LOOKING back, Bertie Ahern may reflect that getting to the top was the easy bit. Staying there may turn out to be more problematic. First the (relatively) easy climb: Fianna Fail had about the same share - between 39 and 40 per cent of first preference votes in 1997 as it had in 1992.
But Mr Ahern was elected Taoiseach at the first attempt, with the support of 77 FF TDs, four members of the Progressive Democrats, four In dependents and a cartload of goodwill.
Albert Reynolds had to work harder, wait longer and concede more for his greatly resented partnership with Labour; though when it was formed the FF Labour coalition had the biggest majority west of the OderNeisse line.
Indeed, it might have been in office still but for FF's uncanny ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and Mr Reynolds's curious belief that others, too, would stomach anything to stay in power.
Mr Ahern, I suspect, cherishes no such illusions.
But doubts about the new Government's durability have little to do with its status as a minority coalition. Mr Ahern's skills as a negotiator and conciliator are widely recognised and much admired.
Conventional wisdom has it that if anyone could persuade Jackie HealyRae and Mildred Fox of their shared interests - even without the help of public spending on schools, roads, piers, hospitals or factories - Bertie's the man.
The problem is not with some Independent who takes leave of his (or her) senses and risks bringing down the house. It's with an uninspiring choice of Ministers and a botched rearrangement of Departments: it's also within FF itself.
The trouble is that, however you varnish them, you can't turn the likes of Ray Burke, Joe Walsh and Seamus Brennan into politicians for the 1990s.
Worst of all though in a different sense - Mr Ahern has decided to sink Mervyn Taylor's old office, Equality and Law Reform, in a Department of Justice run by John O'Donoghue, the loquacious author of zero tolerance Irish style.
SOME rearranging of departments is done in a spirit of improvement, though I can remember only one case of a minister, Sean Flanagan, suggesting that it was time to abolish his own office, Lands.
Now and then a Taoiseach will abolish a Department because he likes neither the office nor its holder: both the Department of Economic Planning and Development and its minister, Dr Martin O'Donoghue, were given short shrift by Mr Haughey.
But to bury Equality and Law Reform in Justice, even with the promise of a junior minister to look after it, sounds like carelessness or indifference. It mocks the Government's claim to favour an inclusive society and ignores the breadth and depth of the reform that's needed.
Mr Spring challenged the Taoiseach: "People with disabilities are people against whom society has built barriers. Much work has been done in the last few years in empowering people to tear down those barriers.
"You have weakened that empowerment and created yet one more barrier for them to climb. Nothing you say or do now can undo that.
"And I must assume that your silence in relation to the Equal Status Bill and the Employment Equality Bill must be taken as yet another indication that people who have suffered discrimination in the past must wait a long time yet for redress."
The challenge was echoed by John Bruton and Proinsias De Rossa, whose fear must be that, with Mr O'Donoghue in Justice, Charlie McCreevy in Finance and Brian Cowen in Health (no doubt for his bedside manner), the new Cabinet has a core of financial hardliners ready to exert a powerful influence on Coalition policy.
In this context, the rearrangement of Departments may tell us more about the direction of the Government than any declaration by Mr Ahern or even the partnership with the Progressive Democrats.
One of the features of Mr Ahern's politics is an absence of conviction on most issues, though he clearly hopes to encourage significant movement towards a settlement in the North and is seriously committed to reforming FF.
These ambitions are linked, but the connection is seldom made. Reforming the party, as Mr Ahern sees it, means getting rid of the whiff of sulphur which has clung to its leaders for almost 20 years.
But some of its most supportive critics, like Prof Joe Lee, have also stressed the need for clearer definition and a more compelling sense of direction. Given the abandonment of all but the most nebulous core values, a vision is essential.
There was no sign of it, either in the election campaign, during which debate seldom rose above competing tax offers, or in the programme for government, which repeated those offers and the contradictory claim that what the parties sought was an inclusive society.
Promising tax cuts is hardly a substitute for visionary politics, especially if the promise is directed largely at the better off and trumpeted by the Government's most ardent supporters in the style of the Sun.
Last week the Irish Independent proudly reproduced its own demand: "For years we have been bled white - now it's payback time." And in case its readers missed the point: "Coming true . .. what we campaigned for. Our Page One leading article of June."
ONE OF Rupert Murdoch's stable had the idea earlier and put it more pithily: "It's the Sun wot won it." (That was after John Major's win in 1992. Rupert Murdoch has changed his mind since.)
But a pat on the back from Glenda Slagg is no substitute for an administration that's sure of itself and the direction in which it's heading. The new minority Coalition is neither.
And, like any other administration, from the strongest of single party governments to the most tentative coalition, it's susceptible to what Harold Macmillan simply called events.
Two such events are in the air. One is the resumption on Monday of the McCracken tribunal on Ben Dunne's payments to politicians.
The other, the subject of an intriguing reference by Mr Spring on Thursday to demands on the FF Labour government for tax concessions to the super rich, is reported by Geraldine Kennedy in today's - editions of The Irish Times.