Insert coin to continue

I go away for a quick weekend trip to Cork and Galway and I come back to Dublin to discover the country has fallen apart at the seams. Well nothing like playing catchup on about 1000 blog posts, 10,000 tweets and 100,000 politics.ie posts. This is now the end of the end for this government. Gormley's statement this morning that he wants an election date in late January has given us all a target date to aim for. However, I'm still not convinced that we won't have an election this side of Christmas.

Somewhere around Enfield I switched over to the radio, having been listening to Grand Magus' awesome Hammer of the North up until then, to catch the end of the news and some of Liveline. Firstly Mammy O'Rourke, who's constituency I had just zipped through at 120km/h, was blathering on about the Fianna Fáil leadership issue and how they would take stock in the New Year after the budget had been passed. Talk about not getting it - the people don't care about internal FF shenanigans anymore and with the Greens having put a sunset clause on this Dáil sticking to her timetable would leave them dealing with a leadership heave right in the middle of an election campaign.

Then Sean Power came on Joe Duffy and suggested that Cowen resign with almost immediate effect, the parties all come together and pass a budget to appease the IMF and then we have our election next year. The problem with that is if Cowen is gone then so too will be support from Lowry and Healy-Rae. Thus after the by-election in DSE spells the game is up with 82 opposition (51FG, 20L, 5SF, McGrath, O'Sullivan, Behan, Grealish, Lowry, JHR) and only 80 government.

Later on this week I'll get around to the IMF issue but at the pace things are moving right now that will be very old news by then.