The party that Fianna Fail most closely resembles these days is the Tory party of the mid-1990s. This wasn't the party of conviction led by Margaret Thatcher but the rag, tag and bobtail - knee deep in sleaze and all at sea in the wider world - which it was John Major's misfortune to inherit.
Remember how Britain stood then: the economy was doing well, better than at any time since the Thatcherite revolution began. Thatcher had pronounced society dead. Trade unions had been demoralised and the back of old industry broken. The message that all was for the best in the new, share-owning democracy was heard on every side. And the Tories seemed set to benefit from a change which they had done so much to engineer.
But the good news about the economy was more than matched by dramatic images of politicians who'd taken the message about self-reliance as a licence to help themselves. Major may have been an honest man. The Geoffrey Archers, Neil Hamiltons and Jonathan Aitkens were not.
Then, there was Britain's place in the wider world; and, among Tories, the certainty that, whenever the party seemed about to unite behind Major, someone would hiss Europe. After which nothing would be heard above the Euro-sceptic roars of those who couldn't bring themselves to accept that, as Claud Cockburn put it, Britain had grown too small for her boots.
In a week in which news of Beverley Cooper-Flynn's lost libel action drowned out Brian Cowen's modest introduction of the Nice referendum, little was heard of our own Euro-sceptics or whether the Boston v Berlin debate is to get an airing in the referendum campaign.
But a lot was heard about sleaze and Bertie Ahern's inability or unwillingness to deal with it: if Fianna Fail in 2001 could be compared with the Conservative Party of the 1990s, there were some contrasts too. And one of the contrasts had to do with their leaders' willingness to face the music when things went wrong. Major faced the music; Ahern does not.
WHEN Fianna Fail has problems with standards, anyone looking to Ahern for leadership will find, as ever in time of trouble, that he has nothing to offer but a mumbled excuse. A jury has found against Cooper-Flynn in her action against RTE. It believed RTE - in spite of her denial - that, while working for National Irish Bank before her election to the Dail, she had advised and encouraged others to engage in tax evasion.
Ahern hides behind the possibility that the decision might be appealed. It's as if the fact that Cooper-Flynn is a lawmaker, a public representative and until lately a member of one of the Dail's most prestigious committees, the Public Accounts Committee, counts for nothing.
Fianna Fail, its members may need to be reminded, once expelled a senior member, Des O'Malley, from its ranks on the ground that he had engaged in conduct unbecoming a member of the party. The conduct in question was abstention on a vote in the Dail and a speech which proclaimed: "I stand by the Republic." Now, the party which O'Malley founded, in the aftermath of his expulsion, is satisfied to sit and wait until it's discovered whether Cooper-Flynn can meet the costs she has been ordered to pay.
If she failed and were declared bankrupt she would be removed from the Dail under an Act which had its origins in another century, another parliament and other circumstances: it should no longer apply to members of the Dail. In the meantime, the supporters of the Fianna Fail-Progressive Democrat coalition may care to recall the fate of Major's Conservatives in 1997 when the party suffered the most serious defeat in its history.
They may console themselves that the opposition here is less well organised than Tony Blair, New Labour and their Third Way strategists were in 1997. But Fine Gael and Labour are beginning to act with greater coherence and force both inside and outside the Dail. Ruairi Quinn has said lately that he is less concerned about the composition of the next government than he is about what that government - inevitably a coalition - decides to do.
Michael Noonan, in an impressive interview with Rodney Rice on After Dark, insisted that the debate raised by the old worries about survival had been overtaken by a new and more urgent issue: "The debate now is about equity in Irish society."
Both chose as their political targets the followers of the Harney-McCreevy line in the present Government and both claimed to identify deep dissatisfaction, especially in the public service and extending to the middle classes. About Harney-McCreevy there is no doubt. The line is centre-right. That's how Charlie McCreevy himself, abandoning the pretence that Fianna Fail can be all things to all men, describes the Government.
Ideology, the public had always been led to believe, was a creation of the left. An import, unsuited to our temperate political and intellectual climate. Ideology was often, easily and glibly denounced as alien.
It may have been global warming - or a related condition yet to be diagnosed by the political climatologists, as Michael D. Higgins calls them - but things have been changing of late, not least the ability of politicians here to ignore the patterns of our European neighbours.
dwalsh@irish-times.ie