We have seen this week the beginning of the end of the Fianna Fail Progressive Democrat coalition.
The Government stands now where the Fianna Fail-Labour government stood when Albert Reynolds tried to pull the wool over everyone's eyes on the beef tribunal report.
The Progressive Democrats must know they can't trust Bertie Ahern's Fianna Fail any more than Labour could trust the equally-promising but similarly flawed party led by Mr Reynolds.
Labour ministers knew in 1994 that, given the damage done by the tax amnesty and the passports-for-sale affair, it was only a matter of time before their partnership with Mr Reynolds collapsed.
Some still argue that the issues which eventually brought the house down - the presidency of the High Court and the Brendan Smyth affair - seemed of little importance. Maybe so. The last straw does, as a rule.
Mary Harney wasn't told the truth about the Ray Burke affair when the coalition was formed. Or about the tax appeals commissioners when Charles Haughey's case thudded, like a brick through a window, on the Cabinet table.
She wasn't told about the significant Rennicks payment to Mr Burke until it was about to become public knowledge. And she read of the £50,000 that may or may not have gone to Padraig Flynn at the same time as other readers of the Sunday Independent.
So it's hardly surprising that Ms Harney now refuses to guarantee the future of the Fianna FailPD coalition - a message she delivered on Thursday in the intervals between Sean O'Rourke's speeches on the News At One.
As she had already told Mr Ahern, there's more to government than loyalty and support between ministers (more to coalition than loyalty between parties). She wouldn't "lightly walk" but the prospect of electoral defeat wouldn't keep her in government if she thought it right to get out.
The thought that morality was essential to politics must have startled her audience, not to mention colleagues in Government who hadn't heard the word used in this sense for a long time.
Mr Ahern may have found it equally ominous that the Tanaiste believed her concerns were shared by some Fianna Fail ministers - if only because they were also worried about "what's coming down the line".
The Taoiseach probably felt that his carefully composed and well rehearsed speech to the Dail had done enough to set all minds at rest, though the person he most needed to convince was the Tanaiste.
His speech, packed with impressive-sounding detail, may have worked as reassuring theatre. No doubt it raised the spirits of party loyalists; the usual groupies in the print and broadcast media lapped it up.
But weaknesses were exposed both by questioning in the Dail and in interviews with spokesmen for Fine Gael and Labour; serious comment in the morning newspapers confirmed doubts raised by the text.
There was the question of Mr Ahern's response to the claim that Mr Flynn had been given £50,000 in 1989 - a donation intended for the party but not passed on to it.
Mr Ahern explained that he had only found out last October when he told Sean Sherwin, the party official who had brought him the news, that he didn't want to hear it - Mr Sherwin should inform the Flood tribunal.
Why Mr Sherwin, who had known for 10 years, hadn't spoken up earlier was not explained. (According to the Taoiseach, he has made a statement to the tribunal.)
And, in line with his own hear-no-evil, see-no-evil response, Mr Ahern admitted he hadn't mentioned the cheque to Mr Flynn at any of their numerous meetings since the claim came to light.
Mr Ahern and his Fianna Fail colleagues keep insisting that the forum for such issues is neither the Dail nor the media but the Flood tribunal.
They speak of tribunals in the way that Mr Haughey once spoke of the Dail as the venue at which all awkward issues would be ironed out. Except that it wasn't - because the last thing he wanted was to be accountable to anyone, any where.
Mr Ahern is a late convert to the value of tribunals: Fianna Fail resisted their establishment tooth and nail until the arguments of the opposition or coalition partners shamed the party into acceptance.
Now, though, Mr Ahern goes so far as to claim some credit for co-operating with Flood - as if co-operation with a body set up by the Oireachtas was an optional extra for a party whose practices and some of whose onetime ministers are under investigation.
Its own investigation appears to have been a timid effort barely worth the name.
Mr Ahern quoted the general secretary's letter to Mr Flynn in full. As if it were serious and tough, not sheepish and apologetic.
It simply begged to be ignored: "I regret any inconvenience I may cause to you in dealing with the above queries, but no doubt you will appreciate the legal necessity for this line of inquiry."
We are constantly told how Mr Flynn, these difficult days, is out of the Government's reach - someone who can safely be criticised because there's nothing the Government can do about him.
So the party and the Government it leads can shrug off responsibility for his refusal to answer feeble letters or the questions of Tommie Gorman of RTE.
It conveniently forgets that at the time of the alleged payment Mr Flynn was Minister for the Environment and remained a member of the Cabinet for most of the following 3 1/2 years.
It was a period when he was within reach and at least some officials were aware of questions which might have been raised. The questions weren't asked.
But although more, much more, than the future of the party and the Government are at stake, the Taoiseach is reluctant to open a full-scale debate. He claims that neither the Dail nor the media are appropriate venues for an exploration of what happened in the late 1980s and what is to be done now.
Yet, if everything rests with the tribunals, why had he nothing to say about resistance to their operation by some of the most powerful people in this State?
He makes speech after speech about improving standards in politics generally and especially in his own party but seems to think that that's all that has to be done to produce change.
Some may object to the description of the party as flawed, as they did when it was first applied by Garret FitzGerald to Charles Haughey's political pedigree on the day he became Taoiseach.
But it was with Mr Haughey's election that the party's problems began, as that honourable man George Colley warned and those who failed him in the 1979 leadership contest must now regret.
Not only Fianna Fail but Irish politics were to be submerged in a world where power and money, interchangeable commodities, mattered more than the public interest; where the influence of office was for sale.
It has taken a long time for much of this to come to light. As Ms Harney suggested, it will take more than detailed lists of meetings and venues to get to the root of the problem.
What was missing from Mr Ahern's speech on Wednesday was the sense that he recognises how deep and difficult are the challenges he faces.