DRAPIER: August looms. Buckets and spades and a break at last. The Cabinet held its last meeting - scheduled meeting at any rate - yesterday and left behind a litany of painful cuts and economies, not to mention scaled down, or in some cases abandoned, promises.
The fact that the Cabinet is not meeting does not mean Ministers will not be busy next month. August is the month when official Ireland goes on holiday, trade union leaders, senior civil servants, IBEC types, most political journalists and maybe even Vincent Browne. In other words it's a good time to try to slip in bad news stories in the hope that the impact will have worn off by the time real life resumes in September.
It's not quite as bad as the ill-fated Jo Moore, press officer to the equally ill-fated Stephen Byers, who infamously tried to use the September 11th massacre as a cloak to hide some local bad news. But the idea is much the same.
Drapier doubts if it will work. In fact, with the passing of time the present Government is coming to look as if it adopted Seán Lemass's cavalier approach to election promises during the recent campaign. Lemass believed that election promises were no more than that. They were a means to an end, and in some cases it would be more irresponsible to implement them than to ignore them.
Something similar is happening now. Those who cried wolf about the state of the public finances during the last campaign were either ignored or worse again, treated as people lacking in national self-confidence, in some ways less than fully patriotic.
The Government's position then was greatly helped by an Opposition whose spending promises depended on a plentiful supply of public money. So their strictures lacked real conviction and, with Charlie McCreevy muddying the waters, the public did not want to know.
It will know soon enough. It's going to be an uneasy niggling August and each month after will get that bit worse as cuts begin to bite or promises are left unfilled. There will be much noise and a great deal of recriminatory wrangling.
But in a way it had to happen. Things could not go on as they have been. We had lost the run of ourselves, many of us believing the boom was all of our own making, that we were entitled to it and that it would go on for ever. As a result we began to price ourselves out of competitiveness and forget that all booms come to an end and in the process inflict a fair amount of pain.
Drapier's best advice to the Government is to come clean. The pressure groups are going to scream blue murder anyway, but ordinary fair-minded people - and they are the majority - would prefer to be treated in an adult way, especially if they felt it was the way to get things back into shape.
Anyway, if hard decisions have to be made now is the time to make them, early in the life of a government, and this is as secure a Government as Drapier has seen in his time. There may be friction and bad feeling on the Fianna Fáil back benches, but inside the Government the chemistry is good.
THERE IS none of the prickly tension and simmering distrust which ultimately destroyed the Albert Reynolds-Dick Spring government. As far as Drapier can see, most Ministers seem to get on well enough with each other and most seem more intent on getting on with their jobs than sparring with each other.
Of course, Drapier has warned in the past that a time like this is often the most dangerous: it's when the unexpected happens. However, as far as Government cohesion is concerned, this coalition Government is as near impregnable as makes no difference.
The PDs are happy. Michael McDowell is seeking to be radical rather than redundant. Liz O'Donnell is enjoying the liberation of the back benches and Bertie Ahern knows he has bucketfuls of Independents only gasping to shore up his Government should the PDs pull out.
In truth the Opposition needs all the time it can get. Enda Kenny has started well and there is undoubtedly a great deal of good will for him in the wider party. He has some good advisers, some bright new senators - watch Donegal's Joe McHugh in particular - and he has set about ridding the party of the faction fighting that marked the regimes of John Bruton and Michael Noonan.
He needs only a small swing to win back 10 or 12 seats. It's after that the real problems start. He has some big electoral tests coming up. The Nice debate is only a starter, but a highly important one. The local and European elections will be the big test of his rebuilding efforts. The locals in particular will be more competitive than ever before, and Kenny's task will be to do in 2004 what Garret FitzGerald did in 1979 and bring in a team of new young councillors who will stand for Dáil seats in 2006.
Fine Gael at least knows the extent of its problem and has no doubt about the scale of its task. Labour on the other hand has been in denial since the election. It may have had a good election campaign, but it had a rotten result. It failed to capitalise on Fine Gael's collapse, failed to elect a single new TD, saw its vote collapse in traditional Labour strong- holds and has the highest age profile of any Dáil party
HOWEVER there appears to be very little public acceptance of this reality. If the reaction to last week's Seanad result is anything to go by - when the party sought to represent its performance as a significant gain, though in fact it has exactly the same number of seats, five, as it had in 1997 - then the party is continuing to whistle past the graveyard. Sniping at Fine Gael will not restore Labour fortunes, a fact well accepted by some of the increasingly restless party members.
As for the new groups, it is still too early to judge. The Sinn Féin script factory is still the best in the business, but it will be interesting to see if the performance of the individual deputies will match the quality of the material they receive. Certainly they will not lack for neck, but Leinster House has its own way of putting people and their performances into perspective.
As for the Greens, they are engaging and enthusiastic. It is too early yet to judge, but of the new people, Éamon Ryan is the one who has impressed so far. The Independents have lost their pivotal position. Jackie Healy-Rae is no longer the power he once was and, with the exception of Finian McGrath, none of the new people has made any real impact. The Government will do its best to freeze them out.