How did he do it? How did Charlie McCreevy score such an owngoal? It came out of nowhere, under no pressure and against the run of play. No wonder Kildare football is the way it is.
It won't last, of course. The credit unions are top of everyone's list of good guys. They speak for the small man and woman. They carry real clout, and kicking them where it hurts is bad politics at any time, but on the eve of by-elections it's pure madness.
Of course, there'll be a U-turn. But the damage is done. The intention was there and so was the ineptitude. Again Drapier can only ask how Charlie McCreevy, normally so close to real people, got himself into this one. All he can conclude is that Finance does strange things to sane people. It all bears out one of Drapier's first rules of politics: trouble rarely comes from where you expect it and it's always your friends who drop you in it. Not that Charlie has too many friends in Fianna Fail this weekend.
As to the by-elections, Drapier knows no more than anyone else, but what he does know is not good news for Bertie Ahern, certainly not at this juncture. Readers will remember that in the last couple of national opinion polls Fianna Fail has been scoring at levels of 50 to 55 per cent, with Government satisfaction at an all-time high.
But somebody seems to have forgotten to let the voters of Dublin North and Limerick East in on this little secret where opinion poll results to date have Fianna Fail at a more modest figure. Dangerously modest, if the truth be told.
It's still early days, but Drapier agrees with Michael Smith that the unthinkable could happen and Fianna Fail could lose both contests. Michael Smith was telling it as it is and indeed as most of us in here know it to be, and no amount of spinning from the early warning unit, or whatever Marty's outfit is called, can alter that fact.
In Dublin North it will be a straight fight between Labour's Sean Ryan and Fianna Fail's Michael Kennedy with the odds at the moment firmly on the Labour man. Ryan has the advantage of a sympathy factor and is far and away the best-known candidate.
He has been campaigning almost from the moment Ray Burke resigned, and his people in here are quietly confident, and have poll findings to underpin this confidence.
Drapier is not fully convinced. Fianna Fail will throw everything into this one. It's Bertie territory and he has already made it clear that he will give it everything he's got and a lot more. We can expect to be back to the blitzkrieg days of Neil Blaney and Kevin Boland, the sort of by-elections we haven't had now for decades. Drapier thinks it will be eventful. This is one by-election where the stakes are really high.
Much the same is true in Limerick East. On the general election figures, Fianna Fail should merely have to turn up to collect the prize, but it's not turning out like that. So far at any rate Sandra Marsh has not taken off, while all the other candidates have previous electoral runs behind them and are better known.
The early running has been made by Mary Jackman and all parties agree she is in with a real chance. In its own way, that would be an even bigger shock than Fianna Fail not winning Dublin North.
Drapier has said the by-elections will be eventful. That's a nice way of putting it. The tension is genuine, the contests are wide open and the stakes are high. This time there will be no shadow-boxing and that means that anything can happen. And maybe it will. Certainly neither election will be for the faint-hearted or squeamish.
Drapier said last week that sex and child-abuse scandals have only begun to surface. The sins and suppressed outrages of the past are coming back with a vengeance to haunt this generation, and Bertie Ahern's admission on Tuesday that there are more than 1,000 cases under investigation in the EHB area alone simply underlines the enormity of the problems facing us. This will be one of the real millennium issues.
All the more surprising then, in Drapier's view at any rate, that the Minister in the line of fire as far as the public handling of recent cases is concerned is Jim McDaid. Jim after all is Minister for Sport and Tourism while Drapier would have thought that questions of sex and child abuse would more logically fall into departments such as Justice, Education or Health, all of which have professionals qualified to deal with such matters.
There would seem to be no part of Jim McDaid's Department with the support or expertise to deal with these issues. It is almost like saying that if these offences occurred in local authority houses then the Minister for the Environment would be responsible. Or if it occurred in the Gaeltacht, it would fall to the Minister for the Gaeltacht. It does not make sense.
So what exactly is happening? Certainly Lansdowne Road was not the only place where balls were being dropped last weekend as the Government chopped and changed and sought as vainly as David Humphreys to find touch on this issue. It was not a competent performance and gave the impression of a Government not knowing what to do. Which in Drapier's view is what it is.
Drapier suspects Jim McDaid has been given what Ray Burke would call the rough end of the stick on this issue by some of his more astute and experienced colleagues who know that no matter what happens this is no-win territory. Drapier has some sympathy for the Government's plight. We don't want an unending series of judicial inquiries, but neither can there be less than a full and exhaustive examination of the issues involved.
So what is to be done? It's clear the Government doesn't know, and nobody else seems to know either. The Dr Roderick Murphy route won't be enough, and no blame in this to the estimable Dr Murphy, a good and public-spirited gentleman, Drapier hears. It is simply that it is too ad hoc and too rushed a reaction. Drapier's advice to the Government is to take it easy and get it right.
Finally, this week to the outcry, muffled it would seem, about the legal charges in the case of the late Mrs Bridget McCole. The charges were outrageous, as Michael Noonan said they would be, but don't expect anyone on the Government side to rush into this one. Memories are not quite that short.