Undeterred by electoral defeat, Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny still believes he can be taoiseach and that Bertie Ahern should resign for the good of politics, writes Mark Hennessy
For five years, Enda Kenny sought to persuade voters that Fine Gael could get into power from the 31-strong base left after the 2002 election disaster.
Seven months on from the May election, Kenny acknowledges now that many voters simply did not believe that the leap was achievable.
Today, however, he insists that the situation "243 weeks" out from the next election is entirely different. The base is larger, the distance to travel much shorter.
Citing no lack of energy, he says that he will lead the charge: "I will be 61 in five years' time. I have never felt myself internally as committed to doing the business as I am now."
The support of 600,000 voters "gives you that injection to want to do it again and to set our stall for the future", he told The Irish Times.
Regardless of the views of others, Kenny insists that there is no one explanation for the May result - not The Big Debate, not the economy and not the polls.
If there was, he said, it would explain why Fine Gael had made gains in some constituencies but failed to progress in near-identical ones elsewhere.
Gains came in Donegal North East, Cork South West, Kerry South, Clare, Galway East, Mayo and Dublin, but not in Meath or Kildare.
"There is no definite pattern to say why the people of Carlow Kilkenny, where we had 1.9 quotas, did not transfer the votes across to us for a second seat.
"Yet we were within 400 votes of getting four out of five seats in Mayo, or where you had only three deputies in Dublin and now you have 10.
"Yet the issues were the same: childcare, health, justice, all these things," says Kenny, who acknowledges that the party's campaign should have been better in places.
The televised debate between Kenny and Taoiseach Bertie Ahern was "part of the campaign" and not "a crisis point", as others believed before and since.
Though the majority opinion subsequently judged that Ahern had won clearly, such opinion, predictably, finds little favour with Kenny.
However, Fianna Fáil was better at imprinting its version of history onto the public mind in the days after the debate with "an army of texters and callers".
"I do think that something that was more damaging was The Late Late Show where you had, in my view, an unbalanced panel talking about politics on a show that is not normally that way. I do think that that had an impact with people who might have wanted to switch off from mainline politics and suddenly found that The Late Late Show was doing a political programme," he complains.
Either way, Kenny is not going to have to square up to Ahern, who has repeatedly voiced his determination to step down by the age of 60, but not soon.
In some ways, the election in Kenny's mind is a series of "might-have-beens": if the tribunal's inquiries had progressed faster, if economic shivers had been more evident earlier.
"The fundamentals of the economy were a lot stronger in May than they are now. Hindsight is always a wonderful vision. Four days after the election the tribunal blew the Taoiseach's story about the bank accounts out of the water which meant that the drip-feed of incredible explanations and all of that would certainly have changed people's attitudes I would have thought pretty seriously.
"Before the election I had made the point very specifically that I wasn't going to deny anybody the right of natural justice and due process. I accepted his statements, his explanations on the basis that he was going in to the tribunal to confirm that. But that wasn't what happened. So circumstances did change," he says now.
Today, he says, Bertie Ahern should have already stood down as Taoiseach and by doing otherwise is damaging politics and the Government's credibility.
The danger now, he says, is that Ahern's continued presence on the scene will damage the effort to get the EU reform treaty passed by the people. It gives ammunition to those who want to say No.