Inside Politics/Stephen Collins:The opinion poll verdict on the Bertie Ahern payments controversy has transformed the mood in the Dáil.
Instead of looking tired and apprehensive, as they had done for the past year or so, TDs on the Government side of the House were bursting with confidence.
By contrast, Opposition deputies were deflated, with the more pessimistic despairing of ever getting their hands on the levers of power.
With just six to eight months to go before an election, there is every reason for optimism in Fianna Fáil about five more years. However, as recent events demonstrated again, nothing is ever certain in politics, and the Opposition has plenty of time to pick itself up and make a fight of it.
"The public clearly supports Bertie on the payments issue but they are just as capable of voting Fianna Fáil out next year for equally irrational reasons," remarked one retired former minister at a Fine Gael presidential dinner last weekend.
There was some irritation among Opposition TDs at media criticism of them for not exploiting the payments controversy to better effect when the controversy itself was generated and fuelled by the media rather than the Opposition. "How could we deliver the killer blow when the media, which after all got the leak, failed to deliver it?" asked one party official.
While there was some justice in that observation, the crisis did expose a certain timidity on the part of the main Opposition parties.
It is arguable that if they had gone in harder from the beginning, and put down a motion of no-confidence in the Taoiseach, they might have encouraged even more sympathy for Mr Ahern, but it is also possible they might have panicked Fianna Fáil and the PDs into serious mistakes. Instead the two Government parties had ample time to devise a counter-strategy.
"Fine Gael and Labour have been working hard in opposition but we have adopted a risk-averse strategy on the assumption that power would fall into our laps as long as we didn't make mistakes. Now we know that that won't work," said an experienced Labour politician.
A worrying feature of the polls for the Opposition was that they showed a significant proportion of the public has still not come around to the notion of Enda Kenny occupying the Taoiseach's office. Given Mr Ahern's long and continuing popularity, that is going to be a real problem for the Fine Gael leader when it comes to the election.
Still, Mr Kenny has improved his satisfaction rating from a low base in 2002, and he is a fighter who will keep going until the last day of the election campaign. During that campaign his natural affability should prove a big asset, and while he will struggle to rival Mr Ahern in Dublin the rest of the country is there to be won.
The task facing Mr Kenny and the Labour leader, Pat Rabbitte, is to convince the electorate not just that they are capable of government but that they will do a better job than the current incumbents.
They have spent a lot of time trying to prove that they will not increase taxes or do anything else to undermine Ireland's economic prosperity. What they have yet to do is offer a vision of society that is capable of winning the hearts and minds of all those disillusioned with how we have used our new-found wealth.
The impact of RTÉ economics correspondent George Lee's impassioned plea for a fairer society on Ryan Tubridy's radio show during the week demonstrated that there is a hunger out there for a fresh approach to politics. Fine Gael and Labour have been coming up with solid policies aimed at the creation of a fairer society and they will undoubtedly come up with a coherent election platform. To win the election, though, they will also have to appeal to voters' emotions.
Mr Ahern won the emotional argument, regardless of the facts, during the payments controversy. One lesson from that for the Opposition was that there is no percentage in making personal attacks on the Taoiseach. The other lesson is that emotions have as much, if not more, to do with winning popular support than facts.
Another key ingredient in any campaign which polls don't properly reflect is the candidate factor. It was Albert Reynolds who coined the truism back in the early 1980s that elections are won and lost in 43 separate battles up and down the country. In that context, the TNS mrbi poll carried out for TG4 in the Clare constituency and published during the week was fascinating.
In crude party terms the poll indicated that Fianna Fáil should hold two seats, Fine Gael one and Independent James Breen the other. When asked which party they would support, 35 per cent said Fianna Fáil, 18 per cent Fine Gael and 8 per cent Independent, with the Greens, Labour, Sinn Féin and the PDs trailing in well behind. Undecided voters accounted for 28 per cent.
However, when presented with a list of candidates, 42 per cent said they would be voting for one of the Fianna Fáil candidates, 33 per cent for Fine Gael and 18 per cent for Mr Breen. The interesting thing here was that Fianna Fáil got a 7 per cent bounce with its named candidates yet Fine Gael got a whopping 15 per cent bonus. The message is clear: where it has good candidates Fine Gael can do far better than its level of core party support might suggest.
Taken with the fact that Fianna Fáil is having trouble holding on to gifted TDs like Jim Glennon and Tony Dempsey, who see no future for themselves in politics, the message for the Opposition is that good candidates at local level could counter-balance the Ahern effect at national level.
The election is certainly not over yet.