While he suffered some late damage from unexpected quarters, this has been Bertie Ahern's year. And with the Opposition struggling to make up ground, the Taoiseach seems to be on an upward curve, writes Mark Brennock, Chief Political Correspondent.
Up to early December it had been Bertie Ahern's year. He negotiated a difficult EU Constitutional Treaty, becoming a serious contender for the EU Commission Presidency in the process. He became de facto chairman of the Northern Ireland talks, bringing the DUP and Sinn Féin close to what is surely an inevitable but astonishing deal to share power.
At home he executed the most brazen makeover of his Government's image, responding to his party's June election disaster by claiming it was a new government now, and that everything had changed. It was to be all talk of caring and helping the needy from here on, as Charlie McCreevy went to Brussels, Seamus Brennan to Social Welfare and the Taoiseach told us that far from being the head of a right-of-centre Government, he had been a socialist all along.
And it seemed to be working. In October a The Irish Times/TNS mrbi opinion poll showed satisfaction with the Government rising nine points to 53 per cent, the Tánaiste up eight points to 54 per cent, and Fianna Fáil creeping steadily upwards, at 35 per cent support in October compared to a low of 31 per cent in 2003.
This was before the carefully crafted Estimates and budget designed to respond to as many public criticisms as possible. To hear backbenchers talking about Brian Cowen's first actions as Minister for Finance, it is as if the party has just liberated itself from a bunch of aliens who had possessed it for the past seven years.
But in politics, it is the unexpected events that cause the damage. This month saw the controversy over Minister Martin Cullen's amazingly generous contract with PR consultant Monica Leech, the renewed anger about the possible release of the killers of Det Garda Jerry McCabe and finally the news that many elderly people in nursing homes were having their pensions sequestrated to pay for what is supposed to be a free service. If you are planning to insist you are now a caring compassionate Government, you shouldn't lift money from the bank accounts of the most vulnerable people in society and then offer to return a fraction of it when you get caught.
This self-inflicted damage came just as the Government appeared to have begun to implement a coherent revival strategy after the dreadful local and European election results. Those June elections showed Fine Gael recovering and gave it some hope that it could mount a credible challenge to Fianna Fáil to be the core of an alternative government. However, the continued failure of Labour and the Green Party to make significant ground still leaves that possibility as a long shot.
Straight after the summer break, the Fine Gael and Labour Party leaders travelled to Mullingar to announce an unremarkable voting pact on Westmeath County Council. However, they also announced their joint determination to agree a pre-election pact before the next general election to present voters with an alternative government. The alternative was defined in vague terms: Enda Kenny said it would be one "which puts the people's interests first". Pat Rabbitte said it must "reflect decent and human values, as well as possessing competent management skills". Fianna Fáil's ongoing strategy of repositioning itself as a party of social justice has challenged the Opposition to define a coherent position worth voting for.
This, the two parties have said, will happen over time. However, Fine Gael's partial recovery from its 2002 election disaster will not, on its own, get it back into power. The party's gains in the local and European elections provided a major morale boost. Opinion polls show Kenny being taken more seriously by the electorate.
HOWEVER, THE ALTERNATIVE government proposal faces several problems. Firstly, the Green Party bristled at the presumption that it would be involved, and made it clear that it was part of no such alliance at this stage. While indicating its clear preference to be part of a government with Fine Gael and Labour, it says it will not consider tying itself into any alliance until much closer to an election.
Secondly, the haste with which Rabbitte signed up for talks with Fine Gael about a deal has caused him serious difficulties within the Labour Party. Some, led by Rabbitte's unsuccessful opponent for the leadership in 2002, Brendan Howlin, objected to the strategy, saying the party should fight the next general election independent of pre-election ties. Others said the party's national executive and annual conference must decide on electoral strategy before the leader goes out to advocate a particular course. Labour's conference next May is likely to rule on the issue in some way.
Rabbitte's handling of the presidential election also caused widespread irritation in Labour. His suggestion that Michael D. Higgins did not want to run was followed by an attempt by Higgins to become the Labour Party candidate after all - an attempt which was defeated by just one vote on the party's national executive.
There have been several heated national executive and parliamentary party meetings since then, at which members criticised the leader's style as well as his decisions.
Next May's Labour Party conference has assumed a critical importance, with Rabbitte needing to use it to steady the party and unite it behind a strategy if it is to concentrate on gaining ground at the next election rather than fighting internal battles.
Last year - 2003 - was Bertie Ahern's worst year as Taoiseach; this year, aside from the December mini-crises, may come to be seen as his best.
This time last year, backbenchers and some Ministers were sniping at him and his Government about the Hanly reforms of local hospitals, cuts in community employment (CE) schemes and what they saw as the Government's "right wing" tone. Fianna Fáil, the Government and Ahern hit their lowest ever points in opinion polls. And they still had the local government and European Parliament elections to come.
They received their expected hammering in those elections. It was Fianna Fáil's worst election result since 1926. The party won just four European Parliament seats compared to six in 1999. It won just 32 per cent of the national vote compared to 41 per cent in the general election two years earlier. It lost around 80 local authority seats.
But it was clear in Government circles, even before those elections, that a major make-over was on the way. The party had spent the previous two years cutting various public services and postponing the implementation of many election promises (hospital beds, extra gardaí etc) in order to curtail public spending which had been allowed grow massively in the run-up to the 2002 general election. With that process of what the Government liked to call "adjustments" completed, and with the voters' verdict to be delivered in June, this was to be the turning point.
Within days of those election results, Ministers were on the airwaves promising to "listen" to the voters. Government sources were briefing journalists that they were truly about to change their ways and spend money on the needy.
The key to the make-over was the departure of Charlie McCreevy to Brussels the following month. Last year, McCreevy expressed an interest in the EU Commissionership. Then he changed his mind. But some time after the June local and European elections, he decided he wanted it after all. Both Ahern and McCreevy insisted he wasn't pushed. But he went, opening the way not just for a change of the Government's image, but its internal dynamic.
Fianna Fáil's new image was further emphasised in September when the parliamentary party met at Inchydoney, west Cork, to receive a presentation on social inclusion from Father Sean Healy of CORI (Conference of Religious of Ireland).
In the McCreevy days, Father Healy's advocacy of greater income and wealth redistributionwas dismissed by Government figures as wild-eyed lunacy that would bankrupt the State in the blink of an eye. Now, however, he was to give the keynote address to the party's TDs and senators in an attempt to show just how much they had changed.
McCreevy somehow failed to attend Father Healy's session at the Fianna Fáil meeting. Now that he is gone and Fianna Fáil is determined to portray itself as a newly converted organisation, many party figures talk of McCreevy in different terms than they did for the past seven years. For most of that time they said he was the architect of the boom, the bringer of foreign investment to our shores, the inventor of low taxes and the greatest finance minister in the history of the State.
Now they say he used to dominate Cabinet debates on economic and financial matters, keeping many important policy departures to himself, surprising even the Taoiseach with the contents of his Budgets. He didn't listen, they say, and his attitude helped lead them to this year's electoral calamity.
McCreevy's was the single most important move. However, the involuntary departure of Brennan from Transport to Social Welfare, and Mary Harney's voluntary move from Enterprise and Employment to Health scattered the group that had driven the Coalition's liberal economic outlook since 1997.
NOW, HAVING PUT right the pre-2002 overspending, Fianna Fáil is back to its traditional pragmatism. There will be no solo runs from the new Minister for Finance, Brian Cowen. He is a team player, and nothing he does will be without the approval of the Taoiseach. His carefully packaged Estimates and Budget gave substantial funds to disability services, tax cuts favouring the less well off and more funding for threatened CE schemes. In the run-up to the Budget, Cowen couldn't stop himself talking about "helping people".
And then of course came Bertie Ahern's confession to being a socialist, in an interview in this newspaper. Rather too much was made of this: he did not say he believed in socialism as an ideology whose principles should be used to order society. He used the word only in response to a question about his personal attitude to money, wealth and possessions.
Asked about the fact that he appeared to have very little interest in amassing personal wealth, he said: "I don't . . . People mightn't believe this but I have a very socialist view on life. I have it in my mind that I own the Phoenix Park, and I own the Botanic Gardens, I own Dublin Zoo. Because the State participates in these things, I am free to go in there whenever the opening hours are.
"And I don't feel I need to own any of these things. They are there. I don't feel I need to own a huge house with a huge glasshouse when I can go down the road 10 minutes and do it [ visit the Botanic Gardens]. It's just the way I think about things. What is the best form of equality? It is the fact that the richest family in this area can go on a Sunday afternoon to the Bots, and the poorest family can too. And they can both share the same things."
It was in this context that he said: "I am one of the few socialists left in Irish politics." He was talking about what appears to be his personal disinterest in money and private property, not his public political outlook. But it has gone down as a cheeky public declaration of a so-called "lurch to the left", an attempted theft of the clothes of his critics.
The Progressive Democrats have watched Fianna Fáil's revisionism somewhat uneasily. They point out, correctly, that there has been no lurch to the left. Sure, there is some extra money for disability, for hospital beds, and perhaps for extra gardaí, but this is merely fulfilling 2002 election promises that were put on hold. They have no direct hold on an economic ministry since Mary Harney's move, but in Health and Justice the PD Ministers hold two posts which can deliver - or fail to deliver - major high-profile reform.
If the Government's new message is a classic example of politicians following the people, the Government did provide one example of leadership this year. It would have been easier to compromise on the smoking ban, to allow for exemptions and opt-outs in the face of a well-funded campaign by the powerful publicans' lobby, which has important friends within Fianna Fáil.
But as minister for health, Micheál Martin, backed by the Taoiseach, did not cave in. The ban is in place and the predicted social mayhem has not materialised. Cynics suggested the smoking ban was useful to allow the minister a distraction from the failure to improve the health services. Perhaps it did. But it is already producing dramatic results.
There has been a significant fall-off in cigarette sales, and health spending on smoking-related illnesses will therefore be lower than it would otherwise have been. A simple piece of political determination will result in many people living longer and healthier lives.
DETERMINED MINISTERS CAN get it wrong too. As minister for the environment, Martin Cullen was determined to plough ahead with the introduction of electronic voting for last June's elections, despite vociferous concern from opponents that the system might be neither secure nor accurate. The Government toughed it out for months, agreeing late to a review of the system, and later still to abandoning the planned June introduction of the system when this review said it could not stand over the system's security.
Around €50 million has been spent on the system, and a warehouse full of idle machines stands as a monument to the poorly judged deployment of ministerial determination.
Cullen ends the year under great pressure. If either of the two possible inquiries into his awarding of a highly paid PR contract to his political associate and friend Monica Leech show that anything less than proper procedures were followed, his Cabinet position is in danger. The Taoiseach, in this new caring and straight Government, has indicated that he is investing no personal political capital in defending Cullen.
The as-yet unknown outcome of the current round of talks in Northern Ireland offers the most intriguing prospect for the immediate future. An early deal involving complete IRA decommissioning, the permanent end of the IRA's campaign and a Sinn Féin entry into Government with the DUP in Northern Ireland would surely pave the way for the entry of Sinn Féin into Government after the next general election.
For Bertie Ahern not to be Taoiseach after the next general election, Fine Gael, Labour and the Green Party would have to come together and then add 25 seats to their current 59 to win an overall majority. It is a very ambitious target. If they fall short, Fianna Fáil may have the prospect of forming another Government with the PDs, or with the support of Independents, or even with Labour, Sinn Féin or the Green Party.
Having started 2004 under significant pressure, Bertie Ahern ends it facing some political difficulties but on an apparent upward curve with his options growing.