Unlike some fellow members of the Cabinet, Noel Dempsey is an energetic, imaginative politician. And he has decent instincts. However, he runs into problems getting things done, writes Mark Hennessy
During his time in the Custom House as Minister for the Environment, he gnawed like a dog with a bone on a plan to introduce a ban on Oireachtas members sitting on local councils.
Given that Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats then depended upon Kerry South TD, Mr Jackie Healy-Rae, and his ilk, the idea was always going to be stillborn during that administration. No matter how many times he was told, Mr Dempsey persisted until he received a bloody nose when the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, backed away from it after the Independents made it clear they would not budge.
Following the election, and benefiting from a very different Dáil arithmetic, his successor in Environment, Mr Cullen, with some clever footwork, piloted the legislation safely into harbour.
Today, Mr Dempsey has chosen another major target for change: third-level fees. And he has a point. Their abolition by former Labour minister Ms Niamh Breathnach has done little to get the children of the poor into third-level. Last year, Mr Dempsey mused that people earning the kind of money he does should be well able to pay for their children's education. Most people, earning far less, would agree.
However, he left open the possibility that the incomes threshold could be set at a far lower level - a decision that allowed opponents to paint him as the big, bad ogre threatening the middle-classes.
In the Dáil this week, the Taoiseach offered a signal that the idea is in difficulties when he opined that the change would affect only those earning "several hundreds of thousands of euro".
A threshold set at this level would raise little, or nothing, as the Taoiseach knows only too well. So what is Mr Ahern up to? Is he seeking a compromise? Or will he hang Mr Dempsey out to dry?
The Progressive Democrats do not want to touch the idea. If offered a high incomes threshold, they will argue that it will cost more to administer than it will raise. So why bother?
If Mr Dempsey wins and gets an €80,000 family income threshold, as is being mooted by some, he will raise not-insignificant money, but it will annoy the hell out of the upper middle-classes.
And the upper middle-classes count. Dartry votes. Sadly, Darndale does not. The money raised will be used to get more poor students into third-level, the Minister promises. However, the revenue will not be put into a special fund safe from the clutches of the Department of Finance.
Such funds are known as hypothecated taxation and Finance officials hate them - even though they did accept that money from the plastic bags levy should go into one.
The Minister cannot guarantee that all future monies will go in the same direction. Nor can he guarantee that thresholds will not change. So he will be seen as shafting the middle-classes, right away or in the future.
Although Labour trumpeted the idea in 1994, the abolition of fees has not helped the bright kid from Darndale. In fact, the numbers from such places are falling, according to UCD academic, Prof Patrick Clancy.
Clearly, free fees benefit everybody, rich and poor. Abolishing them will do a bit, but probably not much, to level the pitch. And change will create its own new inequalities.
Labour, increasingly moving to capture more of the middle-class ground, argues that third-level education is what secondary education was in the 1980s. Therefore, it should be free. Fine Gael, on the other hand, failed once more to make the issue its own.
Offered the Government's jugular, Enda Kenny, instead, waffled about its first year in office. Frankly, there are times when one despairs. Education is the key to the future. The Republic is one of the world's most open economies, dependent on trade and increasingly expensive. The days of low-tech, blue-collar industries are gone.
The ones that are left here will be gone soon to Eastern Europe, North Africa, or God knows where else. And there is no point complaining. Globalisation is a fact, not a choice.
This leaves the country facing stark choices for the future. The poorly educated are currently either unemployed, or in low-paid, dead-end jobs. In the future, most of the dead-end jobs will go.
So, we can do two things. The Government could drive millions into schools in the poorest areas: more and better teachers, canteens, all-day care, better back-up services, improved maintenance grants for those who manage to get to third-level. We can give kids the chance to dream.
Or society at large can sit back and watch many of the past pupils of such schools in the years to come on security guard duty in the rain outside McDonald's, or in the District Court dock.
The problems in such areas will not be helped by whether or not Mr Dempsey succeeds in abolishing free fees for the better-off, or, at least, they will not be helped enough.
The Minister is squandering political capital that could be better used elsewhere.