The season of politicians' holiday stories is almost upon us. The Dáil rises next Friday and doesn't sit again for almost three months. The Cabinet will continue meeting in July and September, Oireachtas committees will take place, but politics will wind down, writes Mark Brennock.
Columnists will thunder about this. Opposition politicians will take a break from packing their suitcases to join in the condemnation. Photos of sunburnt Ministers' faces at the Galway Races will appear in your newspaper. Our colleagues further down the market may bring you a photo of Bertie in a T-shirt and shorts on a beach somewhere.
The media's "politician holiday" season combines with the sporadic rash of stories on MEPs' expenses and TDs' pay-rises to point to one conclusion: Politicians have a great life.
The truth is different. During most of the year, the politician's lifestyle appears more suited to somebody dysfunctional.
There was shock earlier this month when Britain's health secretary Mr Alan Milburn resigned from cabinet saying he wanted to spend more time with his family. When Estelle Morris resigned as Britain's education secretary last year, she admitted, with admirable honesty, that she felt ill-suited to the demands of running an office of state.
The lifestyle has affected a few political careers here. Former minister of state Ms Liz O'Donnell chose to go to the backbenches after last year's general election because of the pressure of coping with political and family life. Fine Gael's Ivan Yates, seen as a possible future party leader and Taoiseach, quit politics for family and business reasons. Former minister Ms Maire Geoghegan-Quinn quit frontline national politics some years ago, citing the pressures on family life as contributing to her decision.
None of these decisions was initially taken at face value. Other politicians and journalists appear to have difficulty accepting that someone would leave a coveted job simply because it can ruin other parts of their life. You might ask what's so hard about being a Minister. They are paid exceptionally well by most standards, briefed by the best public servants and political advisers, driven everywhere and work out of offices with a floor space bigger than some family homes.
However, the pressure comes from the imperative to work, and lobby, and curry favour, and generally impress people in every waking hour. And they keep at it, and at it, and at it, until they fail. Since 1997, several Ministers have suffered bouts of ill-health, which can be a career-threatening event.
Because if you don't keep at it, you lose. If you are not around networking, meeting deputies (if you are a Minister), lobbying Ministers (if you are a deputy), somebody else will do it more than you. You will be dubbed lazy.
Backbenchers live strange lives too. If you are a non-Dublin TD, you are stuck in the capital from Tuesday to Thursday. So you hang around Leinster House at night, where the Dáil often sits until 11 p.m. There might be a vote, so you can't get away.
You might sit in your office alone signing letters to constituents, or go to the bar, before retiring to a Dublin hotel or maybe a small apartment while your wife or husband and children do the things families usually do in the evening, miles away. If you are senior enough, they might see you on the telly.
If you are a Dublin deputy you have it a bit easier. You get to go home at night, although local meetings will often keep you out. Just try telling the speed ramp action group that you are sure their meeting will be very interesting but you really want a night at home.
The problem for politicians who choose to devote time to their non-political life is that there is always a rival who won't. If you don't do constituency clinics and walkabouts on weekend afternoons, or if you skip the local GAA club a.g.m., or go home rather than hang around to impress your party leader some night, you can be sure a party colleague who is more obsessed than you are will be doing the things you are not doing.
Ministers of no great intellect have made it to high office, but few have done so without being prepared to make big sacrifices in their personal life. The Taoiseach made it clear before the last election that deputies who worked their constituencies the hardest to try to bring in running mates would be the ones to be promoted to minister of state positions. Are these people - whose personalities are unusual to say the least - the best suited to ministerial office?
No politician, and certainly no Minister, can play a full part in bringing up a family. There was a time when the concept of "duty" - the notion that in abandoning their families for office, Ministers were making a noble sacrifice - was used to justify this. But more and more people, women and men, find such a lifestyle unacceptable.
However, it is the politicians who make the rules. It is they who won't abandon the multi-seat constituency which turns TDs' lives into a permanent campaign for re-election. It is they who organise Dáil sittings for late at night.
They make the rules, they choose the life. They ensure it remains a job requiring single-minded obsession - something to which well-rounded individuals striving to have balance in their lives are not best suited.