Her party is battered and possibly broken beyond repair. Her crusade to reform the health service has been stalled by protracted negotiations for a new consultants contract, and 40% of Fianna Fail backbenchers are unhappy with her as the minister.

It was a fatigued-looking health minister who sat through yet another incandescent Dail debate on Wednesday about the continuing mayhem in the hospital service. Health campaigners, who had followed the discussion from high up in the public gallery in Leinster House, fulminated afterwards that the minister had spent most of it doodling on a large, brown envelope and texting under the desk.

"Just looking at her. You'd say she was pretty downbeat, " concluded a former colleague. "She's tired. She's got burnt out in the last year. The internal leadership wrangles wore her out.

Then she had a very bruising election followed by the death of her mother, Sarah. Talk about somebody needing a duvet day."

Joan of Arc Once hailed as the Joan of Arc of Irish politics for confronting Charlie Haughey on matters of ethics when selfaggrandising hardman colleagues shrivelled in his shadow, there was always cross-party consensus on one point at least: Harney had guts. When she resigned from Fianna Fail over its rejection of the Anglo-Irish Agreement and formed the Progressive Democrats with Des O'Malley, the future looked brave, principled and hallmarked with Harney's integrity.

Now that nascent blizzard of cliches about mould-breakers has evaporated, along with most of the parliamentary party.

A brilliant public speaker and media performer, Harney has become a remote figure, seldom available for interviews, daily losing the PR battle in her health portfolio and letting contacts with erstwhile party colleagues slide. On Friday, she was a no-show at a nurses' graduation ceremony in Sligo which they claimed she had been scheduled to attend. Her idealistic verve seems to have been zapped.

"There hasn't been a peep out of her in the Dail since it came back. She hasn't even been asked to comment on Bertie's evidence at the tribunal, " says a Dail habitue. "It's as if she's become irrelevant."

Feeling duty-bound to hand-hold her fellow dazed election survivors after May's debacle, the PDs' interim N1 leader exists in a bubble of suspended animation. As worried party members dream up ways to keep her as their titular leader while alleviating the commensurate workload, Harney too faces an uncertain future . . . the solitary buffer between Fianna Fail and the Greens at the cabinet table.

Sources unanimously postulate that, had she withstood Michael McDowell's serial coup attempts, the PDs' unedifying wobble over Bertiegate early in the election campaign would never have happened.

"She's not bitter about Michael, though I wouldn't be too sure about the cordiality of their relationship, " says one. "What I'd be surer about is that, if she'd still been leader during the election, she would have gone to see Bertie quietly and sorted it out instead of the megaphone stuff we had. One of the haunting nightmares for her must be that, in that scenario, we could have come back with a couple more seats than we have." Thus the Greens would have been rendered surplus to requirements for the formation of a government ("the new organic biosphere", as she labelled it) and the pre-election status quo would have resumed.

The Greens' original price for coalition, that Harney be banished from the department of health, taking her hospital co-location master plan with her, got short shrift from the taoiseach.

Bertie Ahern likes and trusts Mary Harney: besides, she provides a decoy for the brickbats some Fianna Fail minister would otherwise have to contend with in Hawkins House. Her commitment to staying the course in health . . . despite rumours that the sole guarantee Ahern gave her was that she could remain for as long as he is taoiseach . . . gives a cushion to Fianna Fail critics playing to their own constituencies. Harney, for all her early idealism, is not naive about the cynicism of politics.

Agreat asset "She stayed on for the party, for her constituents and for the health service, " says former Labour Party MEP Bernie Malone, who has been a close friend of the first woman tanaiste since they were two of only four women among Dublin's 40 councillors in the 1970s.

"She could have had a much easier life. She likes the company of legal people. She could have been a great barrister. Or, after her experience in enterprise & trade, she would be a great asset to any business. I keep saying to her: 'Relax, take it easy. There's a life after politics, as I've discovered.'

She's a very warm person. She's quiet.

She's very loyal as a friend. The public wouldn't see that. All they see is somebody to bash."

Another woman who is close to her outside politics says: "She's not a quitter. She won't walk away. She was devastated by the election and she was coping with her mother's illness at the same time. Her mother had become severely incapacitated and I've never seen anything like the filial love Mary showed her, despite her hectic schedule.

"It was a pretty serious lot of stuff to deal with. It was dreadful for her to see so many people losing their seats at the election. This decimation was never in the plan. It was like a runaway horse the way events took over. She's given the leadership 13 years and led them into two successful governments.

Another generation has to do it now.

Mary's 54. She'll be 59 at the next election.

"But she's lost none of her determination to fix the health problem. Both her parents were public health patients and, by the time they got ill, they couldn't get VHI because they had pre-existing conditions. Her father broke his neck when he was 57. It infuriates those of us who know her well and know what motivates her when she's accused of elitism with the co-location project. She's acutely aware of what public health is all about."

To patients lying on trolleys or waiting for life-or-death treatment, and to hospital workers coping with an erratic, bureaucracy-ridden system, the minister's personal motivation may offer little solace. However, the case made by her friends that she is driven to dismantle vested interests in order to achieve an equitable health service seems to contradict her frequent denials that she is an ideologue.

"She doesn't have an ideology. She has values, " says a friend and former colleague. "And she's as tough as nails when it comes to the whole health thing. The people she is taking on know they have powerful emotional cards to play if they want to get their way, but she will not buckle. She's closing down 13 cancer centres. It's a rare politician who will stand up to hospital groups everywhere. I suppose one of the advantages of being a one-woman band is that you don't have any backbenchers screaming, 'You can't do this to me'. Everybody who's ever been minister for health couldn't get out of there fast enough, but she won't budge.

Knowing how stubborn she is, she'll never walk off the stage if the job isn't done."

Obstinacy is a trait she brings to bear in her spare time when playing Scrabble "very competitively" and Sudoku, less keenly. "She's got great focus, " says Bernie Malone. "She's able to blot out a lot of things. We were all away together in Spain in the summer. She's able to relax. Cooking is her other hobby. Brian [Geoghegan, her husband] is a great cook too.

They're a great team in the kitchen.

Marrying him changed her life. It gave it another dimension and he's her supreme confidant." Malone dismisses speculation Harney has her eye on the EU commissioner's job when Charlie McCreevy's term ends, on the grounds that: "She'd rather have quality time with Brian."

Another source says: "This is the best opportunity she could have to tackle the vested interests. Only a minister who is not running for the Dail again could do it at this stage. Frankly, she doesn't care if nobody likes her any more."

Close to Des O'Malley Meanwhile, "she must plough on at the helm of the PDs", as one friend puts it. A recommendation by an internal inquiry that senators be allowed to contest leadership elections is expected to be adopted by the party's national executive. The move is widely interpreted as a mechanism to elevate the taoiseach's nominee, Fiona O'Malley, to the head of the party.

"Mary's still very close to Des [O'Malley]. She would discuss political issues with him, like Bertiegate, " says a former colleague. "Fiona's been anointed as the next leader. It's kind of ironic that Des passed on the baton to Mary and she's handing it back to the O'Malleys. It might be a cute move too. If you knew the party was heading for oblivion, wouldn't it be easier to hand it back than having to wind it up yourself? I think the party will contest the local elections and that will be it. Over.

Kaput. The problem for Mary is, what does she become? An Independent in cabinet? Return to Fianna Fail? I know she compartmentalises things and that she's not the sort of person who lies awake at night fretting but these are things that must surely worry her."

Several of her former colleagues admit, however, that they have no idea what are her preoccupations because they have had no contact with her for several months. "Mary's in politics because she's good at it. It's all she's ever done, " says one of them. "Politics was in her life before she ever met most of us, and it'll be there long after us too."