AND SO WE COME to party conference season. Both Labour and Sinn Fein will hold their party's annual conferences in the coming weekends; Fine Gael got the ball rolling with a conference (but not the annual Ard Fheis) last weekend. Fianna Fáil will follow in April.

We're at an odd precipice in the lifetime of the current Dáil. The government has pointedly refused to get into election speculation - to the point where Fine Gael is even refusing to participate in 'pre-election' debates on Vincent Browne.

But yet, the weekend saw minister after minister line up to take potshots at the major opposition parties - saying Fianna Fáil could not again be trusted with the economy, and Sinn Féin were so economically illiterate that they couldn't be given control of a fledgling recovery.

Some ministers were less eviscerating than others when it came to Fianna Fáil - but certainly, every minister to a letter was saying the only way to cement the economic recovery was a Fine Gael-Labour coalition. (Leo Varadkar, who four years ago was a major advocate for single-party government if it could be managed, went so far as to say the government was better for having Labour in it.)

But there's are some contradictions emerging in the way Fine Gael is approaching the question of the next election - and its impassioned message of needing 'political stability' (i.e. no change in government) to guarantee economic stability.

When Fine Gael says the election is still 14 months away and it has plenty to do in the meantime, the coded message is that any talk of an election is a media-concocted distraction - and that the government is way too busy working on the economy to be bothered with such frivolities for the time being at least.

That's only true to a point. It's been openly admitted for some time now that various crucial parts of the Fine Gael 'five point plan' need two terms to implement. Universal Health Insurance was due to be in place by 2019, three years after the end of the current mandate; and we're now told that the government's primary raison d'etre - restoring the public finances and getting Ireland back to work - is now also, basically, a two-term project.

Full employment will be gained by 2018... if the government is re-elected.

We'll turn a profit on the €30bn investment in the surviving banks... if the government is re-elected.

Taxes will be cut further and more money will go into people's pockets... if the government is re-elected.

That, inherently, means re-election is on the government's agenda, and not merely in a partisan way - this government, perhaps more than any other before it, has openly said its agenda needs two terms to complete. The very programme for government itself, therefore, is built on the idea of retaining power after the next election. 

This demolishes the argument that discussing an election is a distraction from the work Fine Gael are doing to fix the country. In fact, discussing an election should be front-and-centre of it: the party's own plans for Ireland, well-intentioned as they may be, actually demand that the election be a key focus so that it doesn't disrupt the goal of full employment.

That leads to the other mantra from the weekend - political stability. The weekend was marked by a Red C poll for the Sunday Business Post which saw that, while Fine Gael support was unchanged at 24, Labour support was down two points to 7. Respected poll analyst Adrian Kavanagh translated those ratings into seats, and found that Fine Gael would win 47 seats, while Labour would take only four.

Obviously an election may still be 14 months away, and polls are only a snapshot in time, but it's been quite a long time since Fine Gael and Labour have scored a combined poll rating that would be enough to retain a majority in the Dáil. And that means 'political stability' is arguably something of a misnomer.

Short of an astonishing turnaround in the next year, it is now increasingly clear that the current government is not going to continue in office after the 2016 election. 

'Political stability' - the sort that does cement an economic recovery and ensure the continued creation of jobs into 2018 and beyond - demands that, at some point in the not-too-distant future, Fine Gael will have to bite the bullet and build bridges with someone on the opposition benches.