It has been an interesting spectacle, these last two weeks, watching the good times roll - all over the Minister for Finance. Interesting, too, to see Fine Gael's Michael Noonan streaking ahead of the rest of the opposition in his sustained and clever assault on the Budget.
From the first sound-bite, Noonan has demonstrated the best of himself, right down to the "gable end" image. His shining performance underlines one of the realities of political life which should console McCreevy this weekend: what goes around comes around. If you don't surrender to the bad times, or - more importantly - get stuck justifying your original intention, recovery is always possible.
But if recovery is possible, prevention is an even better option. Not an easy option, however, as has been assumed by many commentators. One of the frequent comments has been that "if McCreevy hadn't been so secretive", the tick of the time-bomb would have been heard and the detonator removed.
Much has been made of the suggestion that most of the Cabinet knew nothing of the more controversial measures until Budget day, and that as soon as they did know, individual Ministers, notably Michael Woods, predicted dire consequences.
Alongside the complaints about secrecy goes the allied whinge that McCreevy stopped listening a long time ago, and that nobody could have talked to him. Having known Charlie McCreevy for a long time, I find the picture of him as a secretive Lone Ranger quite difficult to accommodate, because my experience of him is rather the reverse. The McCreevy I worked with was not secretive at all. He could be trusted with a confidence, and he was not a gossip, but his instincts were towards openness and directness, even when neither was popular or profitable.
On the other hand, in recent years the abandonment of collegial discretion by successive cabinets has been almost total.
Many Ministers have made the pragmatic twin decisions that to have a high profile is a form of insurance taken out with the voter and activating the pivotal influence of public reaction is often easier than fighting for your point at the Cabinet table. Having made that decision, the Ministers involved engage in a sort of barter with journalists: "If I leak you this, you'll give me coverage on the other."
This unacknowledged barter system has become more powerful in recent years, when getting a story first has often been the litmus test of good journalism, rather than simply getting a good story. So a Minister who is prepared to give a journalist some of the details of an announcement the day before the information becomes generally available sets up an indebtedness with that journalist. In that context, a Minister for Finance preparing a budget sooner or later faces a choice. He or she can be open and share information with the entire Cabinet, or can be realistic and tight-lipped.
Given the level of leakage from this Budget in spite of McCreevy's apparent secretiveness, it would appear that no matter how he tried to keep the details under wraps, his colleagues were going to subvert him. So he kept some details off the Cabinet table and suffered as a consequence.
AS for the complaint that McCreevy doesn't listen - for this, my good friend Ray MacSharry must take the blame. MacSharry, in his cutback years, took no prisoners, brooked no opposition, rejected whinges.
He had to do something that could not be softened no matter what arguments were put to him, and so could not afford to listen to many of the arguments Ministers wanted to put to him.
MacSharry's rigidity made perfect sense, but it also provided something of a template for later Ministers, so that the capacity to jut a jaw and refuse to consider pleas to soften the package is now seen as a prerequisite for good handling of the Finance brief. McCreevy is up there with the best jaw-jutters. The punishment he has taken and may - unless he takes appropriate action - continue to take has been brutal.
He has been portrayed incorrectly as a fascist male chauvinist, eager to feed women into the maw of the Celtic Tiger. Even tougher has been the isolation he has publicly endured. It must be painful when your own party machinery is lining up backbenchers to badmouth your Budget to journalists, to prevent Independents getting all the kudos for opposing it. When your own Cabinet colleagues are overtaken with a sudden need for media-invisibility that, too, must hurt. Mary Harney took the heat on Questions and Answers and the Taoiseach and Dermot Ahern came out to bat, but the majority of Ministers got fierce busy, these last two weeks. The dust-motes are still settling on this issue and McCreevy has a deal of work yet to do. His boundless optimism, humour, energy and personal resilience are all going to be needed in the next phase. If he can stop trying to justify what simply didn't work, he will recover.
But there is a wider and more important lesson to be learned. This Government is convinced that because it has money to spend, people will be grateful. It is an odd failure to understand the way people think, and if the Government doesn't learn that big spending never makes people grateful, it will repeat this kind of disaster.