Ourld colleague Michael McInerney, who wrote here with great heart and incurable optimism for many years, was given to announcing turning points in our affairs. If he'd been right, the map of Irish politics would have resembled Corkscrew Hill. But the turning points in the 20 years that followed the second World War were few and far between. Even worse, with economic success beyond our dreams came a nightmare of scandals and the widening of divisions which, he'd hoped, prosperity might have eliminated. Michael's optimism comes to mind now that a new generation of commentators is beginning to ask what went wrong at the best of times and to look to yet another election as a potential turning point in the life of the Republic.
A few elections have made a difference: the Fine Gael-led coalition's success in 1973 after 16 years of Fianna Fail rule; Fianna Fail's historic overall majority in 1977; the dramatic emergence of the Progressive Democrats in 1987 and their first coalition with Fianna Fail in 1989; Labour's 33 seats in 1992. But the election for which the politicians are now preparing will have a more lasting effect - not only on parties but on the political system - than any since the 1930s.
The manoeuvring which has already started may throw up surprising alignments; members of Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and Labour speak nervously of a widening range of smaller parties and independents. There will be more at stake than gaining power; much more than the localism of semi-detached independents who'll keep a party in office for the price of a few drainage pipes. This is a test of the willingness of one of Europe's richest states to use its wealth for the benefit of all its people.
Politics and economics are inseparable. Marxists have said so for more than 150 years. And, to the surprise of many, such perceptive commentators on American affairs as John Cassidy of the New Yorker have begun to say so too.
Politics and economics have always been at the root of our problems, whether filed under health, housing, traffic or sleaze. Once it was the politics of a newly independent state, all but ruined by civil war. The need to rebuild was urgent. Jobs had to be found for people who might otherwise have left. Industrial development ensured a closer relationship between business and politics. Or, since the party was in government for two 16-year stretches, between business and Fianna Fail.
It wasn't all bad. Public and private sectors worked well together. Both benefited from protection and the support, in turn, of Cumann na nGaedheal and Fianna Fail. But by the second half of the 1960s the building industry in particular had begun to have an increasingly powerful influence on Fianna Fail and the direction of politics. Party funding was the key to the change. If builders paid £100 a plate at Taca's fund-raising dinners tonight they could be sure of a welcome from mohair-suited ministers tomorrow.
And, with membership of the Common Market came opportunities for beef processors to equal those of the builders. By the end of the 1970s they too had built a relationship with Fianna Fail ministers which called for public scrutiny.
Opposition parties - especially Labour under Dick Spring's leadership - produced a critique of Irish society which differed little from the attacks made on their establishments by British and American authorities Will Hutton and J.K. Galbraith. Hutton, editor of the Observer, linked the primacy of the markets under Margaret Thatcher with decision-making that was centralised, secretive and arrogant. Galbraith in The Culture of Contentment argues that the relatively well off, the rich and the very rich all believe that their system is the best it can be. The poor are lazy, the rich are rich on merit.
The arguments are familiar. And we're reminded of them in a collection, The Coffee Circle Papers, in which supporters of the centre-left government of Fine Gael, Labour and Democratic Left looked to the future. As they saw the political challenge - and they were writing when the worst had yet to be exposed - it was essential to root out corruption; essential, but not enough.
Corruption is possible because the system allows it. The system is secretive, exclusive, designed to maintain the status quo.
As Des Geraghty of SIPTU said in one of the most forceful papers, it "thrives on individual profiteering, tax evasion and passive political compliance with a corporate culture of deregulation and state subsidy - but with minimal interference . . . but it carries within itself the seed of its own destruction. "We must start by reasserting the centrality of politics, of political organisation and democracy, and reject sharply the smart-alec dismissal of politics, or of class consciousness . . . markets must be a mechanism of - and not the master of - political life. And the role of politics must be to ensure the mastery of people over profit."
All of this runs counter to the arguments of Bertie Ahern, Charlie McCreevy and Mary Harney that, especially in such areas as housing, the market will see us right. It challenges those who've always claimed flights of capital would follow any significant Government intervention. There never was any evidence to support that claim but it sure as hell frightened a lot of conservatives. The argument that self-regulation is good enough, in most financial, commercial and professional affairs, has been seriously undermined by the Public Accounts Committee.
Des Geraghty quoted Oscar Wilde: "To make men socialists is nothing, but to make socialism human is a great thing." That, too, is a challenge to be faced.