Colm Wilkinson was the singer chosen by Fianna Fáil for the first of its modern election campaigns in 1977; and the song he sang was a stirring call to the electorate: Make it your kind of country, writes Dick Walsh.
Twenty-five years - and nine governments - later, it's a call that might be adopted by Fine Gael, Labour and the Green Party because, for the old, the poor and the sick this, sure as hell, is not their kind of country.
Nor is it a country for those who believe in well-planned, well-funded responses to problems that can't be solved by the market - however enthusiastically it grasps opportunities provided by the State to create jobs.
It isn't just those who are dismissed by the McCreevys and McDowells as loony lefties who would be happier in a society which has done all it can to remove conditions that are the breeding grounds of crime. Most people would probably be happier; they'd certainly be safer and more at ease.
They would be less likely to vote for ministers - or, indeed, opposition parties - who join the populist hue-and-cry which has left us with the fastest-growing prison population in the European Union.
The hard-working priest, Father Peter McVerry, works in areas from which the Mountjoy prison governor John Lonergan expects the prison population to be drawn.
But when Father McVerry asks why we don't spend the money on potential offenders before they have to be locked up, there's no reply. We prefer whingeing and vengeance, a ministerial windbag in a Dickensian department, to a sensible response.
Father McVerry acknowledges the efforts that have been made by this and other governments: there's a scheme in Ballymun, he tells Pat Kenny, which helps 20 children. Ballymun, he adds, has a population of 20,000.
"For the cost of the Bertie Bowl you could have 10,000 schemes." To judge by their telephone calls the listeners want every young offender or would-be offender locked up. But Father McVerry says almost half of the children in centres for those under 16 haven't committed any crime.
For those over 16 there's "a big warehouse where you just pack them in". It's called St Patrick's. And, to judge by their careers, it's a training ground through which potential criminals must pass on their way to Mountjoy or Arbour Hill.
The mentality of the workhouse and the industrial school is alive and lurking in the Department of Justice, where the windbag John O'Donoghue presides with Victorian zeal. The Children's Act was signed by the President in 1999; it hasn't been enacted yet. The 1908 Children's Act remains in force.
There are other ways of judging a society and those who govern it. When Gordon Brown delivered his budget on Wednesday he gave an undertaking to increase spending on health by 7.4 per cent a year for the next five years.
To pay for it there's a tax increase of 3 pence in the pound. But Brown said the National Health Service defined "the character of our country".
Even critics gave him credit for straight talking; and Labour's allies in the trade unions praised him for responding to the demands of need, not greed.
Our health service defines the character of Irish society. But the straight talk from the Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrat Government has been a complaint by Charlie McCreevy about what it costs.
Never mind the fact that McCreevy himself eroded the tax base by giveaways to property speculators, for-profit hospital services for high earners and reductions of capital and corporation taxes.
So revenue here amounted to 34 per cent of GDP last year compared with 40 per cent 10 years ago and an average of 47 per cent in the European Union.
McCreevy has his defenders: Shane Coleman argues in the Sunday Tribune that it isn't true he's on the side of the rich; his cabinet colleague Dermot Ahern and Dan McLaughlin of the Bank of Ireland take issue in these columns with the Combat Poverty Agency's statistics and definitions.
McLaughlin insists that tax cuts are not a give-away - "the State is merely allowing workers to keep more of their income. Furthermore no tax system on earth can give a person on low income more in tax reductions than someone on a higher income."
But budgets and the tax system are the means by which services are paid for. They are the means by which wealth is redistributed. They, like our health services, define the character of our country.
We owe much to the leaders and public servants of the late 1950s and 1960s who laid the foundation for the prosperity we now enjoy. What they, with a few exceptions, did not debate was the kind of society we wanted to become, once economic development had been achieved and we had finally taken our place in the modern world.
The question for the electorate still remains: what kind of country do we want it to be?