Some political promises sound as if they're made to be broken; others are kept, though we'd be better off if they were not.
We'd certainly have been better off if the manifesto on which Fianna Fail won its historic majority in 1977 had been torn up.
It wasn't. And we spent the next 10 years paying for its foolish extravagance. (One of its strategists, Martin O'Donoghue, has just become a director of the Central Bank.)
If Fine Gael and Fianna Fail hadn't promised a referendum on abortion in the 1980s, we'd have been spared one of the most bitter campaigns of the century.
Fine Gael was as good as its word. And we're living with the consequences.
The promises best unkept were made to suit the parties,
which saw fit to give in to greed or religious fundamentalism.
The promises made to be broken are different.
Everyone supports them, for a start. Everyone wants to make this a fairer society; one in which minorities feel at home; where we have decent standards in public life.
Then someone tries to put them into practice and the ahbut-ery begins. You want to spread our resources? Spend more on education, health and welfare? Arrange affairs for the benefit of those who need help to help themselves?
Ah, come on. You're not living in the real world.
Call for a decent minimum wage or regulation to ensure fair play in business or politics and you're a left-wing conspirator, bleeding-heart liberal or advocate of national sabotage.
Out to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
For some strange reason, some people don't like the idea of societies run by or for geese.
Maybe they suspect that in the nests around too many golden eggs there are golden circles.
Their preference is for politicians who have the savvy to recognise that in the long run stability depends on balance, trust and openness.
And that this doesn't mean opposing efficiency and enterprise.
Those who take this view aren't all on the left. Some FF ministers showed reforming spirit in 1992-94. John Bruton led the centre-left coalition into the election with style.
But many, especially in the present government, find it harder than ever to jump the gap between promise and practice.
And some are convinced there is no gap, as Tony Gregory patiently tried to explain to cosy Pat Kenny on Monday, quoting chapter and verse from the north inner city to prove it.
The last government introduced a pilot scheme to break the cycle of deprivation and drug addiction. The present Government might have been expected to expand it.
It didn't. And, for all Micheal Martin's rhetoric, it may even have worsened conditions in the area's hardpressed schools, according to Mr Gregory.
He was sceptical too about John O'Donoghue's announcement of special courts and treatments for addicts. A good idea, he said when I asked him about it.
But there had been provision for custodial treatment for addicts in 1977. Twenty-one years later the funds to pay for it had yet to be found.
Still, as Aine Lawlor said in an RTE interview with Ruairi Quinn about ministerial comments on Partnership 2000: "They're saying the right thing."
It was one of the fatuous themes of the week, and Mr Quinn was dismissive: it's what ministers do that counts.
The trouble is that Bertie Ahern, Charlie McCreevy and company behave as if trade unionists don't remember the pay-back budget and can't see, hear or read what's going on around them.
Ministers talk about responsibility and restraint. As if no one at the table had ever heard of profiteering on houses, and homelessness.
They deliver lectures on solidarity and the poor, as if they'd read the excellent ESRI and CORI reports on poverty but had only got half the message.
As if they'd never heard from the Combat Poverty Agency, Focus Point, the St Vincent de Paul Society, Peter McVerry, Pavee Point . . . As if they couldn't make the connections between poverty and politics, between justice and class. Between Mary Harney's dirty dozen (inquiries into tax-dodging and corner-cutting) and the blessings on greed.
As Ministers preached social cohesion, Charles Haughey, who'd dismayed even his friends by scrounging from the rich to live in luxury, waited to hear from the Supreme Court down the road.
He was trying to have the Moriarty tribunal closed down. Had the decision gone his way it would have undermined the work of other tribunals as well.
He failed, but may have managed to impose an expensive delay on Mr Justice Moriarty and his staff; which some of Mr Haughey's admirers saw as a triumph. Some triumph.
Dick Roche tried to convince Vincent Browne on radio that tribunals made life difficult for judges; a standing commission should do the job.
In any case, a lot of the current problems arose from something he called culture. As if skulduggery came naturally to us, and a party which had been in office for 48 of the last 66 years had nothing to do with it.
Some say the bad old days (know what I mean?) are to blame for our culture. They can hardly be blamed for our attitude to minorities of all shapes and sizes. The gap between promise and practice can.
It can be blamed both for our tolerance of racism and for our woeful smugness in attitudes to those described with exquisite delicacy in Joyce's story, The Dead, as of the other persuasion. (Any other persuasion.)
When the Downing Street Declaration was signed we promised at least to examine issues which might obstruct reconciliation between what are called the two traditions.
The wonderfully titled Obstacles Committee was set up.
It touched on health, education and the role of the Catholic Church. "Touched on" is right: there was much hemming and hawing in official quarters. Unavoidable delays (you understand) in the supply of information.
The committee was to report to the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation and perhaps it did. If so, the report hasn't been published.
Not a word has been heard about its recommendations, if any.
But, to judge by the printed account of the public session held on July 14th, 1995, there was no great appetite for change where change was most needed.
If they couldn't get to the heart of matters in health and education, maybe they'd make more headway on symbols and symbolism: flags, anthems, the use and abuse of Irish, the Angelus on RTE.
Stephen McBride of Alliance said nothing would be more damaging than a report which said: `Well, the South is fine and we don't have to do anything.' Labour, Democratic Left, Fine Gael and the PDs agreed.
FF, the SDLP and Sinn Fein didn't.
Paddy Gillen of DL detected echoes of St Augustine: `Lord make us pluralist but not yet.'
Noel Dempsey didn't put a tooth in it: "I don't think," said he, "we should promote pluralism just for the sake of appeasing certain people of a particular point of view."
Now there's a gap between promise and practice.