Remember that election poster "One-Party Government - No Thanks"? Remember the outgoing Attorney General and President of the Progressive Democrats, Mr Michael McDowell, climbing up that pole in Ranelagh at the defining moment in the campaign, when the junior partners changed tack to say that Fianna Fáil could not be trusted?
Remember Mr McDowell describing the Taoiseach's pet project, the Bertie Bowl, as "a Ceausescu-era Olympic project" which should be opposed as a matter of basic political morality? And, remember how that electoral strategy worked and the PDs won eight seats?
Mr McDowell would want it all to be forgotten now. The PDs are back in coalition with a comfortable majority with Fianna Fáil. And the basis on which they secured their mandate, resulting in a doubling of their members in the Dáil, is to be cast aside as quickly as the exchequer borrowing forecast, which mysteriously changed within a month from a surplus of €170 million to a deficit of €750 million.
True to character, the new Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Mr McDowell, has gone way over the top again in moving to shoot the messenger - not the message. The question we now have to face, he told journalists yesterday, is who governs the State. Was it the media agenda that the PDs should now withdraw from Government in the year 2002 because Mr Ray Burke lied to the Taoiseach in 1997? The answer, he said, was "emphatically no".
In an outburst which illustrated the heat inside the Coalition kitchen, Mr McDowell appealed to journalists to "get a grip" on themselves. "You are in a feeding frenzy at the moment and, in fact, mutual hysteria - one columnist reading what another columnist is writing - is creating an air of total unreality".
Mr McDowell would do well to remember that the media - in the form of The Sunday Business Post - risked the libel laws in publishing Mr James Gogarty's allegations about Mr Burke a few years ago. The Irish Times asked the Fianna Fáil leader, Mr Ahern, during the 1997 election campaign if he had satisfied himself that that former Minister could be appointed to his Cabinet. The PDs' queries, which sent Mr Ahern "climbing up every tree in North Dublin" prior to Mr Burke's nomination, were worthless. He is the first Minister in the history of the State who has been found to be corrupt by a tribunal of inquiry.
Is Mr McDowell harbouring some doubt that the media collectively served the public interest by bringing important matters into the public domain? These matters were so serious that they compelled governments, including the former Fianna Fáil/PD Coalition, to establish the McCracken, Moriarty and Flood tribunals. The Tánaiste sought, and secured, assurances from the Taoiseach about another alleged payment to a member of the present Government in keeping with the increased mandate which the PDs sought, and secured, to fulfil that task.