Bertie Ahern will be in no mood for Kerry jokes this weekend. The best laid plans and all that. Rarely has a minimalist cabinet reshuffle been managed with such skill. Ever since Mary Harney started the ball rolling on radio on Sunday to hint at far-reaching changes, the Government has basked in the most positive light.
It was Bertie at his best. There never was going to be a major reshuffle. It would be against his every political instinct. But the strategy was to keep the rumours going and test how they were received.
He even deferred the announcements from Wednesday to Thursday so the Aras was available for some more soft-focus pictures. And then Denis Foley intervened.
Nobody will remember better than Bertie that the beginning of the end for his mentor, Charles Haughey, was a botched cabinet reshuffle. Having faced down yet another leadership challenge, Haughey plucked Noel Davern and Jim McDaid from relative obscurity for cabinet office.
In the process he chose to deliberately ignore the superior claims of the likes of David Andrews and Brian Cowen. In a bizarre series of events McDaid had resigned by that night, and it was downhill for Haughey from there. He was gone within a couple of months.
That was never going to happen to Bertie. Behind the smoke-screen of impending major changes, the actual prospective changes were carefully fed out and the response monitored. The reports from Cork, where the Cabinet was on tour, were positively reverential. Everything was going to plan until Banquo's ghost in the form of the Moriarty tribunal came to haunt the parade.
The Denis Foley development shows yet again that if there is any threat to this Teflon Taoiseach it is likely to come from one or other, or both, of the tribunals. Drapier is unpersuaded of the conventional wisdom that Micheal Martin has been slotted into Health deliberately to soften his cough. Martin may yet be a possible successor to Bertie, but he is not a rival. Bertie's only serious rivals are the ghosts of past associations. Who succeeds him is somewhat academic; the struggle is not to be succeeded.
If things get especially murky, the only man with the steel to provoke a challenge is Brian Cowen. Notwithstanding the sometimes merited jibes at his expense, Cowen is likely to find Foreign Affairs plan sailing after Health.
As far as public perception is concerned he leaves the health services in worse shape than he found them. His successor will get little understanding from people gridlocked in the waiting lists for explaining that there has been increased investment. Tackling the queues is the issue and, for Martin, the challenge.
Not many, including quite a few on the Fianna Fail back benches, dispute Ruairi Quinn's assessment that Bertie moved a few but should have moved a few more. Inertia is the kindest word that comes to mind about a few Cabinet Ministers left untouched.
Noel Dempsey doesn't fit into that category, but so far the presentation skills have not been matched by the performance. Housing and traffic are two of the most acute problems confronting the Government, and both are worsening.
At least a half-dozen junior ministers are so anonymous that clued-in observers would be unable to say what it is they do. Chris Flood, who is opting out for reasons of indifferent health, would have been regarded as in the top three Ministers of State. Yet more talented backbenchers were passed over. The St Valentine's Day massacre is not Bertie's way.
Old RTE footage to celebrate the reshuffle brought a lump of nostalgia to Drapier's throat. There was Charles Haughey, surveying his kingdom on the Blasket Islands being linked by Maire Geoghegan-Quinn on one side and Frank Fahey on the other. Maire was a firm favourite at the time, and Mr Haughey made her the first woman cabinet minister since Countess Markievicz.
Maire, however, became disaffected in sufficient time to put some clear blue water between herself and the now struggling icon, but Frank Fahey remained loyal to the surviving Haughey cabal.
When Maire bowed out so unexpectedly, citing unreasonable intrusion into her family life, many in here sympathised but reckoned the real problem was Frank Fahey. His well-resourced campaign from a high-profile premises in Galway didn't augur well for Geoghegan-Quinn. At one stroke Bertie's main rival was gone, and Frank Fahey is in the Cabinet.
It is a bitter pill for Government Whip Seamus Brennan to swallow. Like Fahey he would mind mice at a crossroads, but his track record is moderately more impressive than Fahey's. Apparently his role as foster nurse-maid to the four Independents makes him indispensable as Government Whip, or so Bertie thinks.
The Denis Foley affair is inevitably going to revive friction between the Coalition parties. The Ansbacher list has been a single-minded mission by Mary Harney. At one stage she hinted that everyone on the list was a suspect and yesterday repeated her shock that certain wealthy people regarded themselves as being above the law. It now appears that there is a second list, and it includes the name of a Government deputy.
Bertie was told before Christmas that Denis Foley was being investigated by the Moriarty tribunal but only learned that his colleague was an Ansbacher account-holder when it emerged at the Moriarty tribunal on Thursday. It is difficult to envisage the tenor of the exchanges before Christmas if Bertie was kept in the dark about the A-word.
For Mary Harney the Foley development is unwelcome on another front. It is not difficult to divine from her public statements - including her speech on the appointment of the new Ministers - that she would like Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats to fight the next general election as a government. Last Sunday she barely stopped short of criticising her own party's ruling council for deciding otherwise.
Meanwhile, the black humour in Leinster House has taken to referring to the Ansbacher accounts as the Alzheimer's Accounts. Bertie is not laughing.