There was, by all accounts, a very strange atmosphere in Leinster House this week. TDs, Senators and media were all back in Kildare Street having spent the Easter break absorbed in the phoney campaign taking place in the balmy weather experienced throughout the country.
Back in the Oireachtas hothouse, many of them began to get jittery. Rumours that the Taoiseach was about to call the election spread, gatherings like gorse fire on each of the three sitting days last week.
By early Thursday some were even assuming that he had already gone and done it.
Now that the opportunity for an election on May 17th has passed, all attention is focused on a May 24th polling day, with some still suggesting that voting might even be pushed out to May 31st. The former is more likely than the latter.
If Bertie Ahern lets next week pass without calling the election then he will have lost any remaining element of surprise.
He will also have begun to irritate not just the media and fellow politicians but also the public, who will begin to get impatient for the campaign and all its trappings to be over.
One of the reasons being advanced for the later date is the series of historic engagements that the Taoiseach has concerning the Northern Ireland peace process over the next few weeks.
On May 8th, Ahern will join UK prime minister Tony Blair and make formal speeches in Stormont to welcome the re-establishment of cross-party government in Northern Ireland. This will be headed up by old enemies Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness as first minister and deputy first minister respectively.
It was also announced this week that three days later, on May 11th, Mr Ahern, the leader of nationalist Ireland, will join First Minister Paisley, now the unchallenged leader of unionism, on a visit to the site of the Battle of the Boyne. And he will address a joint sitting of the Commons and Lords in Westminster.
A certain brand of lager doesn't do campaign photocalls but if they did this is the type of scene they would set for a party leader about to embark on the election trail.
However, the timing of these Northern events need not affect the Taoiseach's choice of date between May 24th or May 31st since both will fall within the campaign period whichever he chooses.
The only people in Leinster House who could afford to relax this week were the 19 TDs who are retiring at this election. They can kick their heels and savour their last few days in the Dáil.
Some of them are heavily involved in the campaigns of their chosen successors. Two of them, for example, have children hoping to succeed them, and one has a brother hoping to take up the reins. However, even the demands of weeks of campaigning will be tolerable for these deputies, safe in the knowledge that for them the daily grind that is the political life will be over by June.
Of course, the Ceann Comhairle, Rory O'Hanlon, is also in a relaxed mood. He enjoys the comfort of knowing that once the Dáil is dissolved all he has to do is declare his wish to be a member of the 30th Dáil and he will automatically be returned.
For those deputies actually contesting the election, feelings are mixed. On the one hand, they are tiring of the weeks of incessant speculation and they just want the election to be on and, more importantly, to be over. On the other hand, they are nervous of what the campaign, once it starts, holds for them.
And well they might worry. Of the 146 outgoing deputies who are contesting the 2007 election about a quarter of them are likely to lose their seats. The only thing these unfortunates will have to look forward to after the election is a subdued return to Leinster House this summer, either to take up a place in the Seanad or to pack up their belongings.
In the 2002 general election, 33 of the outgoing deputies who contested the election lost their seats. Two-thirds of those lost because their party was down a seat in that constituency. The majority of these were Fine Gael deputies, swept out by the backlash against the party. The other third, however, lost out to a stronger party colleague.
All of the published polling data, including yesterday's TNS mrbi poll for this newspaper, indicates that there have been major shifts in support between the parties since the last election, and this is worrying, particularly for Fianna Fáil deputies.
However, even those outgoing deputies who represent parties for whom there is good news in the polls have to worry about the risk from a strong new running mate.
Of the deputies recontesting, 31 of them have only served one term in the Dáil. This is a notoriously vulnerable stage in Dáil careers. They are no longer the new kids on the block in their constituencies and may not yet have established deep-rooted political bases.
The current Senators were also in subdued mood this week. They were also nervous about what the impending Dáil contest means for them, and what impact the outcome of the Dáil election could have on the potential line-up of candidates in each constituency in the long Seanad contest that will follow in the late summer.
Oireachtas members this week also mourned the passing of one of their own number, PD senator Kate Walsh, who died on Wednesday after a short illness. She was a hard-working constituency representative and popular around Leinster House.
Warm tributes were paid to her in both houses. She was the first member of the current Oireachtas to die in office. Her untimely passing, at a relatively young age, put concerns about losing an election into perspective for many members.