John Bruton will have good reason to be happy when he welcomes the party faithful to the opening of the 70th Fine Gael Ardfheis at the RDS in Dublin tonight. Fianna Fail is on the rack as the Moriarty and Flood tribunals delve ever deeper into the murky political interface that existed between politics and big business during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

A former Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, has been exposed as a "kept man". A former minister for foreign affairs, Ray Burke, is under investigation for receiving money from construction companies. And Ireland's serving EU Commissioner - and one-time FF icon - Padraig Flynn, refuses to explain the circumstances surrounding a £50,000 donation. It is all grist to the political mill. And the expectation in Fine Gael is that a lot more mouldy corn will come to light within the next few months.

The timing couldn't be better for the main opposition party. Local and European elections are scheduled for June, when the political fallout from the tribunals could be at its most potent. And there is the prospect of a general election even before that because of growing suspicions between Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats.

John Bruton has placed Fine Gael on election alert. The party, he said last Wednesday, was selecting candidates and preparing its manifesto. He described it as "responsible contingency planning in light of the known facts."

Fine Gael's aim is to break the 30 per cent vote barrier in the next general election - something that has not happened since 1982, before the formation of the Progressive Democrats. It is a reasonable enough ambition in the circumstances, given that the party won 28 per cent of the vote in 1997. And it hopes the work of the tribunals will fuel its progress.

But Mr Bruton and his front bench are not simply relying on the self-destruction of Fianna Fail. Detailed sampling of public opinion has been conducted to find the issues and values by which the party will reposition itself in a post-Belfast Agreement and post-euro currency Ireland.

The Belfast Agreement had changed the context within which nationalist aspirations must be pursued, Mr Bruton maintains, in favour of an entirely new dispensation in which unionists and nationalists are at one. The task was to construct an inclusive view of what it meant to be Irish.

As for Europe, Fine Gael was committed to greater integration and to a sharing of security responsibilities.

But the key message to be delivered by Mr Bruton will involve a revamping of the party's old "Just Society" document. This will be aimed at might-be Fine Gael supporters within a younger, urban electorate.

New values for the Celtic Tiger will be the theme. Fine Gael will not simply produce policies on how to redistribute economic wealth. It will offer a values-based statement advocating a new kind of community life in Ireland designed to unite people, not in territory, but in personal responsibility.

It will seek to establish a sense of community; of neighbourliness, to counteract the growing selfishness of society. In that context, there will be an enhanced role for voluntary and community effort.

The game-plan sounds very worthy. But the objectives are largely aspirational and soft-focus. They could, in truth, be advanced by any of the Dail parties. And perhaps that is part of Fine Gael's new strategy: to appeal across party lines and outside its traditional agricultural heartland.

With a general election possible within months, Mr Bruton will bend all his efforts to creating an alliance with Ruairi Quinn and the new Labour Party. If the Progressive Democrats are the cause of the Government's fall, they will be accommodated inside the anti-Fianna Fail tent. And the Green Party might be asked to participate in a multicoloured rainbow.

It is all in the lap of the tribunals. But a banana skin from the Haughey years could precipitate a sudden crisis. Trust has become so eroded between Bertie Ahern and Mary Harney that further evidence of Fianna Fail chicanery will make her "walk".

Des O'Malley laid out the Progressive Democrats' stall during the week. He believed an election, when it came, would be about standards in public life. Politicians, Mr O'Malley said, could act "to eradicate the cancer of corruption that has poisoned the political and commercial affairs of this country in recent years. Or they may choose to shirk their responsibility." All the Progressive Democrats wanted was that "those in public life, and especially those in high political office, abide by normal and reasonable standards of honesty and decency in dealing with affairs of State."

If things went wrong in Government with Fianna Fail, it looked as if Fine Gael might be knocking on an open door.

Over the past few months, as the Gogarty and Gilmartin allegations captured the public imagination, the gloss has gone off Fianna Fail in the opinion polls. But the lost support has tended to drift into the "don't know" camp, rather than adhere to Fine Gael or to the Labour Party.

Mr Bruton's task will be to attract as much of that support as possible, while establishing the nucleus of a future government with the opposition parties. Competitive tension on the opposition benches can be healthy. Unless the Labour Party succeeds in repairing its fortunes and regains lost Dail seats, the numbers will not stack up to form a government with Fine Gael. The worst case scenario would involve further political fragmentation in which gains were made by Independent TDs, by Sinn Fein and the Greens.

Fine Gael isn't contemplating such an outcome. A fair political wind from the tribunals is behind the party. Membership has jumped by 32 per cent in a year - driven by the one-man-one-vote system for selecting candidates in next June's local and European elections - and morale is high after the party's runaway success in the Cork South Central by-election.

It is a good time to be in opposition. But John Bruton and Fine Gael are determined not to remain there for long.