Drapier: Cabinet had a special full-day meeting during the week. The official line is that it was all about competitiveness, of all things. Not world peace. Not the health service. Not the North. Competitiveness.
Drapier doesn't buy it.
Apparently, Bertie is a bit bothered these days.
The economy is in trouble, the health service is in bits, the newspapers are full of stuff about crime, and the punters keep going on about broken promises and the like. Journalists have started to talk about Fianna Fáil post-Bertie.
The word among Fianna Fáil backbenchers is that some of the Ministers aren't cutting it. Joe Walsh, Mary Coughlan and Michael Smith are just some of the names that are mentioned sotto voce.
It's too early to say whether the whispering campaign will come to anything and, needless to say, none of it can be traced back to the Taoiseach's office. Time will tell.
Bertie's well-placed words with Sam Smyth were obviously intended to put an end to any notion that he was anywhere near to his political slí na fírinne. Nobody seriously believes that Bertie is under threat, at least not yet.
But the fact that he felt obliged to say anything at all is telling.
For the moment the genie is well and truly confined to the bottle, but it has started to push against the cork.
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The Greens went to Ennis. The PDs went to Galway. Much in Labour has changed in the last year, but the penchant for Kerry remains, and the comrades are meeting in Killarney.
But while the smaller parties went west to celebrate the gains of the last election Labour will gather to ponder what went wrong.
The focus of the weekend is Pat Rabbitte, and his speech tonight will be watched carefully by everyone in Leinster House, not just the Labour people.
After Rabbitte became leader there were mutterings about a Stickie takeover of Labour. It is certainly true that all of the party's best performers are former Sticks: Liz McManus, Eamon Gilmore, Rabbitte himself.
Equally it is true that we see very little of the Old Labour Party people who ruled the roost this time last year. Ruairí Quinn is writing his memoirs, Brendan Howlin is licking his wounds, Derek McDowell is in the Seanad. Dick Spring, already semi-detached, is now history.
But, so far, the change of personnel hasn't produced any radical change in policy. Certainly there has been no shift to the left as you might expect from people who defined themselves up to a few years ago as being to the left of the Labour Party.
If anything, the early indicators from Joan Burton suggest that Labour may be moving away from the tax-and-spend stuff that Ruairí Quinn liked so much.
Of course, most of us don't care all that much about Labour's policies. The other parties will live with all the social-concern guff if needs be. What interests everyone else in Leinster House is the politics of political mating.
Rabbitte says he wants to put FF out of Government.
This is music to the ears of Fine Gaelers, many of whom blame Labour for their disaster last year. If Pat is on board then the Blueshirts can happily dream of better days and can openly speak about putting together a Fine Gael-led government without fear of a tetchy rebuke from Labour.
But Drapier would advise Enda Kenny not to get carried away just yet. Of late, Rabbitte has taken to fudging the Fianna Fáil question in a way that he didn't do before he became leader. He was at it again in an interview in this newspaper yesterday. It's not difficult to see why.
The fact is that Labour isn't sure any more who its target audience is.
Labour came back with the same number of seats after the last election as they had won at the 1997 election.
But the full story is more complicated. Labour lost four seats, all to Sinn Féin or Independents, and gained four seats all at the expense of Fine Gael. Most of the seats which Labour should have gained were FG seats, which were won by the Greens.
So what does Rabbitte do now? Does he try to fight off the threat from the Shinners? Does he go after the FG vote instead? Is it possible to go after the FG vote while cosying up to them at the same time?
Chances are that most of the votes going-a-begging next time will be disillusioned FFers. Pat Rabbitte's job is to ensure that he gets more of those votes than anyone else. It ain't going to be easy, and Pat knows that better than most.
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Fair Play to Her Excellency! The Dark Side speech was full of stuff that needed to be said and needed to be said by her.
The Presidency is meant to be non-political. For a long time this meant that presidents said next to nothing which anyone would be interested in listening to. The two Marys have changed all that.
Party politics is still out, but we now expect - and get - reflective pieces of social commentary about the State of the Nation. The Dark Side was one of the better examples of the genre.
As a nation we have always liked the sauce. Often too much. The image of the boozed-up Paddy wasn't created by the Celtic Tiger. But it has made it worse. In particular it has created a culture of heavy boozing among young people, many of whom have more money in their pockets than their counterparts of 10 years ago.
There is no simple solution to this problem.
But before we can aspire to do anything about it we must first acknowledge that we do indeed have a problem.
If the President's speech helps us to do that then it will have been a good day's work.