OPPOSITION politicians and some commentators are convinced the latest pre election shuffling is part of a plot. They're not sure who's writing the script, but they suspect that, somehow, Dick" Spring has a hand in it.
After all, it was he who set the ball rolling with the announcement last weekend that he had no intention of leading Labour into coalition with Fianna Fail.
Then there was Fine Gael's celebration of the 75th anniversary of the State, which gave John Bruton the chance to rub salt into wounds reopened by Labour's rejection.
As I write, FF's ardfheis, has just begun and sensitive Labour lads are bracing themselves for an orgy of abuse. Mr Spring, they expect, will be the villain of the piece as delegates remind each other how, back in 1994, when they were on the long road, maybe the wrong road, the road to God knows where, he went and unhitched his horses from their wagon of destiny.
And next weekend, in the fourth and final set piece of the current season, it will be the turn of Proinsias De Rossa and his DL colleagues to let the electorate know the Coalition is determined to hold its ground.
Mr Justice Brian McCracken's inquiry into Ben Dunne's payments to politicians is not so much a political set piece, more an event as envisaged by Harold Macmillan the kind of happening which takes politicians by surprise.
Mr Dunne will name names before Judge McCracken at Dublin Castle on Monday and, well before the Prime Time broadcast on Thursday it was clear that Charles Haughey's would be among them.
It was certainly no news to pleading members of Fianna Fail. But, on the eve of their ardfheis, neither they nor their friends in the media could resist the temptation to see the naming of Mr Haughey as an ambush.
SOME, including Brian Lenihan, even imagined they detected a connection with Mr Spring's speech. A commentator asked in idle speculation could it be a coincidence?
It was as if FF and the PDs hadn't insisted on a tribunal and kept up their demands until the Government gave way.
There was a rush to reassure the public that, whatever about the past, the present leaders of the party had nothing to do with it. As Mr Lenihan put it Fianna Fail has done a very thorough cleansing of any Augean, stables, that may be believed to exist.
For Mr Haughey, this may be, not so much a second coming, as a second going remember Sean Duignan's description of Albert Reynolds's brief reappearance among his EU peers after the fall of 94? "Forgotten but not gone".
Those preoccupied with this Spring scripted chapter in our affairs may have need of a working title. How about Four, Rallies and a Tribunal?
Some of them, I know, find it difficult to come to grips with such terms as centre right and centre left. It's as if they were novel or complicated ore out of date. They are none of these things.
It's far from -isms and -asms of any sort our politicians were reared, they say; and it's far from alien -isms and -asms they should remain.
There is, I suppose, a hint of novelty in the proposition that the choice for the electorate is between governments of the centre right and centre left; that it's no longer a case of taking sides in a mock replay of the Civil War.
At last there's no need to pretend that the issues over which the war was fought still have any meaning for us. We're being challenged to decide how we'd like to see the country run on the strength of competing policies.
Well, not entirely. Traditional loyaltie's still count, especially among those who support the centrist parties. They once commanded over 85 per cent of the popular vote, represented by an overwhelming majority of TDs. Today, their share of the popular vote is down to two thirds and their TDs - 68 Fianna Fail, 47 Fine Gael - amount to close on 70 per cent of all members of the current Dail.
IT'S the others who make the difference in the centre left coalition, Labour and Democratic Left between them have 38 deputies slightly more than 44 per cent of its parliamentary strength.
The left, for the first time, holds the Department of Finance and considers itself not a junior, but an equal partner in government. Indeed, it's the part it plays in decision making that the Opposition and its allies in the media find most objectionable about the Government.
As for the centre right alternative, the Progressive Democrats expect to raise their representation from eight to 12 or even 15 seats in the next Dail. With even greater confidence, they look forward to exerting influence disproportionate to their size in an FF PD administration, a prospect viewed with hostility by the left and with alarm by some in Fianna Fail.
A crucial ardfheis, already begun, will tell how FF plans to balance its ambition for a return to power with the likelihood, bordering on certainty, that this can only be achieved in partnership with the Progressive Democrats.
Labour's decision last weekend told a great deal about the promise and problems of that party's position, as it works to recover the confidence shaken by its agreement to join FF in coalition in 1992.
Those who spoke for FF took offence. They objected to being lumped in with the centre right, quibbled with the definition and claimed Mr Spring was undemocratic.
Why the fuss? Many are too young to remember that this was once not just a party but a movement and a national movement at that. People didn't join, as a rule, they were born into it. To be born outside it was to be less than the full national shilling. To stay outside and deliberately to oppose it was all but unthinkable.
Not that the party was unchanging and unchangeable. On the contrary, FF has changed itself and on occasion changed the country, too.
More to the point - and here it's necessary to tread warily on both sides - Fianna Fail and Fine Gael are capable of swapping sides without too much fuss.
Several on the FF side insisted this week that the party stood well to the left of FG. But it's a long time since FF was considered anti clerical and FG the bishops' friend.
If FF set up more semi State companies, FG and its predecessors were first on the scene with the ESB. Lemass made his own of the IDA and the attraction of foreign investment. He criticised both when his FG Labour predecessors introduced them.
And what of the boast that those in FF were neither prisoners of the right nor hostages of the left but pragmatists of the centre?
Media attitudes to the parties have changed, too, with what effect the election may "tell. The Independent group once supported FG as reverentially as it backed the bishops. Not any more. It's firmly on the Opposition's side these days, though for reasons that are not always clear.
This week, when the Coalition appeared to step on yet another landmine left lying about by its predecessors, the Irish Independent threw its weight behind the Government's critics.
"Only a very innocent person," it said, "could believe that the Government's solution to the television deflector problem is motivated by concern for fair competition.
"It is plainly motivated by electoral considerations."
But what of the Independent's motivation?
As the editorial acknowledged Independent Newspapers itself has a significant financial stake in MMDS.