A LEADING article in last week's Observer described the playacting which passed for a Republican Party conference in San Diego as "the politics of vacuity".
The whole enterprise, it complained, was played out for the cameras, and what had once been a political occasion, however carefully managed, was now entirely a media event.
Not that cut much ice with the commentators: "The US media, which like their British colleagues hypocritically demand real debate, and then call every argument a split, were all too aware of how they were being used."
Some apparently attached health warnings to their coverage the host of one show dismissed the conference as an "infomercial" and handed back to the studio in Washington.
The Observer, which fears the British media may soon feel driven to do the same, reflects on the Tory posters of Tony Blair as a vampire and on the paucity of real debate in British politics, right and left.
To illustrate the poverty of, debate, it sets Europe among the issues of huge consequence which, even in an election year, hardly merit a mention in 1992, politicians conspired to behave as though it didn't exist.
As for the vampire, the Observer says it's not the first distasteful poster in the history of electoral campaigning, but it is among the most vacuous.
Which may be why Sam Smyth of the Irish Independent thought its author might well be hired by Fianna Fail - and why P. J. Mara of Fianna Fail thought not. (Sam Smyth, you may have forgotten, was one of those who confidently forecast the imminent collapse of the tripartite coalition one night in November. Last year. On the strength of the Tuffy letters.)
But if there are reasons to complain about the lack of substance in political debate in the US and Britain, we have an opportunity here to decide on something more durable than any election programme.
The present Constitution has served us for almost 60 years. The document which replaces it is more likely to last 25 - longer by far than any government's term in office or any US presidency.
Whether it turns out to be rewritten, thoroughly revised or simply amended remains to be seen. One way or another, its tone and contents are bound to be influenced by the work of T. K. Whitaker's group which reported this summer.
That report was completed with exemplary speed and efficiency, less than two years after it was promised in the coalition's programme, A Government of Renewal.
Labour's negotiators had already discovered how difficult it might be to win all party agreement for change: when they tried to have the same promise included in the Programme for a Partnership Government in 1993, Fianna Fail refused.
THE Fine Gael led coalition agreed to it in December, 1994. Dr Whitaker was appointed in March of the following year and the group was constituted a month later.
The lawyers, public servants and academics who worked with Dr Whitaker and the group's secretary, Jim O'Donnell, signed the completed document - 450 pages, with 200 pages of related papers and a long list of submissions - on May 23rd.
It had taken less time than it sometimes takes for a memorandum to make the rounds of departments in Merrion Street and its environs.
If nothing else, it showed what can be done when politicians are prepared to look beyond their noses and public servants of Dr Whitaker's calibre are at the service of the State.
In spite (or because) of its bulk, some of our noisier and nosier colleagues are apt to complain that the report isn't meaty enough. No splits. No rows. No dirty linen.
And the foreword's description of its task is indeed modest: the group's commission was to review the Constitution, not to rewrite or replace it. Such issues as Articles 2 and 3, Cabinet confidentiality and bail were excluded.
The review was intended to ease the work of an all party Oireachtas committee, which was appointed in mid summer with Jim O'Keeffe as its chairman and Sheila de Valera among its members.
But there is no doubt about the importance of the work already done, or the task facing the all party committee.
The Constitution - defined as a legal framework establishing powers, rights and responsibilities - should "concern itself predominantly with the strategic elements in the organisation of the State".
But it would be wrong to imagine that what follows is dusty stuff, fit only for the people in the Law Library. Here is every issue to have hit the headlines since the 1980s, the raw material for controversies to come.
The range is impressive: crime and the administration of justice; poverty, property, equality and the public good; education, the family, child abuse and the rights of parents; membership of the European Union and the United Nations; how the Dail and Seanad work, the quality of representation, local government and the relative merits of electoral systems.
I've listed the subjects in this order, not because this is how they are set out in the report but bearing in mind the authors sensible advice that related issues should be taken together.
WE simply cannot consider crime in a compartment education, property and inequality, any more than we can discuss alienation without reference to access to the law and the quality of political representation.
The review group's report presents us with an opportunity to examine Irish society in the round. It challenges all opinion leaders - and not only the politicians, churches and commentators who are to be heard any day of the week - to say how and where the strategy should lead.
Naturally, everyone has his or her preferences. But the strategic argument is not about fighting corners in the old sense. Not the old order: what you have you hold.
In many cases it's about helping to build on what we have, to adapt to modern conditions - good and bad - so as to achieve the better ordered, more humane society that many already say they favour.
Since this debate is not conducted in an atmosphere of crisis - as so many of our discussions are - it should avoid the distortions imposed by the" demands of the moment, as ink the recent hysterical reactions to crime.
Because the all party committee is at work - and we must hope its members are receptive to the opinions expressed in the public debate - there is still time to persuade the politicians that we need a simpler, clearer, more direct document than the one we have.
In one of the papers published with the review group's report, Kathleen Lynch, co ordinator of equality studies at UCD, writes of representativeness in elections to the Dail and Seanad.
She questions "the ability of any political representative to protect systematically and faithfully the interests of groups whose gender and/or economic interests may well be in direct conflict with their own".
It's a question not only about electoral systems - here discussed by Michael Laver and Michael Gallagher - but about politics as a whole.