The Tanaiste and PD leader, Ms Harney, is facing her worst week in Government with strong challenges to her party's position on the high moral ground.
She will be forced to defend the U-turn by her senior Minister of State, Mr Robert Molloy, tomorrow and on Wednesday night on a housing development in Carlow, amid Fine Gael allegations that "the pals' act" was "alive and well".
In anticipation of the Fine Gael debate, Mr Molloy announced suddenly on Friday night that he was giving the go-ahead to the building of the two housing schemes at Shaw Park in Carlow. He had, effectively, blocked that decision only 10 days earlier.
The apparently enforced U-turn will cause embarrassment to Ms Harney because the PD chairman, Senator Jim Gibbons, lives adjacent to the development and had objected to the schemes last year.
Mr Gibbons, with two others, made a submission to the UDC in 1996 stating: "Naturally our objections are different from those of the general public as we, the undersigned, have our residences adjacent to the park and have little doubt that we will suffer an invasion of our privacy in terms of being overlooked, greater noise and probably trespass."
The timing of the Fine Gael motion will coincide with the new debate about the financial affairs of the party, published in the Sun- day Business Post.
While the PD leader clearly grasped the seriousness of the breach of trust explicit in the dumping of Mr Des O'Malley's files in a skip outside PD headquarters, some party sources did not seem to understand its full implications last night.
As the details of the links between politics and big business were again starkly put on show, some PD insiders insisted on focusing on how the documents came into "the public arena". The real question for the PDs, from their perspective, is how they could be so negligent as to throw confidential files and private letters into a skip on a public street, unshredded.
The disclosures in the files, donations and otherwise, will raise many questions for the party in coming days. Fine Gael, for example, is already asking whether the £20,000 donation from Mr Goodman was disclosed to the Tribunal of Inquiry into the Beef Processing Industry. The Irish Times confirmed last night that it was declared.
The Green Party is asking whether the former leader, Mr O'Malley, was satisfied that the Smurfit off-shore account in Jersey used to donate money to the PDs was not used to evade tax.
These issues arise at a bad time for the PDs publicly. They are credited with prioritising big tax reductions in a Budget which, according to last week's Irish Times/ MRBI opinion poll, is perceived by three-quarters of voters to favour high-income earners.
The party held the strongest view against State funding for political parties and yet changed its mind without a whimper last week.
There is one other issue. With all the laws about ethics in politics, only donations of over £4,000 to the party would be required to be disclosed today.