Something extraordinary is going on in politics when a fall in support for the Government parties is typically accompanied by a fall in support for the main opposition party.
This is what happened in recent opinion polls, including the last Irish Times/MRBI one in May, and the most recent one in the Irish Independent published by Millward Brown/IMS last week.
Government support has collapsed, Fianna Fáil support has fallen to record lows, the Coalition has failed to change the public belief that it broke election promises, it has appeared shambolic during the Laffoy controversy and hasn't the money to pay for existing services and promised improvements. In response, Fine Gael has lost support.
The root cause of that party's decline is no great mystery. It is not clear to enough people that Fine Gael stands for something distinctive and relevant in Irish society, and would do something substantially different from the current Coalition if it won power.
The party itself has tended to settle on other theories as to the cause of its misery, such as the quality of the leader. This theory is wearing a bit thin as they are on their fourth leader in 13 years. Twice the party rose up, ousting first Alan Dukes and then his replacement, John Bruton. Michael Noonan packed it in immediately after last year's election disaster and before the "shoot the leader" faction could come after him. And now they are on Enda Kenny.
Mr Kenny's entertaining pledge to "electrify" the party - given when he first sought the leadership unsuccessfully against Michael Noonan - refers to another pet Fine Gael theory as to the cause of its misfortune: organisation. The party has commissioned reports on its organisation; Enda Kenny has toured the State for the past year in the name of revitalising - if not quite electrifying - the organisation.
When a party announces that a key aim is to transform its organisation, voters' eyes glaze over. Voters don't care about party organisation. Another theory is that there is a failure to communicate the party's message. This is sometimes blamed on the leader and the front bench (particularly by those who are neither the leader nor on the front bench themselves).
But it is often blamed on party officials - backbenchers who refer to these officials as "unelected advisers" are certain to be among those who hold to this theory. One exasperated party press officer says that the central discussion at the annual two-day meetings of parliamentary parties such as took place in Sligo, Killarney and Wexford over the past 10 days is on the theme: "The press office isn't getting the message across".
After last year's election disaster Fine Gael did indeed go through a rudderless period in terms of getting its message across. But in recent months it has made some key appointments and gets its message across whenever it has one.
And this is the nub of the problem: what is the message? As party leader, Michael Noonan sought to position Fine Gael as a soft left-of-centre party, talking much about the social contract and how in exchange for flexible labour practices and wage restraint, workers must have an adequate social safety net for when times get hard. This included everything from welfare payments to decent health and education services, funded by the State.
Fine Gael, which spent much of the 1970s and 1980s establishing itself as the party of fiscal responsibility, can indulge its soft social democratic fringe in this way when times are good and the Exchequer is awash with cash, as it was through much of the 1990s. But during the election time it abandoned its core image as a party of economic caution by offering yet further tax cuts, coupled with increased public spending.
The reality of the State's finances would have ensured that had Fine Gael come to power there would have been no tax cuts if the party hoped to fund increases in social spending to pay for this social contract. If Fianna Fáil has had to abandon election pledges, Fine Gael would have had to do so even more dramatically.
It has not been easy to discern where on the political spectrum Mr Kenny now plans to position his party. He has spoken a number of times on the theme of "rights and responsibilities", a theme often put forward by those with a right-of-centre agenda.
He has spoken of making parents responsible for criminal actions of their children. He also suggested the notion that patients who looked after their health should be given priority in hospitals over those who don't. The medical profession rejected this idea immediately, saying they would continue to prioritise patients on the basis of medical need, not based on some moral judgment as to their behaviour. The policy implications of this "rights and responsibilities" theme have appeared woolly so far.
Committing themselves to abandoning the benchmarking pay awards this week was at least courageous, given that 260,000 public servants and their families will be voting in next year's local and European elections. Richard Bruton's trip to Dublin Airport a few weeks ago to a meeting of outraged Aer Rianta workers to tell them he largely agreed with the Government's proposal to break up the company was courageous, too.
But what it amounts to so far is not an offer to voters of a different type of society, but merely a different management. This is unlikely to be enough in the situation where for Fine Gael to lead an alternative government involving Labour and, say, the Green Party, those parties need to gain 26 or more Dáil seats at the next election.
Opposition leaders who have led electoral turnarounds on that scale in the past have offered a fresh vision rather than simply a change of personnel. There is no sign of it from Fine Gael yet.