It was a week of growing nervousness - about job losses, BSE and the future of traditional industries. A week in which Liam Lawlor tottered, with angrier tones and shrinking expectations, from Dublin Castle to the Four Courts and back to Kildare Street.
A week that ended with Opposition parties finally setting their sights on a general election, if only because a faltering US economy, confusion in the beef trade and its continuing dispute with the ASTI may have an unsettling effect on the Government.
The Coalition's weaknesses are more easily assessed than its strengths: Fianna Fail in particular has spent much of the last three years claiming a success it cannot quite explain.
American investors praise our low corporation taxes and what they like to describe as the exceptional freedom of the Irish environment. Freedom, by and large, from regulation by the State. But that's not what the electorate wants to hear, especially when it looks as if Irish workers may bear the brunt of problems which have their origins in the US or in the wider world of American enterprises.
As for the problems raised by BSE, there are multiple difficulties here. One of the thorniest is our old reluctance to tell the truth about anything which might cast suspicion on the beef trade. Another is the close connection between the processing industry and Fianna Fail. It's a connection the party likes to boast about when things are going well. When they're not, reactions are defensive. The beef tribunal may not have reached the conclusions that everyone else thought inevitable.
There is always the risk of a revival of interest in its unfinished business. What if another tribunal - or another set of circumstances, say the damage done by BSE - were to produce renewed public interest in the industry and its political connections?
Under attack, Fianna Fail's tone is unmistakably Liam Lawlor's. As he said in the Oireachtas Committee on Finance and the Public Service on Thursday: "We're all accountable. We all have our responsibilities." In other words: "Yis are all the same and ye'd better remember it."
(The obverse of this message is Dermot Ahern's bland assertion that no one party has a monopoly on commitment to social justice and inclusion. Of course not, any more than a monopoly on the time and attention of the tribunals. It's not the assertions that count; it's the records.)
Lawlor in the Oireachtas committee followed the example of Willie O'Dea in the Dail where his knockabout apology to Government colleagues so amused Vincent Browne that he set it to music and broadcast it on RTE radio. O'Dea's offence was incitement: he'd been caught telling taximen in Limerick that one more push against Bobby Molloy's plans for deregulation would work wonders. He turned the apology into a comic attack on John Bruton and Nora Owen. His audience loved the buffoonery and promptly forgot that he was a junior minister who'd have been fired if he'd been in a better-run government.
Lawlor, too, took a swipe at Bruton, added Ruairi Quinn for good measure and even warned Mary Harney to mind her house. If they were as public-spirited as he, he suggested, they'd be over at Dublin Castle spilling the beans to the judge.
Except that this was not how Mr Justice Flood saw Lawlor - which was why he was appearing at all three constitutional venues on one day: the judge decided he was not co-operating with the tribunal and sent him to the High Court accused of contempt.
And when he got back to Kildare Street his colleagues in the Oireachtas committee had clearly made up their minds that he was no longer a suitable vice-chairman. (Lawlor had already decided to quit.)
The only Fianna Fail member to speak up for him was Sean Fleming, himself no stranger to Dublin Castle. He was there as a former holder of the party's purse strings to explain how it handled - and identified - corporate donations.
Lawlor didn't mention Bertie Ahern in his speech to the committee. But the Taoiseach is more likely than Bruton or Quinn to find himself answering questions raised by the tribunals. In any event, the tribunals are bound to provide a major issue in the election.
Some assume that it will be a straight fight between the FF-PD coalition and the rest; the team that gave us full employment and reduced tax rates, versus a scattered high-spending alternative. It ain't necessarily so.
In a little-noticed speech in the Dail in mid-December John Bruton listed emerging problems which, he said, the Budget had not addressed. They included increases in public spending as public services - in transport, childcare, health and housing - declined.
He worried about rising levels of personal debt, about a "bubble" in house prices that led to escalating wage claims, about young people drawn prematurely from education in an overheating job market, about high dependence on information technology and about heavy reliance on an over-borrowed US economy.
He spoke of exposure to job losses "flowing from a sudden rise in the euro relative to the US dollar" and of "the potentially enormous cost of the BSE crisis for a country whose huge beef industry has a unique dependence on exports".
And in these columns Mike Allen, Labour's general secretary, acknowledged both Labour's errors and Fianna Fail's ability to attract the support of "ordinary workers". He went on: "This is no longer true and the Fianna Fail leadership knows it. Traditional FF voters have not decided yet what to do about it . . . The Labour Party has not yet convinced them that it is their home.
"That is the task Labour must set itself in the new year. And the ferocity of Fianna Fail's attacks suggest they know we are capable of it."
dwalsh@irish-times.ie