The US election saga may or may not be over today. The long, drawn-out process has been damaging all round.

But it's an ill wind that doesn't blow some good. Were it not for the post-voting drama, we might not have seen so clearly in this country the extent of the proDemocrat bias of Irish media and political commentators. As ably pointed out by Stephen Collins, Eoghan Harris and Kevin Myers from different perspectives, the political and media class has been wholly and entirely partisan in favour of Democrats.

I don't intend to argue that people here should grimly suppress political opinions and recognise what side our economic bread is buttered on by focusing only on US investment.

Still, we cannot quite forget that many US business decision-makers who have invested heavily here are likely to be Republicans. At the very least, they must find it baffling how the public, or at least the media atmosphere, in Ireland has been so much against their Republican friends and has painted such distorted caricatures of them.

Is this what the wonderful Irish workforce itself thinks about the US? I doubt it very much.

Take Microsoft. It may just get more breaks from a Republican antitrust regime. There are many sides to that argument. The point is not that there is a clear advantage for investment in Ireland under the Republicans. Investment has been strong in the past eight years, after all.

The point is that Irish media and political hostility to, and lack of understanding of, US Republicans is at odds with the culture that produces a lot of the investment of which we take advantage. It is also entirely at odds with the degree of comfort that many thousands of Irish people have in working in US business cultures. I see very little evidence that our media voices have any understanding whatsoever of that comfort level and real life in multinational businesses.

This attitude in media debate is not terribly important, so long as the apparatus of the State is taking a more sophisticated view. We should hope and expect that the Irish diplomatic effort in the US, and Irish trade and investment promotion, would not find itself like a beached whale when the Democratic tide runs out and a Republican president is in. We should hope that Ireland is not perceived as partisan in US domestic politics.

That could never be in the national interest, notwithstanding the exceptional contribution that President Bill Clinton has made on Northern Ireland.

It is also important that we take a more sophisticated view of how the Republic and its economy positions itself visa-vis the United States and fellow member-states in the European Union. There is no sense to a false dichotomy posed in some political rhetoric between Boston and Berlin, a mythical rugged individualism of the US frontiersman and an equally mythical, caring and socially just European system.

We are not required to make a stark choice between becoming the 51st state of the USA and building another Sweden here. We shouldn't think of such exclusive choices. Our national interest, which includes our economic, social and security interests, does not require an abandonment of a commitment to the EU, nor any watering down of our historic and still-growing cultural and economic affinity with the US. There is no danger posed by the US replacing the UK as our largest single trading partner.

Oddly enough, the degree to which we are intertwined with US and EU is shown by the view that the two greatest threats to our present economic fortune are said to be a US stock market crash and a collapse (even dissolution) of the euro. We can have many relationships and take many elements from other societies' experiences. We should not need to feel we are following one existing model or another, nor that Ireland itself should become a textbook model for others. Ireland might just remain Ireland, not Sweden, Arizona, the new European regional economy or the full-employment new paradigm. Remember, we are only 3.8 million people in the Republic, just over five million in Ireland.

False dichotomies thrive in scenarios painted in primary colours. Lately, we've had the nonsense of good guy Democrats and baddy Republicans, decent Sweden and Darwinian America. The lack of nuance and understanding of US political and cultural life illustrates a problem in the quality of Irish debate.

It poses a danger to our own decision-making if it seeps into the corridors of power. It could convince us that there were starker choices required than is actually the case. It could ultimately have our Government act, and our voters vote, out of ignorance.

Oliver O'Connor is contributing editor at Finance and Finance Dublin. E-mail: ooconnor@ indigo.ie