So, what now for Michael Healy-Rae?
And what does the future hold for the Healy-Rae political dynasty?
Is there a road back for either, or both, following his resignation as junior minister at the Department of Agriculture, the highest political office attained by any member of the family, three generations of whom have been elected to public office?
To answer these questions, it's necessary to understand a little about how the Healy-Rae dynasty operates and where it stands within the political firmament in Kerry.
Michael Healy-Rae was last elected to the Dáil in 2024, having delivered a poll-topping performance of 18,597 first preference votes.
He was comfortably elected on the first count, where the quota was just over 13,000 votes.
In fact, his first preference vote was the second highest recorded in the last general election, making him one of the country's most popular politicians.
His brother, Danny, was some way behind, winning 8,603 first preference votes. He was eventually elected on the 11th count.
Between the two of them, though, they garnered more than one-third of the first preference votes cast in the last general election in the five-seat Kerry constituency and, if anybody knows how to mind each one of those votes, the Healy-Raes do.
Before them went Jackie, their father, first elected to the Dáil as an independent in 1997, after breaking away from Fianna Fáil, the party he had served as a foot soldier and councillor all his political life up to then.
After them, three of their children have been elected to Kerry County Council, following in their footsteps and in the footsteps of their grandfather.
The Healy-Raes are clearly the strongest political force in Kerry at present, and maintaining that position dominates how and why they operate.
Politics is deeply ingrained in the Healy-Rae family: it is in their DNA.
It's what they wake up thinking about in the morning; it's the last thing they think about when they sleep at night.
And, even when they sleep, they probably dream about politics too, but that is more difficult to substantiate.
For the Healy-Raes, politics isn't about the money. Both Michael and Danny are independently wealthy men through a myriad of businesses.
If it were about money for the Healy-Raes, they could arguably leave politics behind and become an awful lot wealthier by concentrating on their business interests.
Those who know the Healy-Raes in Kerry say that, for them, it's all about power and the power of politics: the power to achieve things and to get things done and it's about popularity too.
When Michael Healy-Rae was appointed junior minister at the Department of Agriculture, with special responsibility for forestry and farm safety, just under 15 months ago, it would have been the high point of a political career that saw him first elected to the Dáil in 2011, taking the seat vacated by his father.
Given his rural and agricultural background, it was a role to which he was ideally suited. With the family's background in plant hire and machinery, he has been driving tractors and diggers since he was a teenager, if not before.
To anyone who encountered him in his work, he clearly loved the job and loved being a minister.
Many tributes paid to him over the past week have referenced how hard working and capable he was, particularly in the forestry role in the wake of Storm Éowyn, which devastated the forestry industry in this country last year, days before he was appointed.
He loved his job as junior agriculture minister.
Being a junior minister gave Michael Healy-Rae a certain amount of power, and he used that power, in a positive way, to get things done for people.
That delivered popularity and the Healy-Raes like being popular.
Everything was going fine, until the strikes on Iran by the US and Israel closed the Strait of Hormuz, sending fuel costs rocketing, globally as well as here in Ireland.
That led to the fuel price protests we saw across the country just over a week ago.
With those protests came pressure for all politicians, but the Healy-Raes were particularly susceptible.
And here's where their political dreaming may have turned to nightmares.
The family are deeply embedded in the plant hire business themselves for decades -- it's what put bread and butter on the table for them when they were children.
And the people who were manning those fuel-price protests last week were their people - farmers, agricultural contractors, plant hire contractors, truckers.
All politicians came under pressure over the cost of fuel, even before the fuel price protests were mounted.
But, for the Healy-Raes, because it was coming from so close to home, pressure was applied to them on such a scale and in a way they had rarely experienced before.
As the protestors saw it, Michael Healy-Rae was in Government, while Danny, as a supporter of the Government, had a foot in the camp too.
Watch: Michael Healy-Rae says he had 'no choice' but to resign as Minister of State
They were expected to deliver, they simply had to.
Also, consider how the Healy-Raes operate - they are ever available; always at the end of the phone, morning, noon and night.
Well, if they were, they got it in the neck morning, noon and night from the people who put them in the position they were in - their voters; their base.
And those voters weren't asking for something to be done about fuel prices, they were demanding it.
Michael Healy-Rae himself referenced in his resignation speech a meeting he had with "tractor men, lorry men, farmers" in the Plough Bar in Milltown in mid-Kerry, the night before he made his speech in the Dáil on the confidence vote in the Government.
He described how emotional they were - at breaking point as they struggled to survive financially.
This meeting wasn't an isolated incident. It was one of dozens of similar encounters which would have played out before all of the Healy-Raes as fuel prices increased and pressure grew for the Government to intervene.
Danny Healy-Rae was verbally abused at a fuel price protest on the bypass Road in Killarney last Sunday. A video of that incident was widely circulated on social media.
Asked about that social media video, Danny Healy-Rae described the man as "an old friend".
"He is as fine a man as the days are long and he is just one of the many people who are not happy with Micheál Martin and Simon Harris and that is the pressure I'm under from supporters," he said.
Watch: Was Michael Healy-Rae right to resign?
That is the point here. The pressure was coming from the Healy-Raes' own people, and it was coming on a scale not previously experienced by them, notwithstanding the many political crises they have experienced in the past.
Danny was the first to indicate that the family's support for the Government might be wavering.
His role in Michael's resignation from the Government shouldn't be underestimated here.
While Michael is by far the more popular of the two electorally, the Healy-Raes operate on a patriarchal structure and Danny, the older of the two brothers, would see himself as the father figure within the family.
His public statements last Monday, expressing dissatisfaction with the €505 million package of measures announced by the Government to offset the increase in fuel costs, undoubtedly put Michael under added pressure.
And that's not to mention what he might have said to Michael privately.
The two brothers haven't always voted exactly the same way in Dáil votes, but they generally do, on a united we stand, divided we fall basis.
Then we come to Michael's own position.
Even without Danny's intervention, at 59 years of age, he is sufficiently savvy and experienced himself to be able to judge what way the wind is blowing politically and to make decisions accordingly.
Certainly, he loved being a minister.
But, even more than this, he is acutely aware of the price he would pay if he ignored the fuel price protestors and disregarded the farmers and agricultural contractors he met in the Plough Bar in Milltown last Monday night - and elsewhere over the past number of weeks - and voted confidence in the Government last Tuesday.
As Michael Healy-Rae drove to Dublin last Monday night for Tuesday's Dáil confidence, he did still have a choice.
It mightn't have been very appealing, but it was still a choice.
His choice was between something he clearly loved, being a minister, and something he values even more, the future of the Healy-Rae political dynasty.
With Danny threatening to vote against the Government in Tuesday's confidence motion, Michael made the only choice he felt he could make - to vote against the Government he and Danny had pledged to support in January, 2025.
That sealed his fate.
On a personal level, the decision for him, in the short term at least, is heartbreaking.
But you're unlikely to hear too much wailing from Kilgarvan.
Not in public, at any rate.
By Wednesday morning, Michael was back in his home village, in the family's political power base.
Even at that stage, he was already planning his work schedule for the week ahead.
By Thursday night, he had completed two constituency clinics in north Kerry, and there was a list of another dozen or more to be completed over the weekend.
As he heads towards his 60th birthday next January, Michael Healy-Rae certainly wouldn't be excluded from serving as a minister again on age grounds but, realistically, would a party leader putting a future government together be prepared to take a punt on him, given the way he turned on the Government this week?
As he travels to and from the Dáil and to his constituency clinics in the weeks and months ahead, he will no doubt reflect painfully on his very sudden transition from Government minister to Opposition TD.
But, in his heart of hearts, Michael Healy-Rae will know that he didn't really have an option when it came to him choosing between what he loved and what he loves more.
