The irritant of the Ansbacher recall aside, Bertie Ahern heads into the recess at the height of his powers. For the first time since 1969 he has led the same Government combination back to power. He heads up a political organisation more professionally streamlined and better funded than any party in the history of the State.
He has firewalled his party from the fallout from various inquiries, investigations and tribunals, where so many of his prominent colleagues past and present are embroiled, that a party other than Fianna Fáil would have been demoralised. As he floundered a few days before polling, Michael Noonan produced a compelling document that chronicled the recent Fianna Fáil record on sleaze, and it sank without trace.
Now Ahern has a comfortable working majority and a cosy relationship with his Government partners. Ceausescu jibes apart, the parties could scarcely be closer. Gone are the days of uneasy coexistence with Des O'Malley. Mary Harney is not for turning. She would need to be confronted with an appalling vista before she would pull the plug.
Spiritually, she is comfortable with Bertie Ahern's Fianna Fáil, and her new deputies, two of whom became Ministers on their first week in the Dáil, are still in some awe at their own election. Michael McDowell's scathing attack on "one leader one voice" and contemptuous denigration of the Abbotstown project were just business. The new Minister for Justice will now throw himself into an ambitious reform programme and won't have time to devote to the kind of venal lapses that would agitate him in opposition.
And, should it all somehow go suddenly wrong, Mr Ahern will have so many Independents queueing at his door to replace the PDs that it will be reminiscent of the old hiring fairs. And the Opposition was never more fragmented, divided and demoralised. What more could a Taoiseach ask for?
In politics when it gets this good it is time to worry. The chickens have started coming home to roost. A truculent electorate may consider that they have been sufficiently generous to the egregious Taoiseach for one year. That could spell disaster for the Nice Treaty and a wounding defeat for the Government. Not everyone is persuaded that Dick Roche and Una Claffey can stave off another defeat.
The Exchequer returns are forcing a reversal of the rhetoric endured during the general election. Spending Ministers are feeling cheated and apprehensive about being forced to manage in the new environment. Backbenchers have returned to their constituencies to have their egos massaged and to be told why they should have become junior ministers.
However, the benchmarking report is now the elephant in the room that Ministers pretend to ignore. Even relatively speedy implementation, with all that implies for the public finances, will leave many disgruntled public servants who were seduced by the hype surrounding the origins of benchmarking and by Joe O'Toole and his hole-in-the-wall gang.
Meanwhile, the Government is standing square behind the decision to permit only one day to debate the Ansbacher Report. If the long-awaited report lives up to the billing it will expose the worse tax-evasion scam by the native elite ever seen.
YET the Taoiseach has decided for his own reasons to close down the debate after one day. There was a time when Mary Harney and Michael McDowell would demand at least a week to trawl over such a report and its implications.
No doubt the occasion will provide another opportunity for the Greens and Sinn Féin to cry foul and claim they are being excluded. Sinn Féin issued another statement during the week about the supposed discrimination which denies them priority questions and private members' business since they have fewer than seven members.
However, Sinn Féin members have the same entitlements as other deputies in terms of, for example, ordinary parliamentary questions.
Drapier had a look back at their performance on ordinary questions for the week before the House went into recess. Under Standing Orders the Sinn Féin deputies would have been entitled to 30 parliamentary questions that week, but only got around to tabling a solitary one.
This fact is unlikely to dampen Sinn Féin's addiction to victimhood. No more than the report from the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee of the House of Commons claiming that between them republican and loyalist paramilitary groups can earn up to $22.8 million through racketeering will diminish their indignation at the Ansbacher Report.
The new Government has not had much of a honeymoon despite the extraordinary benign landscape referred to above. The economy, the public finances, benchmarking, Nice, Northern Ireland and crime are all hovering dark clouds.
Meanwhile, the new Fine Gael leader, Enda Kenny, is being more successful in evoking a response from his troops than might have been expected.
The Labour Party, for its part, seems to acknowledge that the need for rejuvenation is not confined to Fine Gael. Maybe we are not headed for a one-party State after all.
However, both of the main parties in Opposition have a long way to go if we are to avoid the next general election being only about who will dance with Fianna Fáil.
Garret FitzGerald is on leave