Bertie Ahern's achievement in securing agreement on the much-disputed clauses of the EU constitutional document was by any standards remarkable, writes Garrett FitzGerald.
Of course there was a widespread will for him to succeed, but in the fragile post-Iraq state of intra-European relations, it would have taken very little to precipitate a row that could have blocked that agreement.
The Taoiseach's approach was low-key, methodical, sure-footed, and correspondingly successful.
This is the sixth time that Ireland has made a success of its presidency of the European Union. I don't think any other EU state has had such a striking record in the presidency of the Council.
Of course, if no significant issue comes up for resolution during a six-month presidency, there is no opportunity for the country in question to have a success.
To that extent, we can be said to have been fortunate in having been tested on every one of the six occasions we held the office. But other countries have failed such a test - some of them more than once.
The fact that Ireland did not fail in any of its six presidencies is no accident. I believe our consistent success has been due to a combination of three factors. The first has been the remarkable quality of our diplomats.
The second is the fact that the politicians, who have held the offices of taoiseach and minister for foreign affairs on each of those six occasions, have all recognised the potential importance of success for a small country such as Ireland. And the third factor has been that Ireland has not - as has been the case with some other, and particularly some larger member-states - been distracted by widespread interests elsewhere in the world.
It has, therefore, been able on each occasion to act as an "honest broker" between the competing interests of other EU members.
This consistently good performance has been of great benefit to us in many concrete ways, for it has won us the goodwill that we needed at other times to secure favourable outcomes to negotiations important to our economic interests.
The qualities required of an EU president are not, however, the same as those needed in other high executive political positions, such as that of prime minister.
There is much more to such an executive role than mediation or conciliation. Successful leadership of a political team requires vision and leadership. And these have not been qualities widely attributed to Bertie Ahern.
It is certainly the case that he has held together a Coalition Government within which there are significant right/left tensions. In this respect, his conciliatory approach yielded short-term success.
But this has been achieved at the high price of allowing the right-wing Progressive Democrats, together with a few Fianna Fáil Ministers, such as Charlie McCreevy and converted PD Martin Cullen, to dominate the Cabinet, to the obvious distress of some Fianna Fáil Ministers more social democratically inclined - and also, I believe, to the great disadvantage of our society.
Quite contrary to what I believe to be Bertie Ahern's own instincts, our public services, and some of our social services, have consequently been run down by this Government in certain respects at the very moment when, for the first time in our history, we had the resources to improve their quality considerably. By caving in to the ideologists of the right within the PDs, as well as in a corner of his own party, Bertie Ahern has notably failed to secure an optimal deployment of rapidly expanding resources.
He has also given free rein to McCreevy's gamesmanship with the public finances. This involved wasting resources on a two-year pre-election 32 per cent spending hike, which boosted our inflation rate far beyond that of any of our 11 Eurozone partners.
To correct that splurge, ham-fisted post-election cuts or constraints were then imposed on the social services, on higher education and on the health service.
Moreover, the Taoiseach also allowed this irresponsible political gamesmanship to be accompanied by an attempt to buy votes in a highly politicised decentralisation exercise which backfired badly. The Dublin electorate, with its large number of civil servants, should not have been taken for granted.
The simple truth is that all this short-term political gameplaying both deserved, and received, a setback at the polls. And that in turn has greatly intensified tensions within a divided Government.
For this is all potentially destabilising in a Coalition which is not the only possible government in the present Dáil. Fianna Fáil knows that with support from Independents it could probably continue in office without the PDs, and the PDs know that their future might be better secured if they cut adrift from Fianna Fáil before the next election. On the right wing of the Government, Michael McDowell and Charlie McCreevy have sought this week to defend their position by claiming that their "new low tax policy" and their new "low rate of taxation" is "a spectacular success".
Not surprisingly they have been challenged on the other wing of the Government by Dermot Ahern and others.
A low rate of capital taxation has, of course, been a very important factor in our economic growth. Moreover, it is right that our personal tax level should not be significantly higher than that of neighbouring states.
But all that does not mean that our national tax level has to be reduced to a level below that of the rest of the EU, at the cost of inadequate public services, severe cuts in social provisions hurting vulnerable groups, and a health service marred by a bed shortage and very long waiting lists.
Instead of vague political sloganising about "low taxation" what we need is a balanced policy under which the rich pay a fair share of taxes (instead of being allowed to write off most or all of their income for tax purposes through relief measures of one kind or another), combined with the kind of public and social services that our new-found prosperity warrants.