Cowen’s political positioning of the government is very much the slowly slowly affair befitting of a month in May. The cabinet reshuffles were quite deft, keeping the big names happy but at arms length from a putsch while the junior ministries gave the backbenches more hope than Bertie ever dared. It is a mark of confidence as much as anything else to trust Fianna Fail with a meritocratic approach. Beyond this though, we have seen some utterances on policy.

His speech at the grand homecoming was laden with community solidarity, the needs of others, the common good and the necessity of good government. If Bertie never did the “vision” thing or the ideology then Cowen was brimming with the stuff for his first few days. The approach to social partnership, as a microcosm of his tack towards the trade unions, is likely to become easy shorthand for the differences between Ahern and Cowen. Ahern isn’t gone a wet week when we read the news that the HSE will allow about 1,000 jobs to go in natural attrition.

The management structure at the HSE has come in for a huge amount of criticism as disprorpotional to the level of care and the number of doctors. Indeed it is one of the rare points of unison among all critics of the public health system. Jobs that go need to be streamlining delivery, not cost-saving for its own sake. That means somebody (anybody?) knowing what the hell people are supposed to do and who they are reporting to. The voluntary redundancy measure was on the table at the formation of the HSE only for Ahern to intervene and assure unions the jobs were safe.

Harney won’t speculate on the scale of job cuts in the service - and rightly so, the last thing people want is to see the return to the binge-purge approach to Health provision - but putting the service on an even keel in the ratio of service providers to managers is a necessary step to do this. This returns it back to the realm of industrial relations, cutting jobs doesn’t need to bring the house down around our ears and just how much hardball gets played is going to be important.