'Fianna Fáil's promises of much improved public services - specifically in health and education - are as bogus as its claims to have cleaned up politics in the last five years,' argues Dick Walsh
The question sounds deceptively simple. Now that we've been reminded of the records and heard the arguments, do we want our affairs to be run for the next five years as they've been run since 1997 by Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats?
Or is it still possible that Fine Gael, Labour and the Green Party - with or without allies - will find themselves in a week's time negotiating an alternative to Fianna Fáil and the PDs, as Ruairí Quinn put it, to get the bastards out?
For many, the question will be based, not on political records and performance, but on instinct: do they trust Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats, coalition partners who, in the end, couldn't bring themselves to trust each other?
Dare they risk an overall majority for Fianna Fáil, a party that seems in some doubt as to whether it can trust itself? At the end of one of the strangest election campaigns in 50 years, with the debates on health, housing, education and crime continuing, and the televised confrontation between Bertie Ahern and Michael Noonan to come, we have a week in which to make up our minds.
Fianna Fáil's promises of much improved public services - specifically in health and education - are as bogus as its claims to have cleaned up politics in the last five years or to be uninterested in an overall majority for the next five. The party's pretensions to interest in the public services are easily exposed.
If it had been a serious party with a lively social conscience, Fianna Fáil wouldn't have completed almost five years in office and spent a pot of gold but left us with one of the poorest health services in the European Union. And if it had retained the passionate belief in education with which it set out in the 1920s and 30s, we wouldn't be saddled now with a lopsided system in which those who pay most fare best and those whose need is greatest sit in overcrowded classes under leaking roofs and leave early.
It's a bitter irony that, when the passion for education was most intense and the party's roots in the community were deepest, funds for health and education were as scarce as in some Third World states. (How many had to depend on religious orders for training and on McAlpines or the railroads for work?) By the time the party's ministers came to govern a country that was, as they said, awash with money, the thread that bound them to the community had been broken.
So, with the zeal of late converts, they now preach the need for liberal market economics and set out to subvert the public service programmes supported by Fine Gael, Labour and the Green Party.
The programmes are designed to improve the quality of life (Fine Gael's slogan) for those who have benefited least from the prosperity of the past five years or more by raising our public services to the levels enjoyed by our EU partners (Labour's ambition).
This is what the election ought to have been about - and might well have been about, if Fianna Fáil had not led its opponents into a statistical quagmire from which they had great difficulty extricating themselves. Fianna Fáil speakers, from McCreevy up and down, tend to talk about the State's finances as though this was the most important issue and Fianna Fáil was the only party capable of dealing with it.
Now, though, Garret FitzGerald in these columns has pointed to the parlous state of the public finances after the most lavish spending spree in our history - all of which happened during Fianna Fáil's period in office, under McCreevy's nose.
McCreevy denies the existence of a crisis, but already - with both economic and financial uncertainty on the increase - it's clear who will eventually pay the price for over-runs or miscalculations, whoever made them. Those who suffer most will, once more, be those to whom assistance has been denied - on financial grounds - during the last five years.
Remember the disgraceful prevarication over the Disabilities Bill? The codology about schools awaiting repair? The school meals abandoned in the poorest communities? The carers' needs ignored? The schemes supposed to lend a hand to the poorest of the poor dropped without a word? The first election that I can remember was in 1948 when, after 16 years without a break, Fianna Fáil, led by Eamon de Valera, was defeated by a combination of five parties and a dozen Independents. The first coalition, it was known as the inter-party government and held "a makeshift majority" until the Mother and Child scheme brought it down. Dev, who couldn't bring himself to accept defeat, compared it to a platypus, a little Australian creature that was, according to Fianna Fáil, neither fish, flesh nor good red herring.
Be that as it may, the Fine Gael-led coalition pursued some courageous and imaginative policies, one of which, under the guidance of an enlightened public servant, led to the eradication of TB. The funds, as Noel Browne liked to point out, were provided by a Fine Gael minister for finance Paddy McGilligan from the Sweepstake.
As for Fianna Fáil, when it returned to office after the breakdown caused by bishops, doctors and political cowardice in 1951, it put the Mother and Child Scheme into effect without a fuss. It would be heartening to think of today's party proving so resilient. Instead, it looks as if it needs a rest.