FF delegates worry that things can only get worse

The party was in Government. The Taoiseach was breaking popularity records. The economy was booming, and the national question was on the way to being settled. Things couldn't be better.

So it was an understandably worried Fianna Fail that gathered in the RDS at the weekend. Under the veneer of celebration, you could sense delegates wondering when it would all go wrong.

It was no coincidence that the soundtrack for one of the party videos was the theme of the Rugby World Cup: most Fianna Failers prefer the round ball, but in politics they're always expecting an uneven bounce.

Although criticism was muted throughout the ardfheis, some of the problems facing the Government were obvious.

When Saturday evening's programme pitched a Justice, Equality and Law Reform workshop against one on Agriculture, for instance, delegates voted with their feet in the greatest flight from justice since the end of the second World War.

Across in Workshop B, a straggler inquired what was on. "Farming," he was told.

"Oh, Jayz, I'll hang on a few minutes so, see how much heat is generated," he said. In the event, the temperature had more to do with the crush of bodies listening politely but without enthusiasm to the Minister for Agriculture, as he laboured in vain to lift their depression, like an auctioneer trying to sell a heifer.

The speeches preceding the Taoiseach's address tend to be organised like the undercard of a boxing promotion.

They start with the relatively lightweight, working up through the elegant middle division (Micheal Martin), then lightheavy (John O'Donoghue), before the undisputed heavyweight, Brian Cowen, is stripped for action.

Cowen was greeted with raucous cheers on Saturday by a crowd who knew they could expect blood. And he was in his usual form in the early rounds, scattering the party's enemies with vicious hooks and uppercuts, before disappointing fans by turning serious halfway through.

By contrast, having to introduce the Taoiseach after Cowen's performance, Mary O'Rourke occupied an awkward position in the programme, a bit like having to walk across the ring holding up the sign for round one.

But any sense of anti-climax was swept away by the entry of Bertie Ahern, announced with such a fanfare that you expected him to come down through the ceiling in a cloud of dry ice.

The Taoiseach's speech was the work of several scriptwriters and, like any horse designed by a committee, it looked like a camel. It certainly had two humps - farming and EU funds - but as with all other subjects, those were lightly touched upon.

And if the address had a climax, it was the spontaneous applause it drew for the mention of a British Prime Minister and his Northern Secretary, a sign of the times at a Fianna Fail ardfheis. At the end, the TDs and senators gathered round the leader in a choreographed huddle for the benefit of the television. It seemed like a competition to get closest: Donie Cassidy was in like a heat-seeking missile, and others struggled visibly to penetrate Bertie's ring of confidence. At one point, Brian Crowley was engulfed in the seething mass of bodies, and onlookers feared a tragedy.

Then there was another terrible moment when it seemed the celebrations had climaxed too soon. They were just beginning to wind down when one of the television people called urgently for 30 seconds more clapping. Lesser parties might have been flogged out, but like an advertisement for Viagra, Fianna Fail were off again.

At the reception afterwards, one of the more glamorous guests was Elaine Moore, released from a British prison earlier this year and now stolen, it seemed, from under Fine Gael's nose. Insiders explained that her family had Fianna Fail connections as well as Fine Gael ones.

But you could hear the party thinking: all this and Elaine Moore, too. Where will it all end?