DRAPIER: Drapier won't dwell overlong this weekend on the second tier of ministerial appointments. There were few real shocks, a few close calls perhaps, but the overall effect is to give Bertie Ahern's team a new and fresher look.
The promotions of Eamon Ó Cuív, Martin Cullen, Mary Hanafin and Mary Coughlin showed that Bertie does keep an eye on the performance of junior ministers and that effective work can be rewarded.
This time the Taoiseach has hinted at a mid-term reshuffle. Drapier has heard this one before. Experience, however, shows that not all Taoisigh have the scope to go ahead when the time comes.
But Drapier thinks that Bertie means what he says and that a good junior performance could pay off, especially since it is very clear that he is already thinking of his team for the 2006 election and the possibility of winning that elusive three in a row.
Drapier is utterly serious on this point. Bertie Ahern is still a young man. Basket-hanging aside, he has little real life outside politics. For him, as indeed for too many of us in here, politics is everything - we eat, sleep and breathe it.
Bertie loves being Taoiseach. He believes that he is good at the job - certainly better than anyone else on offer - and he has no intention of imposing an artificial time limit on his tenure in office. Dev, after all, held the job for 21 years.
All of which brings Drapier to his main point: the compelling need, in the interest of a healthy democracy, to have a viable and attractive alternative government on offer to the voters.
And so to Fine Gael. Drapier has no great time for those who argue that Irish politics should be organised along right-left lines. Those who so argue have got it wrong in every one of the decades since independence.
As far back as the 1940s, this august newspaper was advising Fine Gael to get off the scene and make way for Labour, while some of Drapier's older readers may remember being assured, again by no less an authority than The Irish Times, that the Seventies "would be socialist".
There is no strong evidence from the last election to suggest a significant move leftwards. A drift to anti-system parties, a rise in local-grievance candidates, stagnation for Labour and huge damage inflicted on Fine Gael. But no great evidence yet of any big move leftward.
Fine Gael is still the biggest opposition party. It has what the distinguished political scientist Richard Sinnott described as a great deal of "social capital", including a large membership, a nationwide organisation and more than 400,000 people who were prepared to vote for it last month, in spite of a disastrous campaign.
All of that is something for Enda Kenny to be going on with. But he will only succeed if he starts by addressing head-on the huge raft of problems, some of which have long been evident, others of which surfaced painfully during the late election.
The first of these is the new mantra - "What does Fine Gael stand for?"
Various people have tried to answer this question, from Gay Mitchell's Christian Democrats to others who talk in terms of left-of-centre Social Democrats, or others still who want the party to move to the "Right", whatever that means.
Drapier does not know the answer, in large part because he thinks the question is the wrong one.
There is no evidence that Irish people think in ideological terms and even less evidence that they are ever likely to. And, in Drapier's view, any attempt to restructure and relocate the party along an ideological spectrum will mean very little to the voters and will lack credibility, especially with the party's own rank-and-file.
Drapier would ask a different question. What do people want of political parties in the 21st century?
Drapier's guess is only as good as the next man's, but he suspects that the main elements are simple enough. They want leaders who do not frighten or repel them, whom they respect, see to be competent and who command their trust. Most important of all, they want people of judgment who talk in real language about real problems and in a way that gives hope rather than in a consistently negative and carping fashion.
As the recent book Days of Blue Loyalty has shown, the age profile in Fine Gael is worrying. But with Fianna Fáil chock-full of ambitious young people, Fine Gael has space and is well positioned not just to build on its strong third-level base but to move into areas hitherto ignored by the party.
The party can follow the example of Garret FitzGerald after 1977, when he brought serious management to Fine Gael for the first time. Enda Kenny should take a hard look at Fianna Fáil.
There is much more Drapier could say. But Drapier's essential point is that if the Irish people are presented with a party that is well-led, professionally-organised, saying real things about real issues, they will start taking notice.
And that's the first step.