Of course, Cowen's job was made easier by the enormous amount of money at his disposal but, as McCreevy's critics in Fianna Fail were rarely shy about pointing out, huge largesse didn't always guarantee popular budgets and positive headlines when Champagne Charlie was in charge. Like his two previous offerings, Wednesday's budget lacked the flair and reforming zeal of McCreevy's seven years as finance minister but, as ever with Cowen, the attention to political detail was staggering.

The opposition had almost nothing to go on. Fine Gael was right to point out that the budget lacked imagination and innovation . . . that was the intention. Individualisation and decentralisation were imaginative and innovative features of previous budgets, and they caused the government no end of grief. As far as Bertie Ahern is concerned, imagination and innovation . . .

much like 'the vision thing' so beloved of commentators . . . do not win elections.

Labour's argument, meanwhile, that the budget favoured the rich, simply doesn't wash. Sure, the 42% rate of tax was cut by a point, but the clawback arrangement whereby those earning over 100,000 got hit with a higher health levy was clearly designed to head off any criticism that this was inequitable. Besides, with two out of five earners now outside the tax net and Cowen introducing the biggest social welfare package in the history of the state, it was a budget Gordon Brown would have been quite proud to stand over.

Cowen managed to walk a fine line between giving away billions of euro and having it look as if he was buying the general election. Yet every line in that budget speech was done with next May's polling day in mind. One only has to read the section on 'Protecting the Environment' to realise this.

The spin before Wednesday was that this would be a 'Green Budget' and the omens seemed good when Cowen quoted the Stern review's conclusion that climate change was "one of the most pressing global economic and environmental challenges we face." But what followed was less St Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of ecology, and more St Augustine . . . 'Lord make me Green, but not yet'.

Cowen committed himself to changing the current rating system for VRT to "relate it more closely to environmental policy objectives, in this case reducing carbon dioxide emissions." He said he intended that there should be some reward in the VRT system for choosing lower-emission vehicles and that those choosing higher-emission vehicles should pay more.

This is all very logical and laudable, but the minister went and spoiled it all by saying his department would carry out a "public consultation process" on its proposals before the government would make a decision and that the target date for any change would be 1 January 2008.

Why the need for public consultation?

What is there to consult about? It's an absolute no-brainer that the VRT system should reward lower-emission vehicles.

We elect governments to make decisions.

We have a public consultation process every five years . . . it's called a general election. Frankly, it's embarrassing to see the government bottling this decision.

It's worth remembering that it was after a public consultation process that the government did a u-turn on carbon tax, which it had previously pledged to introduce. Then there was the farce of Charlie McCreevy announcing that he would ask his department and the Revenue to come up with a fair system of applying benefitin-kind on parking spaces. A couple of years later he abandoned the idea after a less than enthusiastic response (to put it mildly) from civil servants. The moral of those stories is that we should expect the VRT system to change when it actually changes and not before.

The minister also announced plans on Wednesday to rebalance motor tax to encourage the public to drive cleaner cars, and to impose some additional cost on cars with higher carbon dioxide emissions. Again it will apply only to vehicles registered on or after 1 January 2008.

Why wait a year before introducing a measure rooted in common sense which would send out a real statement about the government's commitment to Kyoto and the environment?

The answer is of course that there is a general election in May and the government doesn't want to touch anything that might be remotely controversial before then. Politically, the approach makes sense but it does beg the question as to why this was spun as a green budget. It patently was not.

The budget actually showed that, despite all the lip service to global warming, we have a long way to go before green policies are a central component of Irish politics. Just as it took the participation of the PDs in government to ensure that tax reform was taken seriously, it will require the presence of the Green Party around the cabinet table to bring environmental issues centre stage.

The irony is that last Wednesday's cleverly orchestrated giveaway budget, for all its green failings, has further lowered the odds on the current government being returned to office.