Some 2 1/2 years into the life of the Government and the economy is thriving, the polls are not half bad and the country is at peace, even if the peace process is in severe trouble. The Coalition has hung well together and the recent reshuffle reflected all of this in that it was a fine-tuning, not a bloodbath.
So Fianna Fail members must be happy little campers? No, they aren't. Morale is not high, certainly nowhere near as high as it should be. This situation is caused by frustration with the party's inability to separate itself from its past.
For a relatively short man, Charles J. Haughey casts a long shadow. A shadow the Fianna Fail party has been doing its best to step out of ever since he was ousted as leader. And what the party faithful feels is that every time it has the sun on its face, some other scandal puts it firmly back in the shade.
One of the oddities of the current situation is that for years the constant stream of allegations against the party seemed to have the opposite effect. The largest party in the State developed a siege mentality. It felt as if it was being picked on unfairly and, consequently, banded together, stuck its chin out and used that sense of injustice as a badge of pride.
With the advent of tribunals, members felt that, in the short term, they would have to put up with some embarrassing revelations. However, the public would see the party go through the process of washing its dirty linen in public and it would then know that Fianna Fail was now cleaner than clean.
There are two problems with this approach.
The first is that if your clothes are too dirty you get left with stains. Yet the party understood this and seemed content to go through the vigorous boiling and scrubbing which would be necessary to remove the marks left by previous members' misconduct in the 1970s and 1980s.
The second is that if you happen to drop your freshly-cleaned clothes on the way to the washing line you have to start all over again. This is where the real problem lies. Every time it seems that the extent of the mistakes made seems to be clear something else crops up.
Over the last few weeks, Denis Foley has been the one to drop the laundry in a puddle.
Most frustratingly, he had been part of one of the most successful actions carried out by the membership of the Dail. The DIRT inquiry had demonstrated what good politicians are capable of. And yet, through stupidity or naivety - or both - he almost managed to undermine even the Public Accounts Committee's achievements.
He certainly managed to reinforce suspicions about his party. One step forward and two steps back.
At the ardfheis in November 1998, it was made clear that renewed steps would be taken to ensure that the muck which went with the stream of Fianna Fail-related scandals could be removed. Events have conspired against that aspiration. With another ardfheis looming, the party must start the process again.
At this stage the party has to realise that the task it is undertaking is enormous and will take time.
In May, the Standards in Public Office Act will be published. This may allow those in charge of drafting the Fianna Fail code of practice an opportunity to revisit the document. What they should be doing is treating the legislation as a minimum standard of behaviour. The party's own code should exceed it in every possible area.
Simply complying with the law like other parties is no longer enough to repair the damage. The public has to see, very clearly, that Fianna Fail takes this problem very seriously and is determined that none of its current TD or senators should have the slightest question mark over their behaviour.
For example, it seems that the current code prepared for the Fianna Fail party has a process of asking prospective Oireachtas members to pledge that their tax affairs are in order. What the public has witnessed is one of the unimpeachable PAC men, who had been through a similar process, turn out not to have been unimpeachable at all.
The obvious conclusion for the public is that if he was capable of such duplicity, what is to stop any of the rest of them doing the same?
The next issue is the drip feed of scandal coming from tribunals. Right now what is happening is the equivalent of slowing peeling off a plaster rather than tearing it off in one swift movement. A way needs to be found to give the plaster a good yank. Some sort of system for speeding up the process is needed.
Obviously, this must be done in such a way as to ensure that the tribunals' integrity and thoroughness are not compromised in any way. The Government might be well advised to take a careful look at the way the Moriarty tribunal is being handled. If benchmarks for tribunal effectiveness are to be introduced, that is where the guidelines will be found.
One final element vital for the reassurance of the public is that the party's cleanup must be led by the Taoiseach. The people must see that the process is being pushed right from the top of the party and that it is all inclusive. By the time this Government reaches the end of its term in two years, the clean-up should have begun but be nowhere near complete.
Fianna Fail will need a number of years almost completely scandal-free before the public begins to forget the past and associate it with the kinds of principles most of its members have always tried to maintain.