Now Michael D has, so it’s game on.

The presidency always brings out a certain kind of madness that general elections don’t. The vitriol that presidential campaigns excite among — and about — the candidates is in inverse proportion to the esteem the position commands. Even among the contenders, it would seem.

Mary Robinson was the first to see the potential of a modern presidency. She was canny enough to realise it was whom you met and greeted that made all the difference in an office that had been relegated to a political sinecure. So in the early ’90s she reached out presciently to women, emigrants, Travellers’ groups and members of the LGBT community, in an attempt to widen the embrace of the office.

I have good reason to remember Mary Robinson’s election. It was the first time in 13 years as a voter, that my tick in the box had actually got someone into power. It was a novel and heady experience and it was a while before I would have it again. For that alone, I’m grateful to her. Backing a winner was a rare treat for voters like me.

But more generally, Robinson’s presidency was both defining and redefining; it showed what the office could be, and hadn’t been. Popular, engaging, symbolic, relevant. It set up an alternative vision of a national identity not dictated by the political discourse. A model for first citizenship.

Robinson’s “candle in the window”, for example, brought the notion of diaspora right to the front of the national agenda. The gesture was simple and symbolic. Of course, there had always been much moaning and groaning about the scourge of emigration, but Robinson’s powerful use of symbol created ripples in the political arena. It meant that we started considering those emigrants as not lost, but as still belonging. And it embodied the hope that they might return — which, of course, some did, when the Celtic Tiger roared.

Robinson’s presidency was also defining in terms of gender. Unlike President Higgins, she did not opt for a second term; in fact, she left the post early to take up a role as a UN human rights commissioner instead. (The early finish was a decision she later regretted.) She was followed by Mary McAleese, a two-term president, which meant that for 21 years, the presidency was female. There would have been children born in the ’90s who would never have known a male president.

A senior Sinn Féin party figure was quoted as saying its ideal presidential candidate would be “a very strong woman” who could speak to a modern new Ireland. When challenged, party leader Mary Lou McDonald, who came of age during the Robinson and McAleese presidencies, said nothing to dispel that idea.

Robinson’s election brought about another sea change. It created a popular appetite for and a new interest in the presidential race. Up to 1990 the largest number of presidential candidates was three; in 1997 there were five, and in 2011, there were seven. Not bad for a meet and greet job.

Michael D Higgins is the first incumbent since DeValera in 1966 to run for re-election. Everyone agrees he will be hard to beat, because of that, and because he has the support of three political parties behind him. But that depends on who runs against him.

So far, Sinn Féin is the only party to announce it will nominate a candidate. Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and Labour have washed their hands of it; their eyes are on another election.

Names being touted are Senator Joan Freeman, CEO of suicide awareness organisation Pieta House; former presidential candidate and businessman Seán Gallagher; Dragon’s Den personality Gavin Duffy; political analyst Noel Whelan; Aer Arann founder Senator Padraig Ó Ceidigh; and artist Kevin Sharkey.

Oh yes — and ‘Meet and Greet’ man, Gerard Craughwell.

“Presidential elections have nothing whatsoever to do with policy,” Mr Craughwell has said — rather obviously.

You cannot affect anything in this country ... the one time that you could do something, presidents in this country have been reluctant to do it. And that is to have legislation sent to the Supreme Court to have its constitutionality checked or verified.

Certainly, the presidency is ambassadorial; it’s about representing Ireland abroad but also to ourselves. The president is an embodiment of the nation. Embodiment has power in itself. When we think of France, we think Macron; when we think of the US, we think Trump; when we think of Russia, we think Putin. They may be executive presidents, but our president’s symbolic identification can be just as compelling.

The terms of our Constitution dictate that the president can’t speak out on political issues, but past presidents have both spoken and acted, Michael D Higgins on the case of Savita Halappanavar, McAleese by bold acts of subversion — taking communion in St Patrick’s Cathedral — and by quiet diplomacy in Anglo-Irish relations. On the presidency’s legal remit, both Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese were tough legal minds — between them they referred six Bills to the Supreme Court.

SO why is Craughwell dissing the presidency as soft power, before he’s even garnered enough support to go for the job? Sounds like the bad old ’80s where the presidency was a ready-up for the status quo, or a political football to be tossed about among men.

This is a game where three major parties have already lost interest and are standing on the sidelines. Good on Sinn Féin for queering that pitch and if they nominate a woman, all the better. It may be opportunistic, but isn’t all politics?

So, Michael D changed his mind. Is that a good enough reason to run for an office you have contempt for, as Mr Craughwell seems to have?

In an Ireland where we’ve voted for gay marriage and freedom of choice, which is home to Waking the Feminists, where the #Me Too movement has taken root, isn’t this the perfect time for the presidency to be female again? To show the world where the woman’s place in Ireland is. Not as an object in the Constitution but leading the protection of it. Not in the home, but in Aras an Uachtaráin.