have turned it into a touchstone of collective values. The president now functions as the licensed conscience of the nation. If the morale part of the job is about making us feel good about ourselves, the morality part is about making us feel uncomfortable about ourselves by reminding us of the principles we purport to hold.

It is striking in retrospect that the importance of this second aspect of the presidency rose in inverse proportion to the decline of the Catholic hierarchy. The bishops used to enjoy what the sociologist Tom Inglis called a “moral monopoly”. They were the central bank of our non-monetary values. Everything to do with good and evil, right and wrong, was traded in a currency that only they could issue.

That currency underwent a drastic devaluation in the 1990s as the........

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