THE recent victory of the National Front in yet another French city reflects a disturbing degree of polarisation and extremism in the politics of the Fifth Republic.
Nevertheless, since 1945 France has shown a remarkable capacity to master and absorb various extremist elements and to survive several far graver political tests than any the National Front is likely to pose.
The Algerian crisis of 1958-1962 seemed at several moments to threaten French democracy: one recalls the night when Paris feared and prepared to repel a threatened parachute landing by rebel army elements based in Algeria.
What lies behind the National Front's electoral success has been the ethnic tensions between right-wing elements - some of them former French colonists in Algeria or their descendants - and several million Algerian immigrants living in France.
Several other western European countries have experienced similar but lesser tensions - inter-community bitterness in Belgium and right-left tensions in Italy. And in one country, Spain, Basque separatists have gone some way to replicating the kind of violence we have seen in Northern Ireland.
By contrast, our State, whose existence was put in doubt at the outset by a civil conflict, has since 1945 been remarkably free from both political violence and ideological extremism. The political violence we have seen here during the past 50 years has been exclusively an outcrop of IRA activities in Northern Ireland.
And although there are ideological differences between right and left in Dail Eireann, these are far less acute than in neighbouring Britain.
Why have we been fortunate in this regard? It could be a great mistake to attribute this to any innate virtue of our own. Northern Ireland has shown that, under certain strains, the Irish temperament is capable of actions as violent and bitter as elsewhere.
And during the 19th-century land agitations, during the War of Independence and during the Civil War, class hostility in rural Ireland led to atrocities and widespread destruction of property.
YET the virtual absence of intra-State political violence and ideological extremism here is not a reflection of a basic difference in temperament between Irish people and those of some not-too-distant Continental countries. It has to be seen as a reflection of our good fortune in not having had to face the kind of ethnic tensions that have confronted Irish people in the North, French people in areas with a large Algerian population and the people of the Basque country.
There may, however, be a little more than good fortune to our relatively happy situation. I think a strong democratic instinct has been a factor in helping to ensure political stability in our State. "This instinct seems to come from two contradictory sources: first, "that we had to struggle so hard to achieve democratic control and, second, that during the last 120 years of that struggle, we participated in a British parliamentary system which was in the process of democratisation.
Had we been treated as a simple colony, under arbitrary colonial governance, things might have turned out rather differently.
The really surprising feature of the early years of Irish independence is not that there was a Civil War but rather that, when it was over, both sides moved so quickly to create a stable parliamentary democracy.
Thus, within a couple of years of the Civil War ending, de Valera had broken with Sinn Fein and established Fianna Fail as a vehicle through which to achieve power by democratic means. And the Cumann na nGaedheal government's response to this was to take steps to ensure that when Fianna Fail secured enough political support to form a government, the Army would not be tempted to intervene to prevent those it had defeated in arms a few years earlier from becoming their political masters.
I have, indeed, been told on what seems to me to be good authority that one of the reasons - although not necessarily the only one - for my father's transfer from the Department of External Affairs to the Department of Defence in June 1927 was W.T. Cosgrave's concern, following a meeting with the Army chiefs at the possibility of Army resistance to a Fianna Fail-backed government, such as seemed quite likely to emerge in the immediate aftermath of the election earlier that month.
My father's subsequent efforts to reduce the size of and improve discipline in, the Army made him a very unpopular minister at the time. But after what seems to have, been some unrest in the higher ranks in 1931, a year later it transferred its loyalty smoothly to the new regime - and Irish democracy was firmly and permanently established.
What is particularly interesting is that, although in 1918 Sinn Fein had replaced wholesale the nationalist party which had represented Ireland in the House of Commons for decades previously, within a decade of the fatal split the members of this new revolutionary party - from both wings - had become fully committed to parliamentary democracy in the British tradition.
DURING my time in the Oireachtas, I witnessed the enduring strength of and deep commitment of Irish politicians to democracy.
This was evident during the 1970 arms crisis when politicians of all parties rallied to the defence of a democracy which seemed to them to be momentarily threatened.
And after the burning of the British embassy 25 years ago, an inflammatory speech by Neil Blaney produced an instinctive reaction from all sides. Spontaneously, every subsequent party speaker sought to lower the tension and to encourage a calmer approach to the traumatic events that had occurred in Derry and Dublin. All concerned saw the danger to our democracy - and responded vigorously to the challenge.
When any major issue of genuine national concern has arisen, e.g. the need within the course of a single parliamentary day to legislate to block IRA funds in a Navan bank opposition and government have automatically cooperated without hesitation. When I was Taoiseach, I benefited from such co-operation from Charles Haughey as leader of Fianna Fail on four critical occasions.
The other striking feature of our democratic system is the relative absence of deep ideological differences. In the past some of our parties have been conservative in the sense of being reluctant to initiate change. Others have had a left-wing orientation, and in the last decade we have seen the emergence of a right-wing, ideologically-driven party, the Progressive Democrats.
However, by the standards of Britain, the US and France, the range of differences between our parties is relatively modest. Mary Ellen Synon's disappointment with Mary Harney's unwillingness to subordinate social concerns completely to the markets, expressed in a recent article, offers some testimony to this Irish phenomenon of what might be described as "ideological moderation".
We have been lucky in this State in not having had to face the kind, ethnic tensions or ideological divisions that have riven some of our European neighbours. That this has been a matter of luck rather than virtue should be evident from the events of Northern Ireland.
And we have been lucky in having inherited an instinctive commitment to parliamentary democracy. Perhaps we also exhausted our capacity for ideological confrontation on purely political issues, like the 1921 Treaty, so as to have had little energy left for the kind of deep ideological divisions that have marked the economic and social politics of some of our neighbours.