You've seen the displays with Bertie Ahern's face over the reassuring words: Peace, Prosperity, Progress. Now think of the reality.
The peace holds; Ahern, Brian Cowen and Liz O'Donnell have worked at it. But after four years some of the accompanying pledges have yet to be met or are only grudgingly under way. It's all very well to preach police reform and civil liberties in the North; putting them into practice Down Here takes a hell of a lot longer.
Then, there's prosperity - for whom? And progress - but not towards any form of equality. As the great broadcaster Seán Mac Réamóinn is reported to have said, that reminds me of two stories.
When emigration was draining the country dry in the 1950s, Peadar O'Donnell, who was both writer and revolutionary, accused Éamon de Valera, who'd been Taoiseach for more than 20 years, of responsibility for the way we were: one million people had left the country during his time in office.
Ah, but Peadar, said Dev with a wintry smile, if you had been in office, a million people would have left the country too. They might, indeed, Dev, said Peadar, but they'd have been a different million.
The million whose interests we need to bear in mind in this election didn't have to leave, as we did in the 1950s. But they haven't shared the prosperity of the last 10 years either because they're old or ill or in the wrong place; unable to take the opportunities that others have seized.
The fact is that this is an unequal society and many want to keep it so, lest they lose what they already hold; and conservative parties are ready to meet their demands which invariably start and end with money - or tax. This brings me to my second story.
There was a time when all you had to do to get an argument going was to throw in a comment about the national question. Then there were the issues of church-state relations, as we called contraception, divorce, abortion and homosexuality.
Now, tax has taken over from partition and sex, though the tone of our debate hasn't changed. We are given to exaggeration, abuse and a descent into bad-tempered fundamentalism. Nothing is half-bad that can't be turned into an out and out disaster.
When Richie Ryan proposed a modest programme of capital taxation in the 1970s he became an object of derision on the spot. He featured with Liam Cosgrave, the minister for hardship, in Hall's Pictorial Weekly and was known far and wide as Richie Ruin and, most incongruously, Red Richie.
There are few uglier sights than the lumpen middle classes in full flight. And they reserve their most blood-curdling abuse for anybody they suspect of the ultimate treachery - raising taxes.
I remember watching a fashionable crowd in their Sunday best harangue and harass Richie Ryan in a Dublin hotel, a wedge of farmers among them acting as if not even a window box would be safe from the Revenue men by the time he'd done.
Fianna Fáil led the pack, put up fierce resistance in the Dáil and, when the party was re-elected in 1977, scrapped what remained of the system and made a total hash of the State's finances themselves. We still have the weakest capital and corporate taxes in the EU.
The debate about public services has been the first of the current campaign and may turn out to be the most important. Labour's six pledges on health, housing, schools, poverty, children and carers have seen to that.
You won't hear disagreement from the other parties on that score. But while they may sound as if they're saying the same thing - and commentators for reasons of their own may pretend there's nothing between them - appearances are deceptive.
Look further, dig deeper and you'll find a world of difference between the parties; differences as to how the poorest services in the European Union are to be improved until they meet the highest standards.
There are differences within the coalition and within Fianna Fáil - between Mícheál Martin's plan or Michael Woods's promises and Charlie McCreevy's refusal to pay for either.
We've seen the dismal results of privatisation at Eircom. And what happens when (as at Abbotstown) public money is invested in a so-called public/private partnership. The private side contributes damn all and the project is run as if it were a private business, with not even a nod in the direction of wider responsibilities.
Mary O'Rourke is to be heard on a related theme explaining the failure of the private side to deliver on the crucial infrastructural development of a broadband system. The Government must rely on public enterprise which is anathema to the FF-PD coalition.
Myles na Gopaleen wrote about the "political jest" of having a minister for the Gaeltacht when the Great Blasket was uninhabited. How about one, like Síle De Valera, who hasn't a word of Irish and whose main aim seems to be the destruction of public service broadcasting?
I'm all for Peace, Prosperity and Progress, but not as Bertie Ahern would have them. He takes his lead from Rome - from a medieval Pope and a prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, who is the high priest of the European right.