This election is about two things: making Ireland a fairer place and choosing the party, or parties, that you can trust to do it. Some will say that that's what all our elections are about, but it's not. For decades politics here was distorted by the legacy of the Civil War, frustrating anyone who wanted to concentrate on more recent or more relevant issues, writes Dick Walsh
Economic development wasn't widely discussed, even when it rescued us from the desolation of the 1950s. And when financial affairs began to occupy the political stage in the 1990s, what concerned us most were competing claims to orthodoxy.
Making Ireland a fairer place, with emphasis on health, housing and education, on who owns the country and in whose interests its affairs are organised, was always considered a subject best left to the Labour Party, the trade unions and voluntary organisations.
Even the last election, which really was about fairness, public service and the nature of society, ended with a lop-sided populist appeal which reduced all issues to one: tax reductions at any cost.
Or, as the Irish Independent reminded us in a front-page editorial, this was payback time. Again set and match to Ahern, McCreevy and Harney, with their sponsors cheering from the corporate boxes in Middle Abbey Street.
The Rainbow parties - Fine Gael, Labour and Democratic Left - had hoped to continue their centre-left coalition. They argued that it had, however briefly, made this a fairer place since Albert Reynolds's government collapsed and Fianna Fáil was forced out of office in 1994.
The alternative, a coalition of Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats didn't try and compete with the Rainbow's record. It went straight for the political jugular. As Charlie McCreevy declared without a blush whenever he was accused of introducing a measure which favoured the rich, he was simply doing what the Government had said it would do.
It was what the electorate had voted for, a promise delivered.
And, while the revenue rolled in, his advice to the electorate began to sound odd for a member of the Cabinet and bizarre for a Minister of Finance.
Once or twice it came startling close to the motto of a notoriously giddy Lotto winner: spend, spend, spend.
His tax cuts were not so much an effort at redistribution in favour of hard-pressed sections of the public as a gesture in which lumps of their own money were returned to wealthy taxpayers. Needless to say, the more they'd paid the more they got back.
Now, all parties - Sinn Féin, the Greens and Socialists, as well as FF, FG and Labour - claim to be in favour of making Ireland a fairer place.
Even the Progressive Democrats, when they are not trying to flog the ESB, Bord Gáis and anything with a State label for which the citizens have paid, murmur support for the public services.
(PDs murmuring about the public services remind me of the advice said to have been given by Milton Friedman to a friendly South American dictator: it was time to stop spending on health services for the poor because, whatever was spent, the health of the poor never seemed to improve.)
PD conversions to the public service may be hard to take. At least they are more transparent than those of the Aherns (Bertie and Dermot), McCreevy and their born-again Fianna Fáil colleagues.
FF is like an elder of the tribe of lapsed revolutionaries who takes out his medals and ribbons to impress an impressionable visitor to whom he wants to sell a building site.
It's a bit late for a party which held a vast store of funds for the past five years to come up with promises of help for the old, the sick and the handicapped now.
As if it had never before recognised their problems or spotted them in their hospital queues.
Leading members of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, past or present, may be counting themselves lucky these days that the tribunals at which they once starred are not in session just now. Anyone who wants to be reminded of their shoddy behaviour should tune in to Vincent Browne's radio programme for a refresher course on standards in public life.
And Pat Rabbitte or one of his friends in Labour might do the employers' spokesman a favour by sending them a tape of the televised sessions of the Public Accounts Committee's hearings on the DIRT affair.
It should refresh their minds on the "flight of capital" about which we heard so much when a fairer tax system was proposed, only to discover at the PAC hearings who was codding whom.
And why.
When people talk about public services they are referring not only to health, welfare, education and transport - if we don't have a national broadcasting service, debate on the other services will be ignored or limited to outlets dominated by empire-building millionaires.
We need to hear more of the contributions made this week to public debate by such sharp-witted commentators as Michael Noonan, Alan Dukes and Ruairí Quinn, but by such shy folk as Bertie Ahern and Charlie McCreevy as well.
It's time we heard from them in open debate.