If Mr Charlie McCreevy's muted, self-serving half-apology over the O'Flaherty affair signalled anything, it was a Government coming back from the summer vacation sweating in fear of the electorate. And so it might. There is widespread, deep distrust and dissatisfaction with an administration which only a few months ago was riding high in the polls.
Social partnership is under threat as the inflation rate races ahead, squeezing workers' real earnings. A new season of revelations at the tribunals opens in a few weeks. And there is growing anger across the community at the deterioration in services and the quality of life. In so many aspects of the State's business there appears to be a widespread loss of simple, administrative competency. A visitor who recently remarked that Ireland appears to have a first-world economy with a third world administration was not far off the mark. The tides of economic expansion are set to flow faster and to rise higher, leaving administrative structures bobbing like corks in their wake.
Health services are being cut back, hospital beds are being closed and patients sent home. Anaesthetic and epidural services are no longer available in some districts. Water quality has deteriorated in places to the point where it is a health hazard to drink from the tap. Hundreds of young people are homeless on the streets of Dublin and children at risk have no places of safety or refuge. The rivers are being slowly poisoned and children are prohibited from swimming in the Shannon lakes. The physical planning of our communities is in chaos as local authorities seek to implement often incompatible objectives. Waste disposal is a crisis in every county and region. Public transport is pitiful. More than 400,000 people drive unqualified and untested upon our dangerous roads. Random physical violence is a nightly phenomenon on the streets of our towns with a garda response which is frequently ineffectual.
There is no sense of the administration being ahead of any of these growing problems. Individually, none of them may appear critical. But taken together and in the overall, they describe a society in which economic prosperity, far from improving the quality of life, has added to its daily burdens for many ordinary people. It appears that many of the men and women who comprise this Government are trapped in a more leisurely age, conditioned to the pace of earlier days and unable to transfer to the realities and demands of an economically dynamic, 21st Century, urbanised society.
It will be argued by the politicians that nobody fully anticipated the economic boom and the consequent pressures on the national infrastructure and on State services. Nor is it merely a question of throwing money at problems, they will say. In many cases - for example, the shortage of nurses - the personnel are simply not available. But this is a threadbare argument. The economic boom has been with us for half a decade. Yet in many areas of State activity, outdated plans and techniques are still being used as templates. Targets and objectives which are no longer relevant, are still in place. The State has all but abandoned any attempt to ensure compliance with many regulations which exist on paper but nowhere else.
If Mr Ahern has any expectation of bringing Fianna Fail back to office and if Ms Harney has any ambition of securing the survival of the Progressive Democrats, their watchwords between now and the election must be action, hard work and follow-through. And there must be an end to the guff and verbiage which too many Ministers still believe are an adequate response to the real needs of a population which is increasingly discontent. The coming weeks will tell whether Mr Ahern has it in him to turn around an administration which is effectively in freefall.