In Britain, a late spring or early summer general election is a foregone conclusion: the decks are now being cleared for such an event.
But here the situation is more uncertain.
Even if the Government remains unscathed by further tribunal revelations, will the Taoiseach - whatever he may currently say - really want to box himself in by postponing an election to the spring of next year?
For that would leave him with no element of choice, the constitutional deadline for an election being May 2002.
The only time an Irish government chose to take the risk of running right up to the wire was during the war.
In the immediate aftermath of the 1938 Anglo-Irish Agreement - a diplomatic triumph - de Valera secured the first of only two popular-vote majorities in the history of the State.
Then as the war ran into its fourth year he decided to let the Dail run its full five-year course.
The price he paid for that gamble on the tolerance of the electorate was a stiff one. Despite the weakness of the Fine Gael opposition - that party lost 15 seats in the 1943 election - de Valera found himself with 10 fewer seats. ail after the votes had been counted.
Consequently he faced both a strengthened Labour Party and no fewer than 22 deputies from new small parties and independents. Hardly a good precedent for the Taoiseach.
It is true that a year later, by contriving to present, as if it had been an ultimatum, an American note seeking the close of the Axis legations (no embassies in those days!), and by taking advantage of a Fine Gael-inspired Dail defeat, de Valera won back his parliamentary majority. But, without disrespect, Bertie Ahern is not de Valera.
Since 1943 no government has taken the risk of running a full five-year term. Moreover, between January 1st and February 9th next year, the Irish pound is to be replaced by the euro.
This will be far more traumatic than the decimalisation of 1971, which left unchanged our basic currency unit, the pound, and in which the only real difficulty for the consumer was the alteration in the value of the penny.
DESPITE the relative transparency of the change, it nevertheless led to an almost universal public conviction that retailers had abused the opportunity by putting up their prices. This belief was not sustained by the subsequently published cost-of-living index figure.
If a relatively simple and transparent currency change induced that kind of mass paranoia, imagine the effect in a year's time when every price label will increase by the not-so-round figure of 27 per cent.
Shopkeepers will be legally required to undertake an even more complex conversion, using a rate of .787564 euros to the punt, which yields what is officially described as a "rounded-off" rate of 1.269738078 euros to the pound.
I certainly wouldn't want to call an election after such a traumatic currency change.
If an election is not postponed until 2002, it must in practice take place either in May/June or September/October next. Neither politicians nor the electorate would tolerate an election date in the other possible months: July/August or November/December. Assuming the choice remains the Taoiseach's and that he is not pre-empted by forces outside his control, there is a strong likelihood of an election just before or after next summer.
What can we learn from the record of past governments faced with a similar choice, governments elected in the first half of a year which survived for 31/2 years?
Oddly, there has been no such government in the past two decades. Leaving aside the 1938-1943 Dail, there were seven such cases.
In only one of these did a Taoiseach, faced with a similar choice, decide to postpone the election until the autumn.
That was in 1961, when the Fianna Fail government led by Sean Lemass lost eight seats and its Dail majority. Lemass later succeeded in governing successfully for four years, after Fianna Fail won back a seat in a by-election. I described it satirically at the time as "a majority of minus one".
In the six remaining cases, Taoisigh faced with Bertie Ahern's dilemma chose an early summer election. The record of these six elections doesn't offer our present Taoiseach a lot of comfort, for in four of the six cases (1948, 1973, 1977 and 1987), an early election led to a change of government, and in only one case (1969) did the outgoing government not lose seats.
This happened because in 1969 Labour was in what might be described as a suicidally optimistic mood, believing "the 70s will be socialist".
As a result it rejected the idea of entering a coalition, thus handing the election on a plate to Fianna Fail, which in those circumstances offered the only chance of forming a government.
With no really encouraging precedents to go by in choosing between a summer and an autumn election, I suspect that what may determine the Taoiseach's choice will be the same factor that in six of the seven cases led to early summer elections: the grim prospect of having to spend the entire summer pre-campaigning for an autumn election.
What Bertie Ahern's colleagues may tell him is that, given the undesirability of being backed into a 2002 cul-de-sac, he would do best to get it all over with before the summer.
These considerations, together with the reported prospect of having a spare £1 million from the sale of their headquarters, may have contributed to the recent Fianna Fail decision to seek to overturn the limits that they themselves recently imposed on election spending.
Their proposed greatly increased scale of election spending seems to suggest they are worried about their prospects.
However, at the time of writing it is not clear whether this proposal has secured the approval of the Progressive Democrats or of the Independent deputies upon whose support Fianna Fail depends.
It would be unwise for Fianna Fail to have launched such a proposal without having first secured the support of those they depend on for their Dail majority.
But it would be equally unwise for Jackie Healy-Rae or Tom Gildea, for example, to provide Fianna Fail with an opportunity to out-spend them with a view to winning back seats lost to them in South Kerry and South West Donegal.
And it would be equally unwise for the PDs to give Fianna Fail such a financial advantage over their much smaller organisation.
Both the Independents and the PDs know they hold the whip-hand in this matter.
For Fianna Fail would scarcely want to precipitate a premature election by getting defeated on such an issue.
One can't help wondering what chance there is of success for this curious proposal to rig the election financially.
gfitzgerald@irish-times.ie