PEOPLE at and around the Progressive Democrats' annual conference in Bunratty last weekend seemed to take two things for granted.
First, they assumed that the result of the next general election was a foregone conclusion: certain victory for Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats.
Then, to the obvious enjoyment of Mary Harney, who clearly believes she will float into office towing the party behind her, roles were allotted to the victorious partners.
Fianna Fail would provide the muscle in the oily engine room of the new administration while, on the bridge, the PDs - being the brains of the outfit - charted its ideological course.
Several commentators at the weekend were willing, indeed eager, to accept this version of events. The PDs, they said, without a trace of irony, were a natural party of power: to the manor born?
To deprive them of office in the next Dail, these commentators implied, would be to interfere with the natural order. Those who did so would be mere cuckoos in the political nest.
It's a view with which the PDs modestly agree.
But where - and about whom have we heard it before? Indeed, we have yet to be told in detail what Fianna Fail thinks of the world as viewed from Bunratty.
How have the PDs' grandiose notions, blandly advanced and casually accepted, gone down with those who have always thought of themselves as the natural inheritors of power?
How does FF feel about being consigned to the engine room by a party it wouldn't even acknowledge when, after the 1989 election, they first became partners?
This may sound like provocation for its own sake. A mischievous attempt to puncture the bright balloon of PD rhetoric. Well, it's not.
I don't believe that either the result of the next election or the establishment of an FFPD partnership can be taken for granted.
THE centre left coalition, under the leadership of John Bruton, Dick Spring and Proinsias De Rossa, is one of the most cohesive and forward looking governments we've had.
And it was cheering to hear one of the country's finest broadcasters, Sean MacReamoinn, pay tribute to the Government, Labour and Dick Spring during a 75th birthday celebration with Vincent Browne the other night. If was cheering because MacReamoinn is one of those commentators whose judgment of public affairs has been proved over decades. His views are, in the best sense, respectable. (Long may we enjoy them.)
Of course, members and supporters of the Government have made mistakes: some in the handling of inherited problems, others in the course of their own duties.
(And I'm sure that we haven't heard the last of this Dail's controversies: as I write, both colleagues and critics are waiting to hear Michael Lowry's account of issues raised in a newspaper report.)
But by and large ministers have admitted their failures and set about repairing a ramshackle system which, if time and funds were available, ought to have a more radical overhaul.
The FG Labour Democratic Left coalition has made a difference. Not as much as some of its more adventurous members might have wished, but a difference in the substance as well as in the style of politics.
Those who suspected it - as they would have suspected anyone to the left of Genghis Khan - of doctrinaire attitudes and dangerously radical opinions have had little to complain about.
If anything, the Coalition may be accused of following too cautiously where its own best instincts lead. Or, in the bail referendum, responding too readily to blatantly populist demands.
As in Britain and the United States, the most persistently pressed doctrinaire views in Ireland are those of the right. But the right likes to give the impression that it's the other way round.
The PDs who in their early days objected to being given right wing labels, now bypass both of the major parties to set up conflicts of a kind they once considered out of date.
THEY go for the ideological jugular, insisting that the real choice in the next election will be between the Progressive Democrats, on one side, and Lab our and Democratic Left on the other.
"So, who's afraid of privatisation?" said Mary Harney. "I'll tell you who. There are only a few of them left. The Bulgarians and the Romanians, for instance.
"And, of course, closer to home, political leaders like Dick Spring and Proinsias De Rossa.
The trouble is that when Ms Harney and the PDs place Labour and DL with the dinosaurs, as they like to call them, they are apt to find another party leader trapped awkwardly on the fence.
Some of Bertie Ahern's advisers - not to mention Charlie McCreevy - are closer to the PDs on the issue than Mr Ahern himself may be.
It must have been they who produced the document which came to light in an Examiner report in mid October.
The Examiner made the most of it.
"FF propose huge State sell off" ran the headline on its front page. And to make sure no one missed the point: "CIE, RTE, ESB, Coillte, Bord Failte, Bord Iascaigh Mhara may all go under Fianna Fail hammer.
As Labour and DL accused FF of dancing to a PD tune, Mr Ahern promptly sought to assure all and sundry that this was not capitulation.
The document, it seemed, was neither a policy nor a plan. It was simply a case of FF thinking aloud. And what it was thinking about wasn't privatisation, it was democratisation of the state sector.
As it happened, Mr Ahern was on his way to Cobb of all places and would, no doubt, have some worried Irish Steel employees in his audience.
FF might need, or indeed want, to share power with the PDs. But that would depend less on ideology than on the election results. A few lines were judiciously removed from the leader's script.
To borrow a phrase that's been overused of late, it could happen to a bishop. Indeed, something of the sort seemed to have happened in episcopal circles only on Thursday.
"Bishops concerned at Equality Bill changes" was the heading in that day's paper over a report that Dr William Murphy of Kerry and Dr John Magee of Cloyne had written to TDs, warning against changes in the Employment Equality Bill.
The case for these changes, proposed by Democratic Left, was made by Joe O'Toole of the INTO in these columns when he explained that teachers, nurses and others working in religious schools and hospitals were being denied the protection the Bill affords everyone else.
Senator O'Toole agreed with DL that the Bill needed to be strengthened. Dr Murphy and Dr Magee did not.
But, another page, another bishop. The heading on a separate report of speeches by Dr Jim Moriarty, Auxiliary Bishop of Dublin, and Dr Willie Walsh of Killaloe in the same paper on the same day read: "Politicians warned on pandering to powerful vested interests."
Sure, they took the words out of the senator's mouth.