Fine Gael seems to have two camps in conflict at the moment. In one camp you have the finance minister, conducting his annual exercise in fiscal policy planning, setting out the broad parameters for the process of protracted negotiation between government departments reacting to their various sectoral interests, leading up to Budget Day. Then you’ve got the other camp, the one featuring the Deputy Prime Minister of the country announcing stuff more or less daily, randomly bouncing the state into hundreds of millions of euros of spending on, well, stuff. There’s a conflict this column will explore because it matters…

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