With the parties beginning to eye each other - and the electorate - Sean O Mordha's series Seven Ages, which ended this week on RTE, could hardly have been better timed. Even if caution prevails and Bertie Ahern holds out for another year, O Mordha's programmes have shown us, without fuss or interference, how we came to our present condition.
Seven Ages led us from the foundation of the State to the tribunals, without which many events of the last 30 years would have been doubted by some and damned by others as invention. Not that O Mordha and his colleagues intervened to interpret a history that two-thirds of the people may not have heard and one-third is doing its best to forget.
The observation is not as flippant as it sounds: it's a constant source of amazement to those born in the 1930s and 1940s that succeeding generations know so little of the origins and growth of the State.
It used to be argued in the first half of the 20th century that history taught so soon after the Civil War was liable to reflect the views of hot-headed teachers and provoke impetuous students to actions their elders would regret.
Many had their first opportunity to take an independent look at the 1916 Rising when RTE broadcast Hugh Leonard's series Insurrection, a dramatic celebration on the 50th anniversary. O Mordha's series, made by Araby Productions for RTE and BBC Northern Ireland, was neither dramatised nor accompanied by a narrative. As often as possible, the story was told by the participants themselves.
And if it seemed that more attention was paid to Fianna Fail than to its opponents, that was because the party was in power for over 53 of its 74 years, for more than 18 of the 31 years since the 1969 general election.
O Mordha's filmed reports and carefully designed interviews covered 50 years in which politics was dominated by the Civil War, though many who took their direction from the war could hardly tell when it had happened. The switch to elections fought on economic issues started at the worst of times, for the economy and at a moment of deep uncertainty for politics, with the three elections - in - a - row - - one was held in 1981, two in 1982. By the end of the 1980s three elements had appeared: there were referendums on abortion and divorce; Fianna Fail had abandoned a core value and entered coalition, and standards in public life had become a central political issue.
O Mordha's films traced these developments with discretion, using the commentaries of historians, analysts and journalists and, in later instalments with even greater effect, interviews with participants.
Now we had Paddy Hillery reflecting the easygoing days before fighting in the North and divisions in Fianna Fail changed everything. Jack Lynch had asked him to preside over a session of the 1971 ardfheis. "So I rambled down," said Hillery, without a hint of suspicion that he was to end up memorably shouting, as the crowd surged towards the platform: "You can have Kevin Boland, you can't have Fianna Fail."
But it was Hillery, later a member of the European Commission and President of Ireland, who looked back in the 1990s with a telling observation about how we'd turned out to be great at making money but not so good at distribution.
This is precisely the problem that Charlie McCreevy, Bertie Ahern and Mary Harney cannot or will not see. And it's the central issue on which the next general election will be fought.
In Seven Ages Charles Haughey, the leader of modern Fianna Fail, the party of Ahern, McCreevy, Ray Burke and Padraig Flynn, was set in opposition to Garret FitzGerald, the moderniser of Fine Gael. But, as the episodes covering the 1980s and 1990s vividly illustrated, FitzGerald was less liable to attack Haughey and Fianna Fail than to choose what seemed best for the country, especially on Northern policy.
The Fine Gael leader whose co-operation Haughey acknowledged on film was not FitzGerald but Alan Dukes - for the Tallaght strategy which gave a minority Fianna Fail government conditional support between 1987 and 1989. And, although FitzGerald stuck to his view that Haughey's was a flawed political pedigree, the most vigorous attack on the erstwhile Fianna Fail leader was by former colleague and one-time coalition partner Des O'Malley.
In a final episode which left Haughey fumbling for answers while the camera lingered on his futile efforts to dismiss the questioner, it was O'Malley who pointed to the gap between Haughey's rhetoric and the reality of his actions. There was not only the infamous "living beyond our means" address to the electorate in 1980 but the regular bouts of tough talk and timid populism which marked Fianna Fail governments in 1981 and 1982.
And, of course, there were the ardfheiseanna that shuddered with glee and fury at his victories over enemies within, opponents who'd been beaten up in corridors and hallways of Leinster House.
It was O'Malley who reminded the television audience of these attacks and pointed out what a shameful thing it had been to send Brian Lenihan to the US to campaign against the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985.
It took a series of tribunals - Hamilton on beef, McCracken on payments to Haughey and Michael Lowry, Flood on planning, and Moriarty resuming where McCracken paused - to expose the greed that lay behind the hysteria and the lust for power. As Michael D. Higgins declared, all else was ignored while sections of the media followed the circus of rich and powerful with fawning indulgence. And there's no doubt it will happen again. Housing, immigration and education will be issues in the general election for which the Government is preparing. But issues on which the appeal will be to those who favour exclusion and privilege, not equality and openness.
Prof Risteard Mulcahy wrote to the editor of this newspaper this week pointing out that in 1975 the Irish Medical Association had supported a proposal to provide universal health insurance for all. These were early days, but Ireland was now prosperous enough to provide the same medical service for all citizens.
Congratulating the Labour Party for introducing a discussion on equity, he continued: "It is surely a source of concern that we still have a two-tier system where a large section of the population is disadvantaged in health matters. It is high time for us to emulate the services which exist in many other European countries where all citizens are treated with the same consideration."
But is he a pinko or a creeping Jesus?