The voters do not seem particularly uncomfortable with the outgoing government. If the Opposition is to win, it will have to put flesh and blood on such unease as does exist, suggests Fintan O'Toole. Joining the dots that link the various crises of the past five years is a good place to start
It should be all over, even before it has started. If politics was a rational science, the Taoiseach's casual, almost contemptuous way of starting the race, announcing the dissolution of the Dáil to a near-empty chamber on Tuesday night, would have made sense. Why bother telling the Opposition in advance, when really they aren't even at the race?
Here, after all, is a Government that has solved two problems that once seemed insoluble: the Northern Ireland conflict and the historic inability of the Republic's economy to produce jobs. A lap of honour might seem more appropriate than a general election.
The only message that a grateful people might need to give to its triumphant leaders might be the traditional instruction which the Guardian newspaper trust gives to a newly-appointed editor: "Carry on as heretofore."
This, of course, is the message of the Fianna Fáil campaign launched yesterday: vote for us and you get more of the same, or, in colloquial terms, if it ain't broke why fix it? Passion, excitement and vision may be absent, but if the aim is simply to extend the shelf-life of what Bertie Ahern calls a golden age, such qualities are unnecessary.
For the Opposition parties to succeed, however, they need to convince the public that there is a lot to get worked up about, and that more of the same is either impossible or undesirable.
The first general election of the 21st century comes down to a simple question: what do we expect of ourselves? If we are pessimists inured to failure, if the old Irish fatalism is now part of our genetic code, then we must be enormously grateful for the last five years.
We must be in awe of the miracle that a squalid sectarian conflict is smouldering but not raging on this island. We must be amazed that mass unemployment and mass emigration have abated, at least for now. We must hug ourselves with delight that the wolves are not at the door, and give thanks and praise to the outgoing Government.
If, on the other hand, we see the Northern Ireland conflict as having been sustained in some measure by an appalling failure of imagination on the part of our own mainstream political culture, we will add the words "about time, too" to our praise for the achievement of the Belfast Agreement.
If we see the economic calamities of the 1980s as a disgrace brought about largely by misgovernment, we will be less inclined to see the recent boom as anything more than an economy belatedly achieving the levels of wealth-creation it should have reached years before. If the old fatalism has died, we will not feel inclined to be grateful for the small mercies of not being driven into the external exile of emigration or the internal exile of poverty. We will at least listen to what the Opposition parties have to say.
All the signs are that the population is not especially grateful. One reason for this is a contradiction that is at the heart of mainstream politics in free-market economies.
On the one hand, a market philosophy tells the public that the State isn't all that important and that the private sector is where the action is, a message repeated yesterday in Bertie Ahern's economic manifesto. On the other, the politicians who espouse this philosophy also want the electorate to believe that their own roles as leaders of the State are so crucial that without them the country would have gone to the dogs.
The problem for Bertie Ahern and Mary Harney is that they have been too successful in getting across the first part of this message. The truth of the boom may well be that the role of the State - through infrastructure, incentives, educational investment, the brokering of social partnership and the subsidisation of private sector wages with tax cuts - has been crucial.
Ask most of its beneficiaries who they have to thank, however, and they will probably say themselves and the companies for which they work. As well as privatising public companies, the Government has also privatised gratitude.
At the same time, the prestige of government itself has been undermined by corruption on the one hand and the failure to deliver decent public services on the other. The public has watched the financial scandals, the attempts to interfere with the judicial process, the deeply worrying allegations of Garda misconduct in Donegal and elsewhere, and the unfolding revelations of dodgy dealings in the planning process.
It has sniffed the air of incompetence in public projects from the health service to the pool at Abbotstown. It has seen the State make enemies of the likes of Kathryn Sinnott and the Irish Haemophilia Association. And it has not been encouraged to feel such pride in the State that it ought to care passionately about who runs it.
It is all the more remarkable then that the main opposition parties have shown few signs that they intend to make the nature of the State itself an issue in this election campaign. Important as individual policies on the public finances or the allocation of spending unquestionably are, they all beg the question: can the State actually deliver on anybody's ideas?
One of the reasons the public seems sceptical and wary is, surely, that it suspects the answer is a flat No. This question runs across all the issues. The amount of money to be spent on health matters only if you believe that the money will be well used. A proposal to tackle crime by putting more gardaí on the streets makes sense only if you are convinced that the Garda as a whole is in good shape.
Politicians talking about the fantastic things they will achieve in office are a little like jockeys planning a brilliant strategy for winning the Grand National on a donkey.
If, as seems likely from the opening skirmishes, the campaign is conducted as an argument about different ways of funding the same objectives, the electorate will probably decide that things aren't going to change much and it may as well stick with the crowd that's most comfortable running the system as it is now. To make a real contest of it, the Opposition needs to put flesh and blood on the sense of unease that is plainly present.
It needs to join up the dots between the various points of crisis over the last five years: the resignation of Ray Burke and the pursuit of Kathryn Sinnott, the attempted appointment of Hugh O'Flaherty and the jailing of Liam Lawlor, the conversion of large tracts of Wicklow into a toxic dump and the débâcle of the Bertie Bowl, the cynicism of the abortion referendum and the casual contempt for people with disabilities.
It needs to draw a clear picture of what we have and then another one of what a State that actually turns an economy into a society might look like. If they can't do this, Michael Noonan and Ruairí Quinn will be spending the next five years wondering how Bertie gets away with it.
Fintan O'Toole is an Irish Times columnist