they do things differently there."

Cliched and cheesy as LP Hartley's famous dictum has become (through overuse in columns like this one), it continues to assert itself as one of the most incisive little observations ever to be made. Though they make up the opening sentence of a novel written in 1952 about illicit love in picture-postcard England at the turn of the last century, Hartley's words could be a prediction about Ireland in 2006.

In Ireland, the past . . .

even the very recent past . . . is a foreign country. We did things differently then . . . differently to now, and differently to everyone else.

Last weekend's opinion polls, in this newspaper and in The Irish Times, proved definitively that although we are only about a decade into our little economic miracle, we have made a careful divide in our psyches between the kind of country we are now and the way we were in the 1980s and 1990s when some Fianna Fail ministers and leaders saw power as a way to line their own pockets or, in the case of Bertie Ahern, to worm his way out of financial difficulties.

This is not to suggest . . . a la the Irish Times . . . that the majority of voters is a little on the dim side, or complicit in dodgy behaviour. Wanting to forget about Ireland in the 1980s and early 1990s is a perfectly natural instinct. For people voting in their first, second, and even third general election next year, what happened in the 1990s when Fianna Fail people were hoovering up cash donations for all sorts of purposes is not even a memory. It's just a story, or a claim at a tribunal, or a columnist's rant or a Dail accusation.

The 1990s is an already irrelevant decade, to be dwelled upon only during an episode of Reeling In The Years.

For people a little older, the relief and comfort of not having to wave a tearful goodbye to an emigrating son or daughter, brother or sister is probably enough to justify the eviction of the 1990s from their thoughts. It was a miserable time in which Ireland diced with disaster, but somehow muddled through. Now that we're doing so much better, we do not welcome reminders of the bad old days.

It is to our great credit that we do not sentimentalise those days, or see something noble about our struggle. Poverty is never noble and Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s was not a noble place. It was a place to leave, rather than a place to live, or a place to love. The most natural, the most human, response is to say good riddance and bad cess to it.

When, therefore, opposition politicians got up in the Dail a few weeks ago, thinking that they were about to score a massive political victory, ruin a Taoiseach and collapse a government (even if that last bit might have to wait until next summer), they showed themselves to be as out of touch with the people they want to govern as it was possible to be. The failure of the non-government parties . . . Fine Gael and Enda Kenny in particular . . . wasn't just that they were found wanting in comparison to Fianna Fail and Bertie Ahern, but that they had missed out on the new key rule of Irish life: that the past is a foreign country, and we did things differently there.

In that context, attacking Bertie Ahern for taking money in the early 1990s was pointless, or at least missed the point. As the opinion polls showed, the majority might have wished that he hadn't been putting on the poor mouth, but in the context of the times, under the laws of that foreign country, he was behaving in a normal manner.

If Bertie Ahern's character is to become an issue during the election campaign (and the chances of that are minimal now), the opposition will have to make a connection between what he was up to in the 1990s and what he's up to today. Could no senior politician, for example, have stood up in the Dail over the last few weeks and wondered whether there might be any connection at all between the Taoiseach's blithe, careless attitude to other people's money in the 1990s (whether signing blank cheques for Charles Haughey or taking bungs from businessmen) and the utterly wasteful use of taxpayers' money which has been perhaps the defining feature of his government?

Could nobody have drawn attention to the stark contrast between Ahern's apparently enormous sense of entitlement to other people's money to help him out of financial difficulty and the way, as minister for finance at the time, he starved the health service of funds to such a degree that it has still not recovered.

On Thursday, Dr Fin Breathnach, consultant paediatric oncologist at Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children in Dublin, tried to explain why, between October 1991 and April 1994 (when Ahern was finance minister), the hospital was using a test for Hepatitis C that was only 35% accurate.

Although there was a more accurate test available at the time, Dr Breathnach suggested that it had not found its way to Crumlin because of issues to do with funding. "At the same time there were restraints in many other areas, " he said. "I do recall a period of time when we even began to look at resterilising disposable syringes to try and cut the costs."

As a result of this lack of funding dozens of people will be written to over the next few weeks and told that they need to be retested for Hepatitis C. They were children in the early 1990s and may well be voting for the first time in next year's election. These are Bertie's Children, kids who were badly let down by the health service in the 1990s because the minister for finance was depriving hard-up hospitals of funds while simultaneously trousering large amounts of money from businessmen to alleviate his own hardship. Those children, now young adults, personify the link that exists and needs to be made between Bertie Ahern today and Bertie Ahern yesterday. If the opposition parties can't exploit that link, they should concede the election now.