Inside Politics:The Dáil debate on the motion of confidence in the Taoiseach and the Government's close shave in a vote on Shannon the following day have provided some valuable clues about the shape of politics to come in the years ahead, writes Stephen Collins. It is already clear that the atmosphere in the 30th Dáil is going to be very different from the one that prevailed for the past five years.
One of the striking features of the confidence debate was the perceptible shift in authority from Bertie Ahern to Brian Cowen within the power structure of Fianna Fáil. It was bound to happen at some stage, following the Taoiseach's anointment of the Tánaiste as his favoured successor back in the summer, but the Dáil debate showed that the process has already begun.
It was noticeable that Cowen got a bigger cheer from the backbenchers than Ahern following his Dáil performance. This was in part due to the fact that he had the advantage of being able to deliver a rabble-rousing speech, designed to get the Fianna Fáil TDs going, while Ahern had to stick to the complex details of his tribunal evidence.
Equally striking was the body language. Colleagues came up to Cowen to slap him on the back and congratulate him on his performance. By contrast they were more reserved in their approach to Ahern. Again while there were obvious reasons for this, it was clear that within the ranks of Fianna Fáil Cowen is beginning to assume the role of the main man. When that process will be completed, with the departure of Ahern from office, is anybody's guess. However, unless something very unexpected happens it appears almost certain that the Tánaiste will succeed to the top job at some stage in the lifetime of the 30th Dáil.
Ahern's current difficulties have created both an opportunity and a problem for Cowen. The opportunity is to show leadership and rally his party in a difficult hour as he did on Wednesday evening.
The problem is that in the course of defending Ahern against all comers he may alienate middle-of-the-road voters. For instance Cowen's stress on loyalty as the supreme political virtue went down well with his TDs, but others might wonder at the consequences of loyalty taking precedence over all other values in public life.
The loyalty of the Coalition partners to each other unsurprisingly withstood the first test. Green Party leader John Gormley made the simple point that his party believed it had got a good deal and were going to stay put. He refused to be drawn into the issue of Ahern's finances and instead talked about the polar icecaps being about to melt in just 23 years.
Gormley was not amused by the hilarity this provoked on the Opposition benches and he offered the rationale that a role in saving the world from climate change was worth the price of keeping Ahern in office.
If the Government demonstrated unity, the Opposition showed that they are capable of being a more potent force in the current Dáil than it was in the last one. The clearout of so many Independents in the election and the Government's deal with the others have simplified divisions, leaving Fine Gael, Labour, Sinn Féin and Tony Gregory making up the entire Opposition.
It was for this reason that the Government came so close to disaster on the Shannon vote. Fianna Fáil had become used to letting Ministers and TDs absent themselves from the Dáil without pairs and the bad habit had become ingrained. Government chief whip Tom Kitt may have known how many votes he could muster but what he did not know was that the Opposition would have a full complement, despite Fine Gael providing pairs for all the Ministers abroad. In the face of a disciplined Opposition Fianna Fáil TDs will be kept on a much tighter leash from now on.
New Labour leader Eamon Gilmore got off to a flying start. Not only did he grab the headlines with his call for Ahern to resign after the Mahon tribunal performance, but his Dáil performance both in question time and the confidence debate was impressive. Gilmore does not display the verbal pyrotechnics of his predecessor, Pat Rabbitte, but he speaks with sober authority and showed himself capable of delivering a hefty punch.
His call for Ahern's resignation last Tuesday morning came as Fine Gael was lining up to put down a motion of no confidence. Labour would have preferred to try and drag the issue out over the weekend with a confidence debate this week. That might have served to put more pressure on the Government but there was a certain logic about an immediate confidence motion in the very early days of the 30th Dáil if the Opposition wanted their views on Ahern's tribunal evidence to be taken seriously.
Enda Kenny also needed to establish his authority from the beginning over a much bigger parliamentary party.
The confidence motion should have helped to give his new TDs a sense of cohesion. The trenchant attacks on Ahern by two of the newly-elected Fine Gael TDs, Leo Varadkar and Lucinda Creighton, provoked a lot of annoyance on the Fianna Fáil benches. Ahern even responded to them the following day at the ploughing championships, but far from disconcerting the new TDs, they were delighted to have provoked him into a public reaction.
The expanded Fine Gael parliamentary party contains TDs who clearly do not feel constrained by the clubbable conventions of some of their more experienced colleagues.
They are showing signs of becoming the most aggressive Opposition since Fianna Fáil waged all-out war against the Bruton government in the 1995 to 1997 period. The challenge facing Fine Gael is to develop the kind of ruthlessness displayed by Fianna Fáil a decade ago without descending into counterproductive vulgar abuse.
Ahern has usually been able to turn Opposition attacks on him to his own advantage by evoking public sympathy for his predicament. The political atmosphere will be very different when he departs and the politics is likely to become even more combative, particularly if Cowen succeeds him.
One interesting little coda to the confidence debate was the fact that Labour shared time with Sinn Féin in the course of it. It was not just any Labour TD but Kathleen Lynch, whose political roots go back to the official republican movement, who announced that she was going to share her time with Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin of Sinn Féin. "The last civil war in Irish politics is now over with officials and provisionals sharing time in the Dáil," remarked the astute Longford TD Peter Kelly afterwards.