WOULD you vote for a party whose leader promised to lengthen your working week? It's a proposal, we tend to assume, that would rank up there in popularity with promises to raise your taxes, reduce the amount spent on health and education, and tax cheap holiday flights out of existence. So why of all countries did France . . . FRANCE! . . . vote for a president who vows to end the 35-hour week?

This is a real French Paradox.

Contrast the cheers for the victory of Nicolas Sarkozy with the protests of Irish nurses, who demand that their working week be reduced and find few politicians willing to strongly disagree, at least in public. With half an election campaign still to go before polling, Bertie Ahern swooped into the nurses' dispute late last week, promising to broker a compromise by appointing an independent body to examine the health service and all the issues involved.

Mon dieu.

The nurses are not fools.

Having played for time, and while Mary Harney proved no more able than her predecessors at confronting the vested interests around the status quo in health, they chose to make their stand while aiming a loaded election at the government's head.

Harney proved unable to get her message across, whatever it was, that might have made a case for reform in the health services. Any real debate would have to start with the startling statistic that Ireland has 50% more nurses per head of population than the average, either in Europe or in the OECD. The OECD average is 8.1, in the EU it's 8.2. In Ireland we have around 12.2 nurses per 1,000 people in the population.

Yet despite this reality, the nurses feel . . . and it's quite evident they are not exceptionally greedy or lazy and sincerely feel this way . . . that they are overworked and underpaid. It's hard not to have sympathy for them. For one thing, how can you begrudge them a bit of envy when consultants come out and whine that it's impossible to live on 200,000 a year as a base salary. For another, given a sufficient level of management incompetence, you could double the number of nurses and still have them feel legitimately overworked.

So why do we have a situation where the famously leisurely French can be led to vote, decisively, for a leader promising them more toil and sweat, while the post-Celtic Tiger Irish electorate seems more concerned with, as the Labour pre-campaign posters asked, whether we were all "happy"?

The short answer is because we feel like we can afford it. France's fastest-growing export in the last few years has been younger workers who are tired of feeling like their chances for economic opportunity are limited at home. There is a recruitment agency in Blackrock that specialises in French workers, served up to international companies like Google, Microsoft and the gaggle of pharmaceutical and financial services firms who want the language skills or simply want employees who want to work hard, French or otherwise. While there are some signs that the explosive phase of Irish growth is behind us, no one seriously believes that the Irish economy is about to implode. Even Sinn Fein no longer argues with the benefits a low corporate tax rate has brought. There is little sign we are about to start seeing young people heading abroad in droves.

Some observers have suggested that whoever wins this Irish election is actually going to inherit a poisoned chalice, that disaster is just around the corner. There's little evidence for that view, but there is plenty of evidence that the easy phase of Irish growth is over and there is a danger of stagnation. The explosive growth in productivity and jobs has been largely imported, and promises to bring in more jobs from foreign companies ring hollow. If Ireland is to keep growing, Irish companies will have to step up, and that will mean confronting inefficiencies . . . in homegrown firms and in the public services, including health.

But the odds are that we won't confront the problems until they confront us. After all, no one would vote for a longer working week. Unless they felt they really had no choice.