The Government was very lucky that at the time of the election early last summer the reality of our economic downturn had not yet struck home to the electorate, many of whom were then still in thrall to the SSIA bonanza.
A more astute and self-confident Opposition could, I believe, have done more to alert the voters to the impending crisis, but instead, in order to justify competing with Fianna Fáil in offering illusory tax cuts and in making unrealistic spending promises to the electorate, they played the Government's game by accepting the thesis that strong economic growth would continue.
That an economic downturn might occur in or around 2007 had in fact been spelt out as a real risk facing our economy when over two years ago, in November 2005, the Economic and Social Research Institute presented its last medium term review. For, as well as outlining a "high-growth" scenario if everything ran smoothly between 2005 and 2012, that review dwelt at some length on the possible consequences for Ireland of a US recession that pushed the euro/dollar exchange rate down by 20 per cent - which is, of course, precisely what has happened.
It is true that in the ESRI "low-growth" scenario this was expected to come about as a consequence of US efforts to tackle a huge external payment deficit, whereas the present downturn is a consequence of an unforeseen subprime mortgage crisis.
In that review the institute also analysed the possible consequences for our economy if a US-generated low-growth scenario were to coincide with a domestic Irish housing crisis. For that purpose the institute hypothesised a drop of one-third in house prices, combined with a halving of housing output over a three-year period.
But housing output is currently in the process of halving much more rapidly and could bring supply and demand into balance much faster than the institute foresaw two years ago. As a result the house price decline could fall short of the one-third drop suggested by the institute. And, as house price indicators tend to lag behind events, the reality seems to be that prices have already fallen by as much as 20 per cent.
However, leaving housing on one side, the institute may be right that the general downturn in the economy precipitated by external events may last longer than some commentators have recently been suggesting, especially in view of the fact that the external economic crisis now appears much more serious than the kind of deliberately engineered economic US adjustment that the institute had envisaged.
For this reason I would discount comments suggesting that the general economic situation may recover later this year - or even perhaps next year. The mess into which the US has got itself is not going to be disentangled quickly.
In the ESRI's "low-growth" scenario, based on a US downturn emerging at the start of 2007 rather than towards the end of the year, unemployment does not peak until 2009 and economic growth does not recover to a level in excess of 4 per cent until 2011.
I am, however, inclined to feel that the institute's unemployment projection - rising to 11 percent over a two-year period of reduced economic growth - may prove unduly pessimistic.
Since 2005 the economy has grown much faster than the institute had expected, and this has involved a level of immigration well over twice what it had foreseen.
Thus our "cushion" of immigrant labour is today very much greater than the institute had projected, and it is possible that a considerably greater share of the impact of our rapid deceleration of growth than the institute could have envisaged in 2005 will be absorbed by this immigrant labour force, rather than by domestic employment.
Recent census data has shown that even in a recent period of quite rapid economic growth one-half of the cohort of immigrants who entered employment in Ireland in the year 2003 had by 2006 ceased working here. In the much less favourable economic conditions of 2008 a much higher proportion of immigrants are likely to return home, or to seek work in Britain - especially immigrant building workers, some of whom have moved already to London Olympic projects. Moreover the inflow of fresh immigrants will certainly diminish as word gets back about rising unemployment here.
Looking farther ahead, the institute's more upbeat assessment of longer-term Irish economic growth is particularly important because, behind our sometimes over-the-top celebration of the staggering success of our economy in the years after 1993, doubts have continued to exist in the minds of many Irish people as to whether that success was real, solid and capable of enduring. This means that a downturn in our economy of the kind we are now experiencing could lead to emotion displacing reason, driving us back into a quite irrational slough of despond.
The truth is that, far from our longer-term economic future being placed in jeopardy by the current downturn, the ESRI's 2005 economic projections suggest that we could in fact emerge with a somewhat higher growth rate in the next decade than if the current crisis had not occurred.
How could the current downturn yield an accelerated growth rate in the next decade? The answer is that, painful though the current setback may be in the short run, it might help us to recover some of the competitiveness that we lost earlier in this decade. And, in conjunction with the fact that the 2007 base from which we are starting involved a higher-than-foreseen level of output, the actual level of GNP during the next decade might even turn out to be close to the institute's projected level under its alternative "high-growth scenario".
In the early years of the present decade our competitiveness - one of the beneficial outcomes of the Celtic Tiger years - was seriously undermined by the Government's misguided overheating of an economy that was then approaching not alone full employment but also participation in a single currency system that would rule out devaluation as a remedy for loss of competitiveness. If in the next couple of years of economic difficulty we can recover some of the ground then lost, a leaner Irish economy might then be well-placed to grow faster during the next decade.
This prospect of more rapid economic growth in the next decade than has hitherto been envisaged does indeed offer some light at the end the economic tunnel that we are currently traversing.