Stop us before we kill again. That in essence is the message to the electorate from the attorney general, Michael McDowell, writes Fintan O'Toole.
If the Fianna Fáil/ Progressive Democrats coalition were a Freudian case study, the PDs would have us believe that they are the Ego struggling to control the Fianna Fáil Id. If it were a novel, it would be The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
No one in Robert Louis Stevenson's story can quite bring themselves to say what it is about Mr Hyde that gives them the creeps. "He's an extraordinary looking man," says Mr Enfield, "and yet I really can name nothing out of the way. No sir, I can make no hand of it; I can't describe him."
Mr Utterton, who sees Hyde in the street after one of his obscurely horrible nocturnal adventures, notes that "the look of him went somehow strongly against the watcher's inclination" but can only say that "he gave the impression of deformity without any nameable malformation".
In the wonderfully funny PD campaign against single-party government, Michael McDowell has been communicating his party's unease with its partner, while remaining unable to utter any nameable malformation.
The PDs, we are to understand, are Dr Jekyll to Fianna Fáil's Mr Hyde, the amiable philanthropic gentleman struggling to control the beast that lurks within.
What they forget is that Dr Jekyll is Mr Hyde. At the end of the novel, Jekyll is forced to confront the fact that he has been so utterly taken over by his creature that he can no longer "think his own thoughts or see his own face (now how sadly altered!) in the glass".
The funny part of the campaign is the implication that, if the PDs had not been there to keep Fianna Fail in check, corruption would have run wild. God only knows what might have happened.
We might have had a Minister for Foreign Affairs forced to resign, a Government member of the Dáil's ethics committee going to jail twice, an attempt to appoint to the European Investment Bank a judge who had been forced to resign.
We might have had a former European Commissioner under a cloud, the pursuit of Ceausescu-era vanity projects by a State which refuses to educate people with mental disabilities, a Taoiseach revealed as having signed blank cheques for his sleazy mentor, a huge State contract given to a shelf company with offshore ownership.
The logic of the PDs' message is that all of this is small beer compared to what would have happened if Fianna Fáil had been in government on its own. And yet, in the same breath, the PDs are asking us to put this same beast back into office as the dominant partner in a new coalition.
Fianna Fáil, it seems, is far worse than any of us realise but we are to give them all but one cabinet seat. The only reason this proposition is not laughed off the stage is that no one is talking about corruption in any but the vaguest terms.
In his only substantial one-on-one broadcast interview of the campaign so far, Bertie Ahern was asked about Ray Burke, Liam Lawlor, Denis Foley and Beverley Cooper-Flynn by Gerald Barry on RTE radio's This Week programme. Here, unedited, is his answer.
"In the world problems arise, and in the political world problems arise, and you have to sort them out. It would be a great old world if no problems ever arose and you could go into the office in the morning and you went home in the evening and you never had any difficulties.
"And what I've had to do in a great range of areas is deal with difficult problems and manage difficult problems. And I think it's not the question that these things don't stick. People look at them, people debate them.
"How could they not? It's filled the newspapers, it's filled the programmes. There's been specials this and specials that. But people have seen openly and honestly how I've managed these difficulties and how I've had to deal with them."
If you didn't know what the question was, would you ever guess that this 133 words of verbiage had anything to do with sleaze?
People don't do bad things, problems arise. The place in which they arise is not Ireland, but the world.
The only place in which they might not arise is that "great old world" which we all know doesn't exist. And yet, Bertie Ahern went on to assure listeners, "those days are totally gone".
Corruption is like bad weather, a problem that is always out there in the world. But it is totally gone. Is that clear?
He gets away with this fuzzy flim-flam because his opponents are afraid to name sleaze for what it is.
Even Fianna Fáil itself, by its absolute refusal to utter in public the dread words "overall majority" , implicitly acknowledges that the electorate doesn't trust the party to govern honestly on its own. But no one in the Opposition is prepared to give that fear a name.
Even Michael McDowell's allusions to Ceausescu and Mussolini are a form of evasion, since they are so ludicrously over-the-top that they float away into harmless absurdity.
Since no one wants to be Mr Seek, we are left with Mr Hyde.