There’s plenty of life in the old dog just yet

New politics has been with us for almost nine months now so it's not a bad time to take stock on how the experiment is working out.

The most important thing is that this bockety government held together by rusty nails and springs has somehow managed to survive.

We omniscient members of the high priesthood known as political correspondents have got it spectacularly wrong when it came to Enda Kenny's longevity.

If you rewind back to February, March and April you will see confident predictions that he will be gone within months and even weeks.

Later on, when it looks like he wasn't kindly obliging the predictions, the deadline was pushed back to the end of the summer, then the Budget, and then Christmas. The latest intel is it will be spring.

Eventually the Kenny millennialist a will be proved right – but I'm still sticking to my guns and saying he will stay longer than my colleagues have been predicting.

It's mainly a hunch, based on the demeanour of the man. The election knocked the puff out of him. But he has bounced back.

Despite the precarious nature of the government his authority has seemed stronger. Brexit has given him a strong card. So has the fact that he has very strong support in the parliamentary party, that he is the right person to lead the ship of state through the icebergs.

There is a sense too that his potential successors are not the finished product or haven't quite got to where they need to go.

But then, leadership successions can be messy hasty affairs. People can be thrust into the new job. You don't really know what they are like until they are actually doing the job.

Leo Varadkar could be one if the greats. He could also be one of the great belly-flops.

There's a bit of calculation there too. Kenny must step down before the next election. But I'm not getting a sense of an early election. Fianna Fáil is not in a hurry. It's been often too many times in the past by snap elections.

However, if Fine Gael changes leader it will precipitate an immediate election. It's not going to allow Varadkar or Simon Coveney or Frances Fitzgerald enjoy a honeymoon period.

So, all things being equal, it will be the end of 2017 when it will all happen. Of course, one unseen iceberg is all it takes.

So what has happened so far? Very little – and that’s the problem. It's a government being run on a caretaker basis. So it’s prone to being a victim for every landmine which the opposition lobs.

It has already lost practically every private members motion that has been taken by Fianna Fáil, or ones that are populist - on fracking and on mortgage interest relief for example.

To read Harry’s column in full, please see this week’s Connacht Tribune.