INSIDE POLITICS - OPPOSITION STRATEGY

At the end of every term, I do a simple exercise, totting up the topics that have been chosen by opposition leaders for the twice-weekly set piece Leaders' Questions.

Over the last couple of years, the predictable issues have dominated - health, crime, and the Government's secret weapon of dealing with Limerick's gang culture: unleashing Willie O'Dea in the city's drinking establishment on weekend nights.

The dynamic has changed this time. There are now only two leaders entitled to speak during Leaders Questions and one of them, Eamon Gilmore, is new. With the smaller parties and indepedendents having been hoovered up by Government or gobbled up by the electorate, there is no longer a technical group. There is no Joe Higgins. The Greens have forsaken tofu abstinence for meat indulgence. And Sinn Fein - this was meant to be another breakthrough election; it instead became a breakdown election. Down from five to four. No Mary Lou. Pearse Doherty in the Senate rather than in the Dáil.

So where once there were five, now there are two. It's very early days and I don't think that any of the opposition parties have got their heads around what strategies they will adopt to down the Government over the next five years.

With Labour's Gilmore, there has been a difference of style and nuance rather than substance so far - he is less confrontational; appealing more to reason and to common sense than Rabbitte was. For Enda Kenny and Fine Gael, it's been more of the same, leaving off where they left off before the election.

Fine Gael's big strategy last time was that the election would be won or lost on three big issues - health, crime and value for money. The party was wrong on all three issues. The election was won and lost on the economy.

So can we expect more PPARS, more attacks on health, more 'we are tougher than Terminator' on getting the criminal gang scum off the streets.

Well on the crime front, yes. Listening to Enda Kenny and Charlie Flanagan yesterday, it was deja vu all over again. Kenny repeated a phrase three times: "Who's in charge Taoiseach, the Government or the gangs?"

That had tabloid written all over it. But when Charlie Flanagan started talking about bringing the army onto the street as back-up, that really took the pip. Brian Lenihan should have dismissed it out of hand. Instead, foolishly, the Justice Minister actually said he would refer it to the Garda Commissioner. I mean, if you follow that line of argument, the next thing is that we will impose martial law on the street and people will begin to consider the sense of Eoghan Harris's baublings about armed gardai shooting it out with criminals and the return of capital punishment.

INSIDE POLITICS - CRIME

The crime debate yesterday in the Dail was everything that David Cameron's speech to the Troy Party conference in Blackpool wasn't. The three principals all cleaved to their script. It was Brian Lenihan's first major speech as Justice Minister. A day later I'm looking at him on the TV monitor now speaking live (well maybe dead!) on the Land and Conveyancing Reform Bill 2006 (don't ask because I haven't!).
Lenihan is polished, smart and establishmentarian to his fingertips (head boy at Belvedere; Oxford University).

There will be no McDowellite rushes of blood to the head. Which is a pity. McDowell was a radical thinker but never a politician. Everything he ever promised in terms of legislation was subsequently watered down. Lenihan will have no such problem. He will always have fantastic command of his brief, and will be able to defend himself, his Government and his guards to the hilt. His major problem will be that he's unlikely to come up with an idea worth talking about.

Ditto for Charlie Flanagan. After his bloomer during the election campaign, Jim O'Keeffe was never going to survive. Flanagan is a heavy hitter, another smart man and a lawyer to boot. But he's going to have to get the finger out. His speech yesterday was terrible. It lacked a unifying theme and contained phrases and scare-mongering passages that were cliched and hackneyed 20 years ago, 30 years ago, in similar debates in Leinster House.

His worst sentence: "The unacceptable face of Celtic Tiger Ireland reveals a society where our elderly citizens are terrified in their homes, men and women alike are afraid to walk the streets at night, our children can obtain drugs freely in any school yard in the country, we have seen the emergence of drive-by shootings, tiger kidnappings and callous contract killings."

Stoking up fear. The only line that was missing was the one about people no longer being able to keep the keys in their front door.

Fine Gael is not going to get anywhere if it keeps banging on the same drum, ratcheting up fears on crime. Sure, it can come up with tough policies. But it needs different policies; not just more of the same.

Pat Rabbitte's first outing for Labour was low-key. Rabbitte is an ideas and concepts politician but this speech was not the one where they were to be found.