As soon as the print media starts doing day-by-day, hour-by-hour diaries of the previous 48 hours, it's meltdown-time.

Or . . . to use a medical analogy . . . it's the beginning of an epidemic.

At the beginning of a flu epidemic, simple actions can interrupt its progress. Like sneezing into a tissue, rather than sharing your virus with everybody in the room. Like staying home from work, rather than dragging yourself into the office to infect everybody who touches a door handle you've grasped or a tap you've turned.

The same applies in some political crises. Interrupt the contagion by inaction.

As in: Don't just do something. Stand there.

Up to this point, too many government people have been counter-productively active, with the best of intentions. Starting with the Taoiseach. He has been endlessly courteous and responsive to journalists, including the melee of microphone-holders he encountered on Thursday. The payoff has been dire.

Fianna Fail speakers, again with the best of intentions, barked on about the leak and how unfair it was long after the tide of public and media opinion had lost interest in the leak. Backbenchers, most notably Pat Carey, gallantly went out to be drubbed, because they didn't have the information they needed to support their efforts to back up the Taoiseach.

Meanwhile, the media is having a collective orgasm. For the first time in years, politics is exciting. Blood is in the water.

Inevitability has set in: individual journalists, while agreeing that Bertie's a good and probably uncorrupted Taoiseach, while agreeing that he has dragged Fianna Fail into a much better place than it was in when he became leader, are telling each other he's done, dusted and defunct. Yes, they will say, it's disproportionate that £8k would bring down such a leader, but there you are. As if it was an inescapable, unmanageable process.

It is not an inescapable, unmanageable process. Charlie Haughey faced bigger and worse issues countless times during his leadership. The difference between CJ and Bertie is that CJ hauled in his troops when nasty stuff hit the fan. Fianna Fail, in Haughey's time, was always split.

Fianna Fail, in Bertie's time, has been remarkably united. The irony is that divided passion is more useful to a leader than united goodwill. Haughey's loyalists would have died for him. More importantly, they would have been asked to die for him.

Bertie has a rake of ministers and backbenchers who like him, but have not been asked to rally around. Except in a general, counterproductive "would you ever get out there on radio and say something" way.

To view this as an unmanageable process would be a failure of leadership on the part, not only of Fianna Fail, but also of the Progressive Democrats. Neither party wants an election. The danger, for the Progressive Democrats is that their DNA is inextricably interwoven with media perception, and so they are chronically vulnerable to the feedback loop from journalists. (Liz O'Donnell's Morning Ireland interview was a classic exemplar of this. ) The lure of the moral high ground can rob the PDs of perspective. In this instance, it might move them away from their stated objective of facing the electorate with a view to returning to power in an FF/PD coalition. If they become seduced by the possibility of a return to plug-pulling mode, they may cut and run, in the belief that their narrow electorate will be reaffirmed in its belief in their rectitude.

In that situation, Fianna Fail could continue as a minority government, which would leave the PDs free to attack them.

Such attacks would be of dubious credibility, given the length of time the two parties have been in bed together.

Or the Taoiseach could call a snap election. If he were to do that, the PDs would find themselves on one very small piece of high moral ground. Fianna Fail, on the other hand, are geared up and ready to go to the country, and know, from bitter experience, that the issue on which an election is called dies by the second week on the hustings, which, in this instance, might be no harm at all.

The challenge to the leadership of both parties, right now, is to interrupt the apparently inevitable process. To stop everything and re-group. To quit looking at how to run the post-mortem while the patient is still alive and breathing. To shut up until they have their ducks in a row and are sure that they actually are ducks.

This is a major test for both men.

In the US building trade, the best guys working on high-rise scaffolding are Native Americans. Whether they're from the Comanche or the Cherokee tribes, they are sure-footed and safe, hundreds of feet off the ground. One of the reasons is that they never look downward, believing the ground will drag them towards it. Their mantra, accordingly, is: "Don't look where you don't want to go."

Bertie Ahern and Michael McDowell might learn that one off by heart.