The runners in the race for the Park have had a busy week of it. Still, they can hardly have failed to notice two familiar figures on the way. The one up a tree was Bertie Ahern. He's been up every tree in north Dublin, or so he said on Thursday, explaining the trouble he'd taken over claims of planning irregularities and rezoned land.
The other was Ray Burke, no doubt looking for a line in the sand which he thought he'd drawn with his account to the Dail of strangers arriving on his doorstep bearing a gift of £30,000 in cash during the 1989 general election.
On the evidence of the latest opinion poll (by Irish Marketing Surveys for the Sunday In- dependent), most of the electorate, including more than two-thirds of Fianna Fail supporters, find this account hard to swallow.
His opponents are beginning to feel, though they haven't yet made the demand in so many words, that the sooner Mr Burke stops talking about lines in the sand and steps into Aras an Uachtarain to tender his resignation the better.
Mr Ahern's promise to have Noel Dempsey investigate is a foolish attempt at diversion. Mr Justice Brian McCracken and his team showed that selfregulation doesn't work. They also showed that thorough investigation by independent professionals does, once they've been given the authority, the time and the resources to do the job.
Bluntly, Mr Justice McCracken succeeded in discovering the truth about the affairs of Charles Haughey and Michael Lowry where the Dail had failed, and for Mr Ahern to demand proof before reasonable claims are fully tested is to fly in the face of that experience.
What the Taoiseach is offering is a limp excuse for refusing to include the payment to Mr Burke with other payments to politicians in Mr Justice Michael Moriarty's terms of reference.
Why Mr Ahern and Mary Harney have chosen this course isn't clear. If the payment to Mr Burke is included in Mr Justice Moriarty's terms of reference, as Democratic Left, Labour and the Green Party demanded, and Fine Gael now agrees, the tribunal may clear the air once and for all.
As things stand, questions about Mr Burke's political windfall and the circumstances surrounding it are liable to be asked at every hand's turn, just when the Minister's attention ought to be firmly fixed on the State's affairs.
How often have we been told of late that the Government is engaged in the most important negotiations between nationalists and unionists since Sunningdale, potentially the most significant Anglo-Irish discussions since the Treaty?
This is made to sound like so much rhetoric by the insistence of Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats on having at the centre of affairs someone who risks being ambushed at every bend in the road.
The answer to the wider question of planning decisions in general, and the decision of Dublin County Council in particular, may be more easily found in a separate investigation.
It's not as if the issue of building land, its value and the way it's enhanced by rezoning, was something new, which had taken the Government - or the Opposition - by surprise.
More than 26 years ago, in January 1971, a committee over which Mr Justice Kenny presided was asked to consider controlling the price of land and to examine how added value attributable to the decisions of public authorities might be secured for the benefit of the community.
It took over a year for the committee to complete its work. Majority and minority reports running to 130 pages were signed in March 1973 and printed a year later. As far as I can discover all that survives is a single copy - and that's stashed away in the Department of the Environment.
Old hands who reported on local affairs still remember some extraordinary decisions taken by Dublin County Council in the 1960s and 1970s. One enhanced the value of rezoned land by 900 per cent overnight. A curiously appropriate name, Fortunestown, keeps cropping up.
But Mr Justice Kenny, in whose report some of these decisions were noted, seems to have had little effect. A former Fine Gael councillor, Mary Muldoon, suggested yesterday that Fianna Fail members were largely responsible for what Eamon Gilmore of Democratic Left called an orgy of rezoning in the 1980s.
Ms Muldoon, however, did not confine her criticism to Fianna Fail. She said some of her erstwhile colleagues in Fine Gael and, from time to time, members of the Progressive Democrats, had supported what she clearly considered to be questionable rezoning.
What to do about a practice which has swollen the profits of some developers and enriched a minority of corrupt councillors while ignoring the good of the community at large - and as often as not that of people living in or near the new developments - is a challenge, especially to those who favour increasing the powers of local authorities.
Jim O'Keeffe of Fine Gael, making the case for more effective inquiries into allegations of corruption, said that even the gardai did not have the investigative powers they needed.
The trouble is we only hear of the need for such powers when the heat is on; when it's not, questions of cost and property rights weigh more heavily than communal rights and the needs of those who have no influence at their command or the money to buy it.
Many who contributed to the week's debate were clearly conscious of the damage being done to politics and politicians by the events being discussed.
Sadly for all of us, the week ends with the loss of Jim Kemmy, who did more than most to repair the damage inflicted on politics, sometimes by politicians themselves, more often by those who take a cynical or greedy view of the world.
There are times when you listen to tributes to people you've known, especially those in public life, with more than a growing sense of disbelief. Was this, you wonder, the person you'd known?
I listened yesterday to the tributes to Jim Kemmy, from friends like Frank McCourt and colleagues like Dick Spring, from those who'd opposed him, like Bertie Ahern, or campaigned against him, like Des O'Malley and Michael Noonan; and the sense of recognition grew.
Here was someone of impressive size and depth, a man who enjoyed humanity so much and was so honest in his convictions - about literature, history and culture, as well as politics - that you couldn't fail to share his pleasures.
He was Labour and Limerick to the core, a socialist who never counted the cost of working for his fellow citizens. He was hoping to produce another book about Limerick, this one collecting the fiction associated with the city; and he'd planned one about Clare to match his superb anthology.
It's true, he has contributed mightily to politics - showing that it was possible to be direct and truthful without being hurtful, and practical without losing ideals. He was a friend that Limerick and Labour will miss for a very long time. And so will I.