The trickiest political problem of the year may well be the one to which least attention has been paid by those who've been grimly forecasting what we're in for in 2002.
No one doubts that health, housing and education - public services and public finance - will be urgent issues in a general election now likely to be held in May, before time runs out for the Fianna Fβil-Progressive Democrat coalition and the World Cup begins.
Nor is there much doubt that Bertie Ahern would like to arrange a referendum on abortion for the spring - if only the PDs could be convinced that, for the Independents who've kept the coalition in office since 1997, it's payback time. The final instalment.
The Government has no room for manoeuvre and little heart for a fight. Unemployment is now rising more steeply than it has risen for decades. The coalition will still be one of the most durable administrations in the history of the State, but job losses are beginning to tarnish its record of economic success.
Fianna Fβil tacticians, who could always rely on a feeble, sometimes all but invisible, opposition, are beginning to look and sound shaky themselves. The best they could do of late was to raise a row about Ruair∅ Quinn's modest ambition to "get the bastards out". But the trickiest problem for whichever coalition takes office in high summer will be our failure to ratify the Treaty of Nice in a small poll after a campaign that would have shamed the candidates in a county council election.
It was probably Ireland's lowest moment in the European Community - and all the worse because it gave an impression that, once we had taken what we needed (and deserved) from the Community, we were prepared to ignore our obligations or the needs of 10 or more applicant states waiting for admission.
Pat Cox, one of Ireland's leading MEPs, spoke of the Irish campaign in favour of enlargement as showing the arrogance of presumption: "the greatest guilt of a democratic society". EU opinion polls found evidence of ignorance, indifference and dissatisfaction.
To critics of the EU and Ireland's role in it, the defeat was momentous and irreversible: the European elite, said Roger Cole, chairman of the Peace and Neutrality Campaign, must take heed of Ireland's historic No. The "rulers of Europe", as he saw them, were "trying to involve Ireland in a new age of European imperialism".
To make the campaign and the arguments more difficult to follow (and the decision more difficult to reverse) several of the campaigners on opposing sides had overlapping arguments. But our political correspondent Mark Brennock later detected the emergence of potential coalitions in which divisions, on local and European lines, coincide: the social democrats of Fine Gael, Labour and the Green Party versus the nationalists and liberals of the present administration. The Forum on Europe may show up other alignments.
Meanwhile, two vastly experienced commentators, John Palmer, director of the European Policy Centre, and Paul Gillespie of the Institute of European Affairs and foreign editor of The Irish Times, have published a paper on The Europe We Need which includes some stimulating criticism of all sides.
"The case for Europe," they wrote, "has too often been advanced in economic and commercial terms. This is in spite of the fact that over the decades the EU has developed important policies to encourage regional development, to counter social exclusion, to promote greater equality. However, it has become more and more obvious to peoples throughout the EU that a deeply political and continuing process of closer integration is under way.
"The contradiction between this reality and the apolitical fashion in which political leaders have conducted the debate about closer union has become an intolerable impediment to creating widespread consent and support for the European project . . .
"The existence, evolution and gradual enlargement of the EU have been enormous factors in encouraging and underpinning Europe's half-century of peace and stability and its democratic economic and social development . . .
"On the eve of the historic unification of Europe, the continuing political void at the heart of the case for European integration risks being filled by populist politicians all too eager to exploit a sense of popular incomprehension and unease at the pace and direction of change.
"The nationalist alternatives they offer - in part nostalgic and in part xenophobic - offer no viable solution to the very real challenges facing democratic politics in the era of globalisation." That's the message of the mass demonstrations from Vancouver to Genoa.
Palmer and Gillespie argue that a stronger and more effective EU "can act as a crucial shock absorber between its peoples and the negative and sometimes irrational impulses of globalisation.
"It can help ensure a plurality of choices for society, for cultures and for communities within the framework of a global system. It offers one important model for those wishing to build a democratic transnational polity for the 21st century." They respond to the argument about superstates and domination: "The creation of a monolithic 'European' identity has never been part of the integration project. The integration process is not about building a European state or a European nation. It is rather predicated on multiple identities and diverse allegiances."
The 2002 debate on Nice is only beginning.
dwalsh@irish-times.ie