IT seems like it's time to dust down that old maxim about Fine Gael being unable to walk past a sleeping dog without giving it a kick. The party can attempt all it likes to portray last week's intervention by John Deasy as a non-story, but it will be whistling against the wind.

Let's not beat about the bush here. Deasy's intervention is bad, bad news for Fine Gael. It doesn't matter that he is something of a maverick and that his dad had a long history of challenging previous Fine Gael leaders. Coming just months before the general election, the timing couldn't be worse.

It's hard to know what to make of Damien English's subsequent comments.

He released a statement on Friday saying that his remarks had been misconstrued. But when a TD is quizzed about the leadership issue, any response other than "the issue simply does not arise" is asking for trouble.

Up to now, Fine Gael has carefully cultivated the notion that it can, and will, win the general election, despite the 50-seat gap between it and Fianna Fail after the last general election. Though no party since the foundation of the state has ever come close to closing that kind of deficit, the party has repeatedly and confidently insisted it can win up to 60 seats in a general election.

It was right to do so, even if the predictions seemed wildly optimistic to anybody who has studied the 43 constituencies. To have any hope of success . . . and even simply to maximise its seat tally and avoid a repeat of a 2002 . . . Fine Gael needed to convince the electorate that it, in tandem with Labour, was a realistic alternative to Fianna Fail and it could win the election. Doubts couldn't be allowed to enter into it.

The problem is that they now have. It is clear from the comments of Deasy and others last week that not everyone in the party believes Fine Gael can win the next general election. How can the leadership convince anyone that Fine Gael will drive Fianna Fail out of office, if people are talking already about what will happen with the leadership if and when the party fails to win the election?

It has been a pretty awful few months for Fine Gael. In theory, the whole Bertiegate affair should have left the government seriously damaged, limping towards a general election. But, in reality, it was Fine Gael's electoral prospects that took a hammering and Bertie Ahern who emerged strengthened and with an air of invincibility.

Fine Gael has, understandably, looked slightly shell-shocked ever since. The body language of senior figures has changed notably since the autumn and the momentum that had been building since before the very strong European and local election results has clearly stalled.

Gay Mitchell's decision not to contest the election was a massive confidence blow.

There are mutterings about discontent within old Labour about the recent performance of Fine Gael. And, with the Greens doing their best Greta Garbo 'I vant to be alone' impression, all is not well within the Rainbow.

Fine Gael has not helped matters with a few questionable decisions . . . the plainly insane boot-camp proposal, a candidate donning a Star Trek outfit in election literature, and the idea of running ads attacking Michael McDowell's record on crime. None of the aforementioned would come even close to being fatal to Fine Gael's chances, but arguably they show up the absence of meaty, innovative policies from the alternative government.

And to have any chance of unseating Fianna Fail, that is exactly what the Rainbow will have to produce. When Garret FitzGerald succeeded in overturning a large Fianna Fail majority in 1981 . . . helped, it has to be said, by an increase in the number of TDs in the Dail from 148 to 166 . . . the party's imaginative and ground-breaking manifesto was a big factor. Obviously the Fine Gael-Labour coalition does not want to produce its policy platform too early, but there must also be a big risk that the election will be effectively over by the time they get around to it.

It is impossible not to feel a great deal of sympathy this weekend for Enda Kenny, who must be tearing his hair out at Deasy's intervention. Kenny has been criticised for his performance during Bertiegate and doubts have been expressed about whether he can appeal to voters in Dublin, but he has done little wrong since becoming leader. The fact that people could even consider Fine Gael as realistic contenders after the party's meltdown in 2002 is an enormous achievement.

Perhaps too much is being expected of Kenny. When Neil Kinnock took over as the leader of the British Labour party in 1983 after the Tory landslide, nobody in the party expected him to win the next election . . . the target was to make progress in the 1987 election and win back power in the following contest in 1991 or 1992. Fine Gael's position in 2002, when Kenny took over, was not dissimilar to Labour in Britain in 1983 . . . both parties had been routed. The difference was that Fine Gael hadn't won an election in 20 years. And the idea of writing off the next election . . .

effectively spending another decade in opposition . . . was too unpalatable for anyone in the party to swallow.

It was, and remains, a huge task for Kenny to deliver immediate success. His best hope now is that this mini-crisis will galvanise Fine Gael and shake it out of its post-Bertiegate trauma. With just four months to the election, he will know that it can't afford any more weeks like the last one.