`It appeared to me that the Fianna Fail ministers were behaving in a very disorganised manner. No one appeared to be in charge. At the meetings I attended, ministers came in and out at will, with some being absent for periods." That devastating description of cabinet meetings was read into the Dail record a little over five years ago. The words were not those of a rabid Blueshirt or an obsessive anti-Fianna Fail media type. The vision of political disarray was instead conjured up by Eoghan Fitzsimons, a lifelong party supporter, former trustee of Fianna Fail and attorney general in that same cabinet.

He was describing the atmosphere in the inner circle of power in the run-up to the resignation of Albert Reynolds.

It is hard now to credit that, just a few years ago, it seemed quite possible that Fianna Fail, accurately described by Willie O'Dea in The Irish Times yesterday as "with the sole exception of Swedish Social Democrats, Europe's most successful political party", might go the way of a great power-holding machine to which it bore more than a passing resemblance, Italy's Christian Democrats. With a Teflon Taoiseach presiding over a harmonious coalition, a booming economy and fabulous poll ratings, the waking nightmares of 1995 must, to the faithful gathering for this weekend's ardfheis, seem like a bad dream.

If anything, a glance back at the party's dreadful decade of the 1990s must be, for the party's loyalists, oddly reassuring. In that period, anything that could go wrong did go wrong.

The party's shoo-in candidate for the presidency got caught in a surreal web of lies. One leader, Charles Haughey, was finally exposed as a corrupt liar and his successor, Albert Reynolds, managed the extraordinary feat of bringing down two of his own governments. The party's vote fell to its lowest levels since the 1920s.

And yet, astonishingly, Fianna Fail held power for all but two years of that decade and entered the new millennium with its position as the natural party of government intact. If these are the fruits of disaster, who needs success?

The key to the paradox is that the traumas did Fianna Fail a favour by forcing it to make changes it should have made anyway. Charles Haughey was, in many respects, a huge liability who condemned the party to a permanent state of internal civil war.

The choice of Albert Reynolds as his successor was a big mistake, tying the party to a country and western image that had little appeal for an increasingly urban electorate. And the collapse of the party's alliance with the Catholic Church, dramatised in the Harry Whelehan debacle, removed both the biggest obstacle to rebuilding middle-class support and the biggest asset of the Opposition parties.

Instead of indulging their favourite pastimes of media-bashing and persecution mania, ardfheis delegates should be down on their knees thanking God for the liberal critics who rid them of Haughey, Reynolds and Spuc.

There is, though, a downside to all of this. Fianna Fail has been able to cling to power because the gradual abandonment of key parts of its identity has paid huge dividends. Radically modifying its traditional nationalism and dropping rural Catholic conservatism created both the peace process and an atmosphere of social consensus. Bertie Ahern has exploited both of these factors with considerable skill, positioning himself as the emollient leader of a contented society.

All of this depends, though, on the maintenance of a situation in which there are no sharp ideological divisions and political passions are subdued. And such a situation creates, over time, two sets of problems, one at the nitty-gritty level of local politics, the other on the larger playing field of national power.

The nitty-gritty problem is this: if there are no sharp ideological conflicts, and if Fianna Fail no longer identifies itself as the voice of rural Catholic Ireland, then traditional Fianna Fail voters have a huge temptation to shop local. If politics is merely a pragmatic business of dividing the spoils of prosperity, then it makes complete sense for voters in, say, South Kerry, to vote for a colourful, ebullient local character who will fight, not for Ireland or the church or any other large ideological abstraction, but for South Kerry.

With coalition governments now established as the norm, and the balance of power increasingly lying with small parties and independents, there is every chance that a local renegade will end up with far more real power than a loyal party stalwart.

That, for Fianna Fail, is a threat much more potent than the one currently posed by the traditional opposition parties. Especially since many of the local candidates emerging in this context have a natural affinity with a conservative Catholicism that has been largely disenfranchised by Fianna Fail's apostasy. Nothing would be more disastrous for Bertie Ahern's all-things-to-all-people image than a re-emergence of that most passionately divisive of issues, abortion. But keeping the local mavericks on board without conceding another abortion referendum is already a tricky task and will become an ever more difficult one.

On the national scale, there is another set of problems arising from the basic reality that social consensus is much less deeply rooted than it might seem. In the short term, unprecedented economic prosperity may make everybody happy. But eaten bread is soon forgotten. The new wealth may initially blunt tensions between the haves and the have-nots. But it also destroys the excuses for failure. In a wealthy society, high levels of illiteracy and poor public health services begin to stand out as stark scandals. The pressure to deliver better public services becomes much stronger.

AND that, in turn, vastly increases the premium on political talent. The problem for Fianna Fail is that the reservoir of outstanding talent in its senior ranks can be summed up in two words - Micheal Martin. With a Minister for Finance who can't turn a massive surplus into a popular Budget, a Minister for Justice whose immigration policy has been described by his own junior minister as a shambles and a constellation of political capacity in which Brian Cowen looks like a shining star, the party is being seriously handicapped by Bertie Ahern's extreme caution.

The appearance of consensus is threatened, moreover, by the ever-growing evidence that, if Fianna Fail is all things to all people, it has been even more things to some people with offshore accounts. The real problem posed by the legacy of sleaze is that it undermines the cross-class appeal summed up in the slogan for the ardfheis - A Better Ireland for All - and identifies the party with the rich and generous. That makes it hugely vulnerable to the fierce social resentments that at the moment seem to well up and subside but that will, if they ever burst their banks, have an elemental force.

For all the posturing, Bertie Ahern has completely failed to confront this issue, opting instead to react to each revelation as it comes by waffling, dissimulating and kicking towards the tribunal touchline every time a greasy ball lands in his hands. It's a well-worn strategy and one that might just work.

But Bertie Ahern must remember the last Fianna Fail Taoiseach who tried it with apparent success and who seemed to have reached the farther shores of triumph and safety. His name was Albert Reynolds and Bertie Ahern was sitting beside him that day in the Dail when it all fell apart.