Suddenly, the beast is released. Brian Cowen's knockabout performances during the week caused great excitement amongst the people who read the political runes and interpret their meanings. Pow! Cowen's verbal uppercuts to the Fine Gael leader in the Dáil has us all looking forward to the bloody prospect of a Brian/Enda tv debate during the election campaign. Bash! Cowen sends a normally aggressive Sean O'Rourke scampering back behind his microphone for protection. Biff(o)! The Taoiseach tells his backbenchers that he'll be leading them into the next election whether they like it or not, and anyone who disagrees can see him outside.

And so, late in the day, Cowen becomes the street fighter his backbenchers always wanted him to be. (Some people thought he was just being rude and obnoxious, but different standards apply in Fianna Fáil). He has been revived by the knowledge that his political career will be over in months and is giving vent to the frustration he has been feeling through two years of personal abuse, increasingly low expectations of his performance and predictions of his impending departure as Taoiseach. On Tuesday, we were being primed for a Brian vs Brian battle for the Fianna Fáil leadership. By Thursday there was only one Brian standing, and it wasn't the minister for finance.

Cowen's media and Dáil performances weren't the only contributory factors to this turnaround. A weak and sorry Brian Lenihan played his part too. By now it has become obvious to most people that giving Lenihan the job as minister for finance was like putting Homer Simpson in charge of a nuclear power plant. Having had no part to play in the start of the economic downturn, he has led the country into a meltdown of unprecedented seriousness with a series of reckless, thoughtless and dangerous decisions. That we are no longer in control of our economic affairs is down mainly to him. On the list of politicians responsible for our banjaxed nation, he rivals Charlie McCreevy and Bertie Ahern.

It was clear from earlier this year that he was flailing but he was to a certain extent protected from public criticism by his illness. To his great credit, he never used the fact that he was fighting a serious cancer as an excuse for anything, but he didn't have to. Enough people were willing to reward his personal courage with limited scrutiny of his public performance. His own recovery and the recovery of the nation became mixed up in the public debate over the economy. Many in the media, and far too many in senior positions in Fine Gael, gave him a free pass. By the time the damage he wrought had become apparent, it was too late to do anything except bring in the cavalry in the form of the IMF, EU and ECB.

One result was Tuesday's doolally and dishonest budget – doolally because it is a contrived and direct attack on our economic recovery, the last thing the Rehnpublic Of Ireland needs right now, and dishonest because it purports to spread the pain and to be "equitable". Any budget which makes millionaires 6% better off while slashing social welfare payments and the minimum wage (not to mention leaving TDs' pay untouched) is de facto a regressive one. That it should be introduced at this moment in our history, when solidarity among our people has never been more required, is an indication that every platitude Lenihan utters about sharing the pain, and being all in it together, is blather, pure and simple.

His performances over the last few weeks bolster this argument. Apart from his evisceration by Michael Noonan on Prime Time on Tuesday, Lenihan has been tetchy, touchy, hypersensitive to criticism, and indifferent to people's real stories of struggle and financial difficulty. He cut an impatient figure on Pat Kenny's radio programme on Wednesday morning; the previous night he had reacted to a query about the level of shame he felt as though appalled that hostile questions should be asked at a press conference. His use of language has always bordered on the pompous, the result presumably of years in the Law Library. That might have sounded learned or knowledgeable once upon a time, but now it seems prickly and patronising.

This is the man some Fianna Fáil TDs want to lead their party? Bring it on, I say. Any of us who believe that Ireland would benefit greatly from the long-term, indeed permanent, absence of Fianna Fáil should welcome Lenihan as leader. He would be a constant reminder of why exactly the next few years will be so difficult, unlike Micheál Martin, who shares collective responsibility for the downturn with every minister since 1997, but who cannot be firmly attached to any of the decisions which did for us. This ability to be always in the other room when the pottery breaks has been a skill of his for some time and will come in very handy should he be a future leader of the opposition, berating Fine Gael and Labour about the state of the nation. Martin is also a more suave and sophisticated media performer than Lenihan, less sensitive to criticism, less hostile to challenge. His critics say he doesn't know much about the economy, but neither, as we now all know to our cost, does Lenihan. If Fianna Fáil TDs genuinely believe Martin offers them less electoral salvation than the finance minister, then they are even more stupid than any of us thought.

On the basis of the apprentice, our nation is doomed

OF all the brain-rotting, mind-numbing nonsense inflicted on the world in recent years by reality tv, The Apprentice is closest to the bottom of the barrel. The sight of a bunch of wannabe business people, clearly suffering from horrendously low self-esteem, allowing themselves to be judged by buffoon car salesman Bill Cullen, is one of the most nauseating on television. Last week, Cullen brought in Gavin Duffy, whose main claim to fame is that he likes to scare innocent stags half to death, to help him boot somebody off the show. The results were suitably cringemaking, Duffy ended up berating a contestant for being dull, which is a bit like Elton John accusing somebody of being gay. These people, contestants and judges alike, are supposed to offer some hope that our business future is bright. On the basis of The Apprentice, however, the country is even more doomed than we thought.

ddoyle@tribune.ie