I've always had a soft spot for the slightly ridiculous but somehow compelling 1979 cult film, The Warriors. Set in New York, it tells the story of the eponymously named street gang and their long journey home from the Bronx to Coney Island, being attacked by rival gangs and the police, as they make their way through hostile territory to safety.

And bizarre as it might sound, there are certain parallels between the story of the Warriors and what the government has gone through over the past three months.

At the start of September, the coalition was certainly in hostile territory and Christmas was their Coney Island. But in order to get to the safety of the Yuletide season, it would have to overcome serious obstacles along the way: the Lisbon referendum, the Nama legislation, the re-negotiation of the programme for government and the most severe budget since the 1930s.

And the odds seemed stacked against them. Lisbon I had been lost and, even though the severity of the recession seemed to favour the Yes side, nobody was taking the passing of the second Lisbon referendum for granted. The Nama legislation was widely regarded as the most contentious piece of legislation introduced into the Oireachtas in decades.

The re-negotiation of the progamme for government with the Greens was also far from guaranteed, because any new deal had to be put to the Green membership for approval by a two-thirds majority. Given the lack of money to spend on green projects and the opposition in the junior coalition party to Nama, it was far from guaranteed that the coalition would survive. And then, at the end of it all, lay the prospect of the toughest budget in over three quarters of a century.

But somehow, one by one, these major hurdles were cleared by the government. Lisbon was a landslide and a serious shot in the arm to government morale. More surprising was the Nama debate which the coalition won hands down. A key turning point in the events of the autumn was the intervention of former taoiseach Garret FitzGerald. His argument that a Dáil rejection of either Nama or the budget "could throw our state into the hands of the IMF" was hugely significant given his credibility and his Fine Gael background. A week later, another former Fine Gael leader Alan Dukes also backed Nama, criticising the opposition's alternatives. The idea that Nama was the 'least worst option' took hold and the heat rapidly went out of the debate.

Attention then turned to the programme for government re-negotiation. Fianna Fáil, however, hasn't become the most successful political party in western Europe without learning a trick or two about getting power and holding on to it. It gave the Greens more than enough to sell the deal to their members.

Suddenly it was three hurdles down and one to go. But drastic and all as the budget would be, that final hurdle suddenly didn't look as daunting for the government. Coney Island was in sight.

The failure to do a deal with the unions on public-sector pay was definitely a setback – if that could have been agreed the key source of anger over last Wednesday's budget would have been defused in advance. But the government had done its homework in terms of managing expectations and, although the measures introduced were extremely painful, there was no sense of shock last week.

Despite introducing €4bn of cutbacks, the opposition actually struggled to lay a glove on the government, partly because they had been forced to accept the need for that level of cutbacks in the weeks leading up to the budget.

The safety of Christmas is now just a few days away. The government isn't prospering but it has survived. Serious challenges lie ahead – not least the industrial unrest in the public sector. And in politics, the unexpected can never be ruled out. But suddenly the prospect of the government hanging in there until 2011 or even 2012 seems like a very real one.

People may dispute Brian Lenihan's assertion that the country has turned the corner, but next year's budget – with the need for €2bn in cutbacks – now looks nowhere near as daunting.

None of this is to suggest there will be any short- to medium-term lift in the government's popularity. Just because the reaction to the budget is muted doesn't mean people aren't angry about the pain that has been inflicted.

And time may not heal all, or even some, wounds. The last government to preside over a recession – the Fine Gael-Labour coalition in the 1980s – stuck together for over four years, but it didn't save the two parties from an election battering.

But the longer the coalition survives the more chance there is for some sort of economic recovery and the possibility that it could get some credit for that with voters.

It is unlikely to be enough to change the outcome of the next general election – the inevitability of a Fine Gael-Labour government after the next election remains undiminished. But it might be the difference between the government parties losing 15 seats or 30 seats. That, though, is for the future. In the coming weeks, battle-hardened ministers can enjoy their break and reflect that, like the Warriors, they have arrived bloodied, but unbowed, at their desired destination. The rest can wait until the new year.

scoleman@tribune.ie