AS AN explanation, it is simple, straight forward, satisfactory and wrong. Before the final counts were in, never mind the recounts, Dick Spring's favoured explanation for his party's disaster was the front page editorial run on poll ing day by the Irish Independent. End of story. QED. Do not, if you are, the Labour Party, pick up any guilt at all. The blame belongs elsewhere.
It is comforting to be able to lay off blame when the electorate has dealt you such a blow. Elections ire the toughest bit of the "cruel trade" of politics. What other business would be allowed to operate so inhuman a recruitment and appraisal system? Just when you think you're doing the job well, they take it away from you. Nor do they just make you reapply for it. They make you go out and beg in the streets for it.
The humiliation doesn't even stop there. If the electorate decides against you, the system has one last opportunity for you: the chance (to paraphrase Macbeth) to prove that "nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it". A few defeated candidates took that sad opportunity and made something of it. Helen Keogh, her eyes glassy with, tears, took her defeat with gentle dignity and did her best to contribute to programmes as, a panellist, as did Mary Flaherty.
The Labour Party, on the other hand, was so ungracious in defeat that it gave you the urge to call for a recount to see if the end result could be made, if possible, worse for it.
Niamh Bhreathnach expressed wonderment at the lack of appreciation of all the millions she'd put into education, missing the twin points - that (a) the money was owned by the taxpayers, in the first place, and (b) the problem was not what money was spent on education, but the pay roll the electorate perceived as going to the Labour Party handlers.
Joan Burton, handed a warm vote of old friend sympathy by the Beau Brummell of the count, Charlie McCreevy, gave a token smile before giving a televisual lecture to the candidates who had beaten her on how they should do their job. So relentless, was her driven dogmatism that even the sympathy and courtesy of RTE's elder statesman, ran out and left him telling her, in a Brian Farrell euphemism, to stick a sock in it.
But then came Dick Spring blaming it all on the Indo editorial. THIS ignores a whole bunch of facts. Firstly, there is a sizeable number of people who don't buy that, paper. Secondly, editorials can be a bore to some readers even on the front page. Thirdly, I am reliably informed chat, the Indo was deluged by callers indicating disapproval.
The piece may have confirmed or reinforced a viewpoint already held by some people and stiffened their determination not to vote Labour, but the reality of its impact is probably no more than that much, as Dick Spring might wish it otherwise.
Nor is it legitimate to blame coverage from that newspaper group during the previous year. Certainly, Eamon Dunphy was crude in his attack on Dick Spring but then, Dunphy himself pointed out in his court case, to be attacked by him tended to be followed by a rise and rise in one's popularity. The news pages did not, to my recollection, fail to report his work nor did they criticise him.
Besides for any perceived lack of balance in one newspaper group's output, there were external corrective factors, not least the Examiner's consistently positive coverage of Dick Spring over the past year or two.
It is understandably tempting to blame a newspaper for the defeat rather than examine his own leadership. But, oh, the opportunity missed in the process. The opportunity to greet defeat with openness and humour. To learn from it. To start the rebuilding process on the very night of the count. Instead, Mr Spring used the airwaves to suggest that a newspaper was the sole reason he had been brought crashing down to Earth.
The truth is, that the Spring Tide was a triumph of hope over experience. The hope of the elector ate was that they might see an end to self serving, dishonest, fudgy politics, filled with favouritism and loyal pay offs.
The Labour Party first dealt that hope a smack in the kisser by appointing boatloads of its own people to newly created jobs for the boys and then went on to offend against all of the other job specs, in turn.
It should not now deceive itself that it is an innocent victim of either a volatile and whimsical electorate or a venomous newspaper group.
The voters gave them a vote loan at the last general election, and the voters called that loan back in at this one.
The voters also dealt a blow to the mistique of the smaller parties. Many commentators have been suggesting that Bertie Ahern's chances of becoming Taoiseach hinge on the PDs, and a handful of Independents who can be assumed to have a natural affinity with Fianna Fail. The reality is that his chances hinge on two handfuls of Independents with a natural affinity. With the exception of Liz O Donnell, the PD deputies are Fianna Fail prodigal sons and daughters who now have little remaining of the rationale which fuelled the monster meetings characterising the setup months.
Back then, the PDs, could genuinely see themselves as mould breakers, standing against Charlie Haughey, standing for fiscal rectitude and tax reform. Now, the CJ years are long over. Bertie Ahern has managed to redefine Fianna Fail and make the elect orate comfortable choosing his candidates. Everybody's for tax reform.
The radical narrowing of the PDs niche market forced Mary Harney into what are perhaps too easily dismissed as obvious campaign errors.
Many PDs said that, during the last week of the campaign, they met with enthusiasm for the "encouraging of single mothers back into their parents homes and for the cutting down of public service numbers. Party theorists pointed out that without those elements there was virtually no point of differentiation between the PDs and (the new) Fianna Fail. Shorn of those right wing policies, there was nothing, to the PDs other than personalities. And that was all that survived personalities.
The fact that the party had indicated it wasn't very, flush, with money before the election indicated that the novelty appeal had worn off and that Mary Harney was dangerously close to the category occupied in the past by figures as diverse as Noel Browne and John Kelly - she was likely to become the talkative maverick we all like to have around to confirm to other people how liberal and broadminded we are but to whom, we don't pay a blind bit of attention.
For me, the second most interesting thing to come out of this election is the result for the PD's and the implied choice it offers for their future. The party obviously expected to increase its numbers, and claimed to be planning on 15 seats. To come in with a third of that is very like what has happened to Labour: it's hack to bedrock.
But when most of bedrock is run away Fianna Fail people, the question must arise - is there, in this group, the makings of a revived and expanded independent political entity or is it time to be wooed back into the fold and take Liz with us? My betting is that the very suggestion of surrender to wooing will be greeted, at the moment, with denial and outrage because the very suggestion lessens the PDs' bargaining power for positions within Bertie Ahern's government. On their numbers (both numbers in the ballot boxes and numbers returning to Leinster Rouse), the PDs could not be regarded as "entitled" to high position but will, nonetheless, fight for, and probably gain, such position.
It will be their Vast Hurrah, if they have their wits about them. Dessie and Bobby should be out of politics by the next election and Mary should be fighting with the Fianna Fail machine behind her.
BERTIE Ahern's hand will be greatly strengthened as be enters negotiations if his people maintain the discipline they showed during the campaign, particularly in vote management. The Meath Miracle, where Noel Dempsey willingly parted with first preferences to bring in an extra TD, was equalled by the Dun Laoghaire Demonstration that David Andrews's spotless shirttail could be used to bring in another TD there.
Bertie Ahern mildly observed, after the election, that he had been asked many times if he could deliver Dublin and had done so. Nobody had asked him if he could deliver Cork but he had done that too. With (Shandon) bells on.
Hugh Coveney, despite the scare he got at his convention, showed the same kind of discipline and Deirdre Clune will be able to put TD after her name as a result.
Elsewhere, Fine Gael's vote management was not as disciplined as Fianna Fail's and so there are victims here and there. If, they need a role model of resilience and recovery they should look no further than Clare's Brendan Daly, whose return is due to unsinkable determination and hard work.
Bertie Ahern proved during this election that he can learn from his mistakes and from the mistakes of others. He has reengineered a machine. Best of all, while he has been the centre of the campaign and has fronted for the party with real success, there hams been a high level of delegation to individuals, and groups within the party. If he can do that, then it is not beyond him to reintegrate the disaffected. To reverse the Fianna Fail diaspora. That, rather than deal making, should be his ultimate objective. Of all the pictures from the past that send shivers up and down my spine, the one that does it most is the one that sums up such a deal - the picture of Charles Haughey holding on to the handlebars of Tony Gregory's bike. Deal making there may have to be, in the short term, but the long term, measure of Bertie Ahern's leadership will be his capacity to draw back the remnants of the Fianna Fail diaspora.
