Most eyes were turned northwards this week as the new Northern Assembly got down to the nitty-gritty. It was boring, almost humdrum, and from Drapier's point of view no praise could be higher. The North has given us enough histrionics to last us all a lifetime, and the fact that people are now talking to each other, even sharing the odd joke, is a miracle in itself.
Parliament has many functions. At times it is where we work out the drama of political life, and such times are rare and usually memorable. Most of the time, however, we just go on talking to ourselves, trying to sort out the humdrum, incremental problems of civil society, and doing so without any great fuss or ceremony.
Drapier has always argued that the real sign of maturity in the North will have been reached when the rows and disagreements concern such things as roads and drains, schools and health, clean beaches and good bin collections - in other words, about the things that affect the real quality of ordinary lives, rather than about prejudice and hatred.
Drapier feels we are coming closer and closer to that point. There has been a sea change among sufficient numbers on all sides to make the Good Friday agreement work. There will be blips, and decommissioning still represents a major obstacle, but not an insurmountable one.
The reality is that more people, indeed most people, now have a vested interest in making it work, and with David Trimble and Seamus Mallon working so sure-handedly together the future is looking good. And thank God for that.
Drapier knows, however, that a surfeit of optimism is a dangerous thing in politics, but this time he is determined to stick with optimism because he believes it to be warranted.
On the local front, the first electoral test for the Government's popularity will be the Cork by-election. Or it might have been, if Simon Coveney had not agreed to run. By all accounts he is an excellent candidate in his own right, carries a respected name, and as the late John Healy used point out, being an eligible bachelor is worth a couple of thousand votes on its own.
Toddy O'Sullivan is a good candidate, but it is unlikely now that he will give Ruairi Quinn his three-in-a-row.
Fianna Fail is all over the place, and Drapier blames none of the three sitting TDs for not wanting a strong candidate. Drapier advises them not to waste too much time agonising.
All they have to do is ask themselves what would Bertie do if he found himself in such a situation. They need not ponder too long. What did Bertie do in 1983 when he found himself with a by-election in his own constituency to fill the seat left vacant by the death of that good man, George Colley?
Was Mary Colley, who was willing and able, asked to stand? Did John Stafford get the nod? Exactly. Handsome is as handsome does, and Drapier sees no shame in his three colleagues, already precariously placed in a five-seater, taking care of their own corners. Bertie would - and so would the rest of us.
Nonetheless, Drapier advises Fine Gael not to take anything for granted. John Bruton needs a victory, and so does Fine Gael. It will not come without a fight. A good candidate is half the battle, but no more than that, and Drapier expects to see John Bruton cracking the whip, and cracking it hard over the coming weeks. Complacency is the one thing he or his party can ill afford.
Meanwhile, the Government's Teflon-like protection showed a few scratches this week as angry farmers besieged the Dail and Government Departments on Tuesday. Drapier took time to talk to some of them. The problems are real and the anger is deep. And on top of it all is the bad weather, over which nobody has any control.
As Drapier said last week "events" rarely leave any government unmolested for too long, and no sooner had the farmers packed up than news of the report of the Nursing Commission began to leak out.
Drapier has no doubt it is a good report, with many radical and far-reaching structural changes on offer, most of them long overdue, but the bottom line is money, and big money at that.
It is going to be a tough one. The nurses are popular; they have gone the long route and now it is pay-back time. Drapier dislikes that phrase, but said over a year ago that it would come back to haunt this Government, and if the case being made by the nurses is anything to go by, Charlie McCreevy is in for a long, hard winter.
It started with Joe O'Toole, and even if some in here and outside think Joe has been put in his place after the less than well judged presentation he made from the Shannon, they need to think again.
Joe knows that many of his members feel the Celtic Tiger owes them more, as do the nurses, the farmers, local authority workers, civil servants . . . The list is endless, and we are now seeing that one of the inevitable consequences of our much vaunted economic success, with its examples of huge overnight profits and conspicuous consumption, is that expectations are raised all round, and if not met can lead to a great deal of sourness.
One of the problems facing Bertie is that none of his Ministers has ever held office in hard times. None, including Mary Harney, has ever had to say No in the way Ray MacSharry slashed all requests in 1987 or Alan Dukes did in the 1980s or Richie Ryan in the 1970s.
It's been spend, spend all the way up to now, not just for this Government but for its two predecessors as well. Can anyone name any minister in recent times who had to make a really unpopular financial decision, who ended up with a nickname like Richie Ruin or Mac the Knife for their efforts?
Of course not.
But that is precisely what Charlie McCreevy faces over the coming months. He knows he has to hold the line, but what he does not know is if he will have the support of his colleagues in the spending departments. Charlie McCreevy is one Minister who has grown in stature this past year. He has always told it as he saw it, and he has never been afraid to say or do the unpopular thing. He has that rare combination of honesty and courage allied to a capacity to spell things out in blunt language.
There will be little enough golf for Charlie this winter. The testing time has arrived, and if Charlie is to succeed it's going to mean a fair amount of pain. And being able to say No - and mean it.