Gavan Reilly: Now the election is officially delayed, here’s the danger

Typical, really. The commentator’s curse. Having last week surmised that the coalition was on its last legs, and unity would be impossible to come by after the Budget, off goes Micheál Martin to fill in the blanks that Simon Harris left behind. The Taoiseach kept saying the government would run ‘full term’ but wouldn’t say what that meant; the Tánaiste has now at least coloured in between those lines. February is the optimal time for the election, and the five empty seats in the Dáil will remain vacant without any by-elections.

It’s poor for the people of Clare – entitled to four TDs, but having to get by with two – but the national picture makes sense. 2019 was a lesson in folly, electing four TDs at the end of November and making them redundant in the middle of January. Malcolm Byrne was one of them; the only TD to serve a shorter term was the hunger striker Kieran Doherty who literally died.

The clarity that follows is that the Dáil will remain intact for its full autumn session – meaning 13 sitting weeks of getting stuff done, and a maximum of 25 sessions where Simon Harris will take Leaders’ Questions – but once it rises for Christmas, it won’t sit again, and will be dissolved in early January. That’s a timetable that Simon Harris knows all too well: when the same thing happened five years ago, it was because he was about to lose a motion of no confidence, amid an escalating trolley crisis, on top of questions about his knowledge of the escalating costs of the National Children’s Hospital. Funny that.

Anyway, we are where we are now. The coalition is in lockstep about the rationale for staying until Christmas: landmark planning overhauls that need to be fully passed and commenced; reforms to the legal handling of mental health; publication of new projections for how many homes Ireland truly needs, and so on. Plenty to keep everyone busy.

Helen McEntee has her own projects: as well as some (but not all) of her reforms to alcohol licensing, she’s trying to abolish jury trials for defamation cases. No harm: juries usually award higher libel costs than judges would, which is why Irish publishers are petrified of cases and baulk from publishing stuff they ought to. That idea is before the Dáil on Thursday.

But do we think everyone can stay on the same page once the Budget is done in two weeks time? How meaningful will the work be, when anything even mildly contentious is kicked into the long grass? The senators who have visceral hatred of McEntee’s incitement to hatred bill are all likely to be eyeing up a bid for the Dáil. Is that a fight worth picking? Are there any fights worth picking?

Isn’t there a chance of a government scared into stasis, refusing to pick any fight it doesn’t desperately need to win, and finding itself in a terminal circle of inner wrangling? The August silly season is always treacherous because pointless non-stories expand to fill the attention available. The post-Budget void could be ten times worse.