So what has this longest and least abrasive general election in the history of the State meant to you? Given the prosperity of the last six years, some had hoped before the campaign began that it might have been about making Ireland a fairer place and how this could be achieved by following the example of our social democratic partners in the European Union, writes Dick Walsh
Others took the view that the prosperity had been won in a different partnership, specifically with the corporate sector in the United States and powerful sections of the British media, most of which have embraced Fianna Fáil as fellow travellers.
And their message was: what we have we hold, the less said the better.
A contest between the FF-PD centre-right coalition and the centre-left of Fine Gael, Labour and the Green Party might have turned the election into a lively struggle about the nature of our society at a critical moment in its development.
Only the role of the public services, how they're planned and delivered, who pays for them and where they fit into the Government's scheme of things came briefly to occupy a central role in the campaign.
Indeed, when Labour opened the debate on the health services with clear statements about the need to pay for them and how this should be done, the coalition parties' instant reaction was to retreat into a decrepit cliché about the left's old tax-and-spend habit.
Fianna Fáil - and Bertie Ahern in particular, when he finally stopped running and sat face-to-face with Michael Noonan - seemed determined to avoid serious debate at all costs, even if it meant being made to appear fearful, foolish and poorly prepared.
The only discussions he entered with any enthusiasm were those provoked by the cartloads of opinion polls which arrived in every post and which, as a rule, were more informative on the state of play in the constituencies than about reactions to national policy.
Before the campaign began, I listened to two of our colleagues who discussed on radio whether it was their responsibility to turn Ahern's answers to their questions into statements which the public would understand. The alternative was to quote the answers verbatim and allow people to make up their own minds, not only about who to support but about what to make of their would-be leader's utterings.
It didn't seem to occur to them that if the worst came to the worst and his statements still didn't make sense, Fianna Fáil might eventually be persuaded to risk a novel solution and find an English-speaking Taoiseach for a change.
Strangely, in the campaign just ended, more partisan pieces have been written in the opinion columns of the British tabloids than in any of our own newspapers - all of them calling on the Irish electorate to support FF and its leader.
I was beginning to wonder about this peculiar stance when I discovered a paper prepared by a Labour activist, Paul Daly, who has been working on an academic project in Dublin City University.
The pattern of tabloid support for FF became clear. Some powerful alliances, it seemed, had been formed in advance of the Irish and British elections in 1997 which had a profound effect on the results and showed what can happen when a super-rich owner of media takes a hand in politics.
Neil Kinnock's leadership of the British Labour Party had been ruined by vicious and, in at least one case, entirely fictitious propaganda in the Sun - a leading light in the Augean stables of Rupert Murdoch's News International.
In 1995, however, Kinnock's successor, Tony Blair, was invited by Murdoch to spend some time with him and his senior executives on Hayman Island, off the Australian coast.
The upshot was a change of atttitude at the Sun, which supported New Labour in 1997.
It helped to ensure not only Blair's resounding victory over John Major but his return for a second term with the demolition of the Conservatives.(Murdoch's other enterprises continued to flourish with Blair's blessing in the United Kingdom.)
In this State, the ground for a new and profitable alliance between Fianna Fáil and Independent Newspapers was prepared by Charles Haughey's old friend, former Government press secretary P.J. Mara at about the same time the Murdoch-Blair partnership took root.
Mara was already advising Fianna Fáil on its election strategies when he was called in to advise Sir Anthony O'Reilly and senior management in the Independent Group about relations with the party.
He combined the two roles - with FF and the O'Reillys - with assurance and skill, though his venture into commercial radio was less successful and a good deal more embarrassing.
The Independent Group continues to dominate Irish publishing in a manner that Murdoch would envy.
And O'Reilly joined battle with competitors in the telecommunications sector with zest, though the results may not have been to the advantage of smaller investors when all was said and done.
Concentration of ownership in the newspaper sector continues at speed: Thomas Crosbie, Scottish Radio Holdings and the Daily Mail have lately made profitable acquisitions in the Sunday paper and provincial areas.
Perhaps a new - or freshly invigorated - government may look again at the publishing industry and at the implications for politics and the wider interests of recent and imminent changes in the print and broadcast media.