Inside politics:The Taoiseach's decision to raise the stakes in the pre- election political auction and outbid all the other parties by a mile was deeply puzzling, as it went against everything he and his Ministers had been saying for the past two months, writes Stephen Collins.
It prompts the question whether Fianna Fáil engaged in deliberate deception or whether Ahern panicked in the final days before his ardfheis last weekend?
In either case, the speech has done nothing for Fianna Fáil's chances of winning a third election in a row. If the media and the public were misled on purpose in the weeks before the ardfheis, it raises serious questions about the party's credibility. If it was a case of panic, then questions about the Taoiseach's judgment come into play.
The actual viability of the entire package in an economic slowdown is another and probably even more important issue.
It is worth recording what the Taoiseach and some of his leading Ministers said in response to election pledges made by other parties. On February 16th, Minister for Finance Brian Cowen declared: "We in Fianna Fáil will not participate in auction politics ahead of this year's general election." The following day the Taoiseach himself was equally emphatic. "We're not going to participate in an auction," he told the Ógra Fianna Fáil conference.
At a press conference on the Tuesday before the ardfheis, Minister for Social and Family Affairs Séamus Brennan said: "We certainly will not be matching the unprecedented scale of the promises given by Fine Gael and Labour." Just to emphasise the point, he added: "We will promise less because our approach will deliver more." Finally, on the Thursday, the Taoiseach repeated the mantra: "We will not get into auction politics."
After Mr Ahern's spectacular entry into the bidding war two days later, one Fianna Fáil Minister joked to the media: "We fooled you again." The reporters didn't think it was all that funny, as they had been used as a conduit to fool the public. In any case, it appeared that most Ministers were just as fooled as the media by the Taoiseach's volte face.
"After all the talk about auction politics, he has just come out with the biggest bid of all," said one surprised senior figure after the speech last Saturday night.
There is no logical reason why the Taoiseach should have used the media to condition the public to expect one kind of approach and then deliver the opposite. While deliberately confusing journalists has some attractions for hard-nosed politicians, confusing the public so close to an election makes no sense at all.
The only rational explanation is that Ahern decided last Friday or Saturday that he needed to do something dramatic to get control of the election agenda. He may have known that a poor opinion poll result for Fianna Fáil was coming on Sunday or, more likely, he was responding to his own party's market research which was, presumably, also quite negative.
One of the rumours in Leinster House during the week was that a string of Fianna Fáil backbenchers and some of his advisers had gone to Ahern insisting he had to make some big announcement to seize the initiative.
Whatever the reason, he came out with his deluge of 55 promises in 27 minutes. The cost is somewhere between € 8 billion and € 10 billion over the next five years, depending on how the calculations are done. The important point, though, is not the precise cost but the fact that the Taoiseach, for the sake of one grand gesture, discarded what was probably the best card in Fianna Fáil's hand.
Up to last weekend the senior Government party was in an ideal position to control the election agenda. All the Opposition promises, and those of the Progressive Democrats, had been presented to the public. Fianna Fáil still had all its ammunition up its sleeve and had plenty of time to assess whether the voters were taking the Fine Gael and Labour pledges seriously.
Ministers set out deliberately to create the impression that the party would wait until the election campaign proper and then try and blow the Opposition away with a carefully constructed set of realistic proposals.
Instead, Fianna Fáil has made a series of ambitious and even wild promises, beside which the election pledges announced by Labour and Fine Gael look prudent and achievable.
The record of the Government over the past 10 years of prosperity is still something to which Fianna Fáil can point, but the scale of its election promises tends to devalue rather than enhance that record.
The promises also raise uncomfortable echoes of the pledge made by Fianna Fáil at the start of the last election campaign that no cuts "real or imaginary" were being contemplated. That pledge was promptly broken immediately after the election. While the reasons for that U-turn were good and valid, the electorate did not appreciate being misled, as the 2004 European and local elections showed.
Fine Gael is in the position of being able to go into its ardfheis this weekend pointing to an attractive but prudent set of tax proposals as well as a series of affordable commitments on health, education and crime.
It will gleefully point to the various Fianna Fáil commitments that have not been met over the past five years and question the credibility of the proposals now on offer.
Fine Gael and Labour are set to announce their joint election manifesto over the next couple of weeks and all the signs are that it will be a less extravagant package than that being offered by Fianna Fáil. Credibility as an alternative government was the weakest card in the Fine Gael/Labour hand up to last weekend. The Taoiseach changed all that in less than half an hour last Saturday night.