After an exhausting election, Fianna Fáil can afford to gossip about a new leader, but other parties have plenty of homework to do on their summer holidays, writes Stephen Collins.
The long Dáil summer recess has come as a blessed relief to all those actively involved in national politics, exhausted after what was probably the longest election campaign in the history of the State. TDs of all parties have a lot to reflect on before they come back in the autumn to begin the real business of the 30th Dáil.
The happiest campers as the holidays begin are naturally to be found in Fianna Fáil. The party is back in power yet again and all looks right with the world.
Now that the election is safely over, some of those centrally involved in the campaign freely admit that at times it was a hair-raising experience, but it ended with their return to office and that is what counts.
Still, Fianna Fáil TDs do have one big issue to mull over and that is the future leadership of their party. Bertie Ahern's decision to anoint Brian Cowen as his successor has focused attention on the subject and, while the Taoiseach has no intention of standing down in the short-term, the leadership is now a topic of much discussion among Fianna Fáil TDs.
It was noticeable in the Dáil over the past week that Brian Cowen as Tánaiste took Leaders' Questions on Wednesday and handled the Order of Business on the last sitting day of the session. It appears as if the first tentative moves in an orderly handover of power from the leader to the deputy leader has already begun, even if the process is going to take some time.
Of course the conspiracy theorists regard the Taoiseach's stance as a device to draw his Tánaiste close, in order to neutralise him and ensure that there is no focus for potential dissent in the party. While Mr Ahern has demonstrated time and again that he is a master of political tactics, there is no reason to doubt that he does intend to pass the mantle on to his deputy at some stage in the lifetime of the 30th Dáil.
That episode will probably happen some time after the European and local elections in two years' time, but if a week is a long time in politics, two years is an eternity and there is no knowing what the political landscape will look like at that stage.
The mood in the other two smaller Government parties is quite different. Although they are back in Government, the Progressive Democrats are shattered by the election drubbing and the loss of their leader.
Mary Harney will bring her vast political experience, and her ability, to finishing what she started in the Department of Health and she may well succeed. The signing of the co-location hospital contracts on Thursday was a big step along the way.
However, helping to bring her party back from the brink of extinction looks like being a much more difficult task. Reduced to just two Dáil deputies, neither of whom wants to be leader, it is hard to see a viable long-term future for the PDs, despite their return to Government.
For the Greens the mood is quite different. The party's TDs are simply delighted to get into power after 25 years of campaigning against the policies of the government of the day. The Green Ministers are so happy to be in power that they do not appear to be embarrassed in the slightest when the Opposition throw their own past utterances back in their faces.
Expressing his opposition to the ridiculously long Dáil summer recess, Pat Rabbitte cited Trevor Sargent's denunciation of exactly the same thing a year ago. The Greens were completely unabashed and voted with their Government colleagues for the long holiday. Even more striking was the fact that the party leadership attempted not only to dictate to their councillors which Fianna Fáil candidates they should vote for in the Seanad election, but suggested that ballot papers would be inspected to ensure they did what they were told. This has provoked a negative reaction from some Green councillors and the plan to inspect ballot papers was dropped. In any case, it is illegal.
Having shown that they can behave just like the big boys in Government on the crude political issues, the big challenge ahead for the party is to show that they are capable of putting their own imprint on Government. The future of the Greens rests on being able to point to distinctive achievements by their Ministers. The programme for government is essentially a Fianna Fáil document, so it is up to the three Green Ministers to carve out their own policy achievements and that is not going to be easy.
If the Government parties all have something different to think about during the summer, the same applies to the Opposition parties. While there is acute disappointment in Fine Gael, Labour and Sinn Féin at failing to get into office, the mood in each party is quite different and all face different challenges in the years ahead.
Fine Gael had a good election in that the party gained 20 seats, an astonishing achievement given where it was this time five years ago. However, the failure once again to achieve power was a body blow to Enda Kenny, Richard Bruton and the other senior figures who dragged their party back from the brink of oblivion. Mr Kenny, an optimist by nature, has manfully kept his disappointment in check, but his senior colleagues find it harder to disguise.
Mr Kenny was ratified as party leader in a near unanimous vote and he has been given the opportunity for one last shot at power. The next election is a long way away and it will be an arduous task for him to start rolling the stone up the hill all over again in the hope that things will be better next time. On the positive side for Fine Gael is the fact that the party has had an influx of young new TDs who have only been too eager to make their voices heard in the first weeks of the Dáil.
However, they will need to take care not to fall into the trap of opposition for opposition's sake. There was a classic example on the last day of the Dáil when Fine Gael speaker after speaker stood up in the Dáil to denounce Micheál Martin's amending legislation dealing with the operation of the Personal Injuries Assessment Board (PIAB). In fact, the legislation is quite clearly designed to close off a loophole that would have allowed the legal profession to exploit the system for maximum gain and negate the whole point of the PIAB.
Siding with the legal profession against the taxpayer hardly tallies with Fine Gael's "rip-off Ireland" campaign before the election, but there is also a deeper point at issue. At the end of the day the Opposition narrowly lost the election because enough voters were not convinced that they had what it took to run the country.
Defending entrenched vested interests in the hope of embarrassing the Government will only reinforce that perception.
Unlike Fine Gael, Labour did not have the consolation of seat gains. The party now needs to undertake a real examination of its role in Irish politics and society if it is to have a real future.
A number of Labour TDs are coming close to retirement age and the party desperately needs to bring new talent forward. More importantly, it has to examine what it stands for and how it can explain that to the voters.
For instance, probably the biggest issue the party campaigned on over the past year was its opposition to hospital co-location. Despite intense media coverage of the issue it appears that the vast majority of voters either didn't understand what the fuss was about or they simply didn't have a problem with co-location.
Labour's closeness to the public service unions may be important in terms of holding on to its voter base, but it appears to be a big obstacle to it being able to appeal to a much wider audience.
If Labour has a problem with its image, then Sinn Féin has an even bigger one. The party's failure to make the predicted breakthrough has come as a stunning blow.
Its long-term strategy of being a significant party of power on both sides of the Border is now in tatters and there is no simple answer to the question of why its vote suddenly dropped in urban areas.
Labour and Sinn Féin will ponder why Fianna Fáil swept the boards among working-class voters, while Fine Gael will continue to muse about what went wrong in the commuter belt. As Brian Cowen cruelly pointed out to them all on more than one occasion during the week, they have plenty of time ahead in Opposition to try and figure it out.