Not yet in full health, but getting better

Mood of delegates:  The mood among over 1,000 delegates who attended the Fine Gael national conference in Galway on Saturday for Enda Kenny's first conference performance as party leader was upbeat.

A full ardfheis will be held in the spring ahead of the June European and local elections.

Delegates spoke positively about the party's condition but they acknowledged that much work remained to be done to recover the ground lost in its nightmare general election last year.

With attendees making frequent references to the disastrous election, they said Mr Kenny was being judged more at this stage for his reorganisation of the party than as leader of the Opposition.

Mr Hugh McElvaney, a member of Monaghan County Council who has been in the party for 30 years, said he was confident that Fine Gael would emerge triumphant from the next general election because the party was not prepared to lie to the electorate.

Still, he said there was room for improvement in Mr Kenny's performance.

"For me, down on the ground we cannot see that he's making his mark as leader of the Opposition, but I have no doubt that as every day goes by and every week goes by he's working towards it."

With the party meeting just after the SDLP took a hammering in the Northern Ireland election, Saturday's conference might have seemed like groundhog day for some in attendance.

If they accepted that Fine Gael was not quite in the fullest health, they were adamant that the party was beyond the mourning phase and preparing for recovery. For all of that, however, many still noted the absence in national debates of political heavyweights such as Ivan Yates, Alan Dukes and Alan Shatter.

The conference itself was slow to take off, with few TDs and fewer than 100 people in the main hall as proceedings began. Many more faithful Fine Gaelers turned out as the day continued.

Mr Jim Daly (30), a local election candidate in Cork South West, said the mood was much more upbeat than he was expecting. "People not singing from the same hymn-sheet destroyed the party until now. It's being put to bed," he said.

From a Fine Gael family, Mr Daly said the election was the blackest day in his parents' lifetime in the party, "but they haven't given up on it. There has to be an alternative mainstream party first and foremost, whether in government or opposition." The local elections next year are seen as the crucial test.

Ms Laoise Ní Charthaigh from the Trinity College Dublin branch, said: "If we fail in June that will go down like a lead balloon." She was at the party's youth conference in Ennis last weekend where the Family at War TV series was discussed. The meeting concluded that the party was at peace.

While many of those who spoke to The Irish Times acknowledged that Mr Kenny had work to do before establishing himself as an alternative Taoiseach, he was not without fans.

These included Ms Joan Mulvihill from the party's Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown branch in Dublin, who said she only joined the party after meeting Mr Kenny. "I met Enda at a social event and that's what prompted me to join," she said. "There's more enthusiasm now than after the general election when everyone was quite down."

Ms Mulvihill's colleague Mr Vincent Dolan from West Dublin said he joined after the election "because there's never a more important time for Fine Gael. The country needs an opposition."

In the lobby at the Radisson Hotel, the Collins 22 Society had copies of an essay titled "Who did shoot Michael Collins?" One delegate quipped that the party had other problems on its mind. And miles to travel.