This morning's cabinet meeting is likely to be the first of the term to focus specifically on the Budget - but it's one which is also likely to see some testy words exchanged between Enda Kenny and some of his subordinates.
Yesterday the Taoiseach delivered a stern smackdown to the new health minister Leo Varadkar - not only chastising him for speculating about tax cuts, but also for trying to do his Budget bartering in public.
It would appear on first glance that Varadkar's sin was the latter - for trying to use the media to strong-arm his colleagues into giving him his way.
But that has, as Brendan Howlin said this morning, always been the case.
"Ministers obviously are looking at their own Budget line, and what they want to achieve.
"The horizon between now and the next election is short enough, and people are setting new priorities - and they want to make sure those priorities are completed.
Leo Varadkar has only been Minister for Health for two months but yesterday's foray seems to have irked Enda Kenny specifically because Varadkar dared to speculate about how much people might get back.
Certainly, speculation on tax cuts is nothing new - in fact, it was the Taoiseach himself who kickstarted the speculation, back in July on the day the reshuffle was confirmed.
Standing beside Joan Burton, as the pair 'restated' the government's priorities for the remainder of its term, the Taoiseach said the 52% tax rate for higher earners (which is 55% if you're self-employed) would be tackled, beginning with this Budget.
There's only a handful of ways to do this - and cutting income tax (by raising the bar at which the higher rate applies), or the Universal Social Charge, are basically the only way to do this.
Varadkar, therefore, wasn't necessarily stating anything new by guessing at a tax cut - he simply dared to guess at what the net effect would be on pay packets.
The other side to Varadkar's comments yesterday dealt with the question of whether such a tax cut would even be worth it.
Would it be worth giving people a fiver a week, wondered Varadkar, if that money could instead go into the health sector and spent in the common good?
That's another question - and one the government will have to grapple with - but it does, on the face of it, go against the promise to give some money back beginning next month.
So perhaps that was Varadkar's great offence - or maybe it's simply a case that the Taoiseach isn't wild about the work his new Health minister is doing to dismantle the legacy of his predecessor, Enda Kenny's deputy leader James Reilly.
The Taoiseach yesterday said he hoped Varadkar would come back to cabinet shortly with timelines for the introduction of free GP care for children, and the abolition of the HSE.
The former is not within Varadkar's power to deliver - he needs the help of the GPs to do that - and the former would require Varadkar to wilfully ignore the advice of his civil servants.
Time will tell what the true motivation of Enda Kenny's comments - and Leo Varadkar's response to them - will be.
But only a day after Brendan Howlin essentially signalled the end of austerity, and a day before Enda Kenny leads his party to a think-in in Fota Island, all journalists will want now is a comment on Enda Kenny's rows with his own cabinet ministers.
And that, it would appear, is a PR failure entirely of the Taoiseach's own making.
