My two sons are doing important exams this week, and watching the doomed expressions on their faces at breakfast this morning reminded me of somebody I could not quite place.  

Was it the condemned man in some old movie about Death Row?  Or the band who kept playing as the Titanic went down?  

I knew I had seen that sick expression before, and it wasn't that long ago either.  And then I suddenly realized.   It was Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Brian Cowen!  

Cowen faces an important exam of his own this Friday, when the elections are held here.  For the past week he has had that same expression that my sons had this morning, of someone facing inevitable, inescapable doom, of someone on auto pilot carrying on under the gathering black clouds.  

Someone who knows the hour is at hand and their goose is not only cooked, but burned to a cinder.  Watching Fianna Fail these days is like seeing a train wreck in slow motion. 

I have already explained in this column the significance of what is happening.  The party, which has ruled Ireland on and off for the past 80 years -- the natural party of government -- is facing a reversal so profound that it could alter the balance of politics here for decades to come.  And the man in the driver's cab, Cowen, has nowhere to go.  

If the results are as bad as the latest opinion polls are suggesting, then Fianna Fail will lose the moral authority to govern the country and Cowen will most likely be shafted by one of the colleagues now standing four square behind him.  They will do it because it will be their only chance, however slim, of surviving the next general election in a couple of years.  

The vote that is being held here this Friday is NOT a general election for seats in the Dail (Parliament).  It is the local elections, for seats on the local councils all over the country, and the European elections for seats in the European Parliament.  There are also two seats vacant in the Dail, and the by-elections to fill these two seats are being held on the same day.  

Within the past week or so two national opinion polls have put the Fianna Fail share of the national vote at around 20 percent, not only way behind Fine Gael but even behind the Labor Party. Brian Cowen's personal popularity is at an all time low for a Fianna Fail leader.  

With humiliating figures like that Fianna Fail is going to lose control of councils across the country and of seats in Europe. 

Recent polls have shown that in the big cities like Dublin and Cork, the support for Fianna Fail has slumped to around 10 percent, an incredibly low figure for the mighty party that once dominated Irish politics.  

At that level Fianna Fail is likely to lose the only European Parliament seat it has in the Dublin electoral area.  The party has also little or no chance of holding on to the two Dail seats that have become vacant, since both are in the Dublin area. 

What all this means is that although Fianna Fail will be able to stay in power until the next general election, which is still over two years away, it will have lost the moral authority to govern.  Assuming the Green Party holds it nerve and continues in the coalition, Fianna Fail can cling to power.  But it will be a zombie government of dead men and women walking. 

The only hope for Fianna Fail will be to dump Cowen and then have a new leader pick a new team of ministers.  A reshuffle just might give the party a chance.  But it would be a snowball's chance in hell, given the anger, impatience and frustration of the electorate right now.  

People across the country are blaming Fianna Fail, former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and Cowen (who was Ahern's finance minister before he became taoiseach) for the mess we're in.   They blame Fianna Fail for the economic crisis. 

They want not only to put Fianna Fail out of office, but they want to humiliate them.  They want revenge for what they see as the mismanagement that has got us into this crisis. 

And nothing that Fianna Fail can do or say in the next few days is going to change that.  

So the party is facing meltdown, with only its traditional rural support remaining, and even that will be at a much reduced level.  And Cowen is facing the chop.

Whether this is justified is arguable -- and that argument is being put strongly by Cowen and his ministers in the dying days of the campaign.  They say that the crisis here is part of the wider global recession, and that Fine Gael and Labor are exploiting this in a way that is tantamount to economic treason by opposing the cutbacks that must be made to begin to set the state finances straight again. 

There is a good deal of truth in this.  The opposition parties are making vague promises about recovery, rebuilding and a brighter future, when the reality is that there is no alternative to savage cutbacks in state spending, a falling standard of living and an economy that will be struggling badly for the next few years at least with high unemployment.  

That is the reality and it doesn't matter who's in power because that reality cannot be vanished away by wishful thinking and vague promises.

Of course, a lot of people are hoping that there just might be a way out that would not be so painful, and they are going to vote for anyone who is not Fianna Fail to give that forlorn hope a chance.  

Then there are a lot of people who know there is no alternative but are going to vote against Fianna Fail anyway simply because they feel it is way past time for a change. 

The Fianna Fail cause is not helped either by some of the recent stories that have dominated the news here.  In the past week two stories in particular have been filling the media -- the catastrophic scale of the losses at Anglo Irish Bank, and the revelations about the abuse of tens of thousands of children for decades in institutions here run by the religious on behalf of the state. 

On Anglo, it was revealed that the bank is going to need €7.5 billion of the taxpayers' money if it is not to go belly up, and that its losses eventually will be around €30 billion.  The scale of this is staggering in what was supposed to be a minor bank here, and most of it has gone to the big developers who are seen as the buddies of Fianna Fail.  There is widespread outrage that the ordinary taxpayer now has to carry the can. 

Cowen has been digging the hole for himself even deeper in the past week by insisting that the taxpayer has no choice but to hand over the cash.

"Anglo Irish Bank is a bank of systemic importance ... this economy could not withstand the failure of a bank of that magnitude and the consequent impact that would have on other banks and the financial system. You just could not even contemplate it," he said. 

Yet that is precisely what most people think should happen.  They see the government policy as more of the same, of looking after the same old system that created the mess, of looking after their friends. 

They also see that it was mainly Fianna Fail who presided over the abuse scandal over the years, and it was a Fianna Fail minister who did the disgraceful indemnity deal that protects the religious orders from legal claims from the victims.  

For all those reasons and many others, mainly to do with fears about jobs and the future of the Irish economy, the hour has come for Fianna Fail and Cowen.  The executioner is at the gate ...