There is no getting away from it. Another torrid week at Dublin Castle, but revelations and accusations do not amount to evidence, and it may well be that some of the more lurid claims made this week may not stand the test of time. We will see, but at a deeper level does anyone really care any more?
Certainly those in the firing line care, and the sight of old scores being publicly settled is not a pretty one, as we saw this week at both the Flood and Lindsay tribunals. Charges are made and left hanging in the air, often for months on end, but with a presumption in sections of the media and among many in the public of the automatic guilt of those accused. To be accused is to be guilty in the current climate.
For that reason Drapier urges a certain caution about some of the allegations at this week's Flood tribunal. Drapier may be wrong, but he suspects the full story, if and when it emerges, will not be quite so one-sided as are many of this week's headlines.
But on the wider question of whether anyone really cares, Drapier has very definite views. Like all politicians, Drapier pays attention to opinion polls. Any politician who says otherwise is not telling the truth. But Drapier has found an unreality about most of the polls so far in the lifetime of this Government.
What Drapier found hard to credit was the very high ratings going to Fianna Fail, enough if replicated on election day to give them a comfortable overall majority. Few enough in Fianna Fail believe these polls either, and Fianna Fail, the most realistic of parties, was not planning its election strategy on the basis of those figures. Far from it.
On each of the seven occasions when real elections were held - the five by-elections, the local and European elections - the figures were very different. The gap between how people said they would vote and how they actually voted was huge. And yet once these elections were out of the way and when opinion polling resumed, the old patterns re-emerged.
Drapier's explanation, then and now, was that most people were simply not engaged. Times were good, there was no general election in the air, nobody on the Opposition side had much of interest to say, there were no exciting new faces around. So when asked how they might vote, people opted for the status quo and left it at that. Until later, when faced with a real election and real candidates they behaved quite differently.
That situation is no more. In Drapier's view, public opinion underwent a sea change in the last Dail week of this session. Suddenly people began to say enough was enough. No single event caused the change, but in Drapier's view it was the combination of the deferment of the Haughey case, Mark Kavanagh's evidence about the missing £75,000, the memory lapses of the Taoiseach and the impact of the O'Flaherty saga which finally tipped the balance. People genuinely had had enough, and it's a long time since Drapier witnessed such sustained public anger.
In that sense and as things now stand, the game is up for this administration. Mary Harney signalled very clearly this week in Waterford that there will not be a Fianna Fail-Progressive Democrats pact going into the next election. Indeed one more crisis - and there will be more than one - may yet be enough to dislodge the PDs altogether.
The Government will do what all governments in trouble do - listen to their spin doctors and try like mad to change the public agenda. We saw it in this paper last week with Dermot Ahern pleading that we should forget the sleaze and look at the positive side of what is happening in this great little country and focus on the "real" challenges facing society.
It is a theme which will be repeated over and over again by Minister after Minister this summer, but in Drapier's view to no great purpose, for the simple reason that the public is listening to a different tune and will stay listening to that tune.
This new tune sings of worries about inflation, the inequities in the Celtic Tiger, the cost of housing, the problems of traffic and most of all the endless series of "revelations". No amount of harping on about the virtues of positive thinking is going to change that.
But if the gig is up for the Government, what of the Opposition? Put quite simply, their performance to date has failed to ignite enthusiasm or persuade the public. An election campaign will focus minds on alternatives, but there is still a long road to travel.
On the question of the new party Drapier is sceptical. Not that an imaginative, strongly-led and fresh new party might not do well in the current climate. It might - indeed it would - but Drapier sees little sign of such a party emerging.
The new party of recent days seems to exist more as a media concept than as a real starter. It may have been flushed into the open too soon for its own liking or it may be insubstantial, but for the moment Drapier feels that those who wish a change of government must look to the existing Opposition parties.
Not the most exciting of prospects perhaps. That is for sure, but then maybe we have had a surfeit of excitement, more than enough to do us for a lifetime. A return to normality and routine dullness might be very welcome.
What we face is the prospect of an election where the parties vie with each other, each claiming to be more staid, proper and respectable than the other. An election campaign where squeaky clean is the name of the game, where any deviation from officially-certified political correctness is out of the question. Who ever said there was no such thing as original sin? There certainly won't be much room for it come the next election.
But respectable dullness alone won't win the day. Competence and policies will be important, and time is not on the side of the Opposition parties as they seek to persuade the electorate that they are not just honest but competent and comprehensive as well.
When Drapier says time may not be on anyone's side, he is sticking to his prediction of an election late this year or early in the new year. He knows the conventional view in here says otherwise, that since Fianna Fail, the PDs and the Independents dare not face the electorate at present, they all have the greatest incentive to stick together for the next two years. Something may turn up.
Maybe so. But events have a nasty habit of coming at the most unexpected time and in ways no one predicted, and at the moment there are enough time-bombs around, any one of which would be sufficient to blow the PDs out of the water. It only takes one, and on any law of averages one such will happen.