There was a great deal happening this week without much of it being reflected in the business of either House. Apart from the Government's closer-than-usual victory on the Second Stage of the Finance Bill on Wednesday night, there was little real excitement. None the less it was a week with plenty of potential for trouble down the line.
First Wednesday night's vote. A majority of two is still a majority, but the three unpaired absences will have sent the alarm bells ringing in Seamus Brennan's office and Government backbenchers can expect a sterner regime from now on. Slippage of this sort - especially at mid-term - can be catching and Sean Barrett will be encouraged to organise the occasional ambush.
It should liven things up a little in what is currently a very dull Dail. The Charlie McCreevy standoff with the credit unions continues, and nobody who knows McCreevy should be one bit surprised. Charlie McCreevy has a stubborn streak. His enemies call it pigheaded, his friends call it principled, but without it he would not have taken his lonely, courageous and at the time politically suicidal stand against Charles Haughey.
And remember at that time it was not just political courage that was needed. More than once McCreevy was roughed up and intimidated in a way few others in contemporary Irish politics have been, and in a way most people thought had gone out with the 1930s and 1940s.
In the current controversy McCreevy feels, not to put a tooth in it, that he was stitched up and hung out to dry by the credit unions. He was not amused, and while personally the most amiable of men, he does not forget or indeed forgive all that easily. There will be no sops, no easy gestures. That's not the Kildare way.
In the end Charlie is a pragmatist and will do what is to be done. But in the current process, or game of poker, he has forced the credit unions into the open. Not all of their claims will stand the test of close scrutiny. The other financial institutions, envious of the credit unions but afraid to strike openly, will have the material to wound quietly. It's not a nice place out there and the high-profile campaign by the hitherto reticent and publicity-shy credit unions may have its own less-than-welcome consequences.
Drapier would like to thank the estimable David McCullough for the "plug" on RTE's This Week when he referred to the state of personal relations between Bertie Ahern and Charlie McCreevy. Charlie played a straight bat, but was less than fully convincing. He has learned a great deal the hard way these past few weeks. He knows that, in the case of his leader, the left hand and the right hand are not always talking to each other. In a word, he knows his leader better than most, and to know is to be warned.
In any event, Charlie McCreevy has recovered from the Budget debacle. He is still a formidable figure in Cabinet, the straightest talker in the parliamentary party, and crucially as the politicians' salary review gets under way, someone who is trusted by most of his colleagues.
Whether he is right on the current inflation debate is another matter. The simple fact of the matter is that no one knows. We listened to Maurice O'Connell's gloomy assessment at Wednesday's meeting of the European Affairs Committee. They say that in private life Mr O'Connell is a charming and witty man, but these are not the qualities we expect to see in the Governor of the Central Bank.
And so it was on Wednesday as Maurice told us not to lose the run of ourselves, that the good times would not last forever and that what goes up can just as easily come down. That also is what the Europeans are saying and while others - and some of them, such as Dan McLoughlin, with good track records - are still optimistic, Drapier detects a growing unease among some of his more thoughtful colleagues that a little more restraint is needed.
There are some warning signs. The inflation figures can be explained, but cannot be written off. There is a message there and it needs to be heeded.
Likewise, the demands on the Exchequer are growing at an unsustainable rate. Every pressure group now feels its day has come and wants its case met now - and no more waiting. Health services are costing more and more, with no discernable improvement in services.
Nor is there any guarantee of industrial peace as the new partnership deal continues to be ambushed - some of the attacks coming from unlikely sources. The dissent within IBEC was not expected, and if Drapier hears right, is likely to grow rather than be easily contained. The secondary teachers got a slap-down from the Taoiseach over their 30 per cent demand, and as is the case with teachers, especially as the demand was made smack in the middle of the mid-term break, they evinced little sympathy. But sympathy or not, experience shows the teachers, like the other big public service unions generally, get their way, later if not sooner.
From a political perspective many of these developments are happening at precisely the wrong time. We are at mid-term in the life of this Government. Shortly we will be into election mode. Government's freedom to take hard decisions will be curtailed just at the time these decisions need to be taken. A Government which has had the luxury of saying Yes to everybody may have forgotten how to say No or, thanks to windy backbenchers and single-issue Independents, have lost the capacity to do so.
That is what Drapier means when he says it was a week with real potential for trouble down the line.
Two other issues this week caught Drapier's attention. John Gormley may have struck gold with his question about the number of civil servants our Ministers currently have doing their constituency work. This is not the first time this question has been asked, but in Drapier's view the mood has changed since the last asking.
Drapier understands why Ministers need extra back-up. They have a full load of ministerial duties and have extra party responsibilities.
Nobody denies they need extra back-up. But does Noel Dempsey - the man whose electoral reforms are set to rid us of "clientelist" politics - really need so many civil servants running his constituency office?
Given the track record of the Greens on issues like this, Drapier feels this one could yet end up down the legal road - and anything could happen down there. It's an issue to keep an eye on.
Finally this week a real note of sadness among many in here at the death of Michael Colvin MP and his wife Nichola. Michael was an old-style Tory grandee, a faithful member of the British-Irish Interparliamentary Body and much respected for his genuine interest in better relations between our two countries.