On the day Mr Dick Spring resigned, Fine Gael's TDs and senators held their presidential election campaign post-mortem.
The unanimous view of Ms Mary Banotti's campaign team, expressed at a lengthy parliamentary party meeting on Wednesday, was that Mr John Bruton's intervention in the campaign to attack Mrs Mary McAleese as a Sinn Feinendorsed candidate did Ms Banotti considerable damage.
This view is shared by a significant number of TDs and senators. At the meeting several deputies warned of damage the affair may have caused to the party's relationship with Northern nationalists.
Some argued that there was confusion among Fine Gael members about what party policy on Northern Ireland was, and there was anger at the way the election campaign had brought accusations that they were "anti-nationalist".
Despite the expressions of anger, TDs and senators maintain that the meeting was positive. There was no muttering in public or in private about changing the leader, according to sources.
"Nobody wants to go back to the bad old days," said one.
Mr Bruton made a frank and disarming opening statement admitting, according to one source, "that there were serious mistakes in presentation and timing".
Mr Bruton had already listened to his front bench at a meeting on Tuesday where there was "plain talking but no bad feeling," according to another source. He said he had realised that he might have made a tactical mistake very soon after he had suggested that Mrs McAleese was not a fit person to be President because of Mr Gerry Adams's stated preference.
Sources in Ms Banotti's campaign say that that is putting it mildly. As soon as Mr Adams had given his view on an RTE morning radio programme, some Banotti strategists were urging that nothing be said.
Their view did not prevail: Mr Bruton came out with all guns blazing that Mrs McAleese was now a "Sinn Fein-endorsed president".
The campaign had wanted to make a subtle point over time that Mrs McAleese was indeed a Northern nationalist and that her claim to be capable of building bridges with unionists was suspect, according to a campaign source.
"Instead, without any consultation with us, the point was wildly overstated." The result was that it looked like a smear campaign, and once that happened they had to retreat from the issue completely.
The other effect was to push Ms Banotti off the airwaves as, night after night, Mrs McAleese looked impressive defending herself against unsustainable innuendo.
Mr Bruton's openness to criticism helped disarm some of the critics.
He accepted that he would have to work at repairing damage to relationships with Northern nationalists through making personal contacts, just as he had told his front bench the previous day of his frank assessment of what he had got right and what he had got wrong.
But while accepting some tactical mistakes, he used the issue to reiterate his line on Northern Ireland.
It was Fine Gael's role to give credence to both sets of allegiances on this island, he said. Neither the Government nor Fine Gael should be an arm of "pannationalism", simply representing the cause of Northern nationalists.
The meeting ran from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., considerably longer than usual, and not everyone was angry. According to several deputies, Mr Bruton had only expressed a traditional Fine Gael position of hostility to Sinn Fein and everything associated with it.
They say that RTE's exit polls show that Northern Ireland was not a major factor, although they did show that a small number of Banotti voters switched to Mrs McAleese because they felt the attacks on her were unfair.
Mr Bruton told Wednesday's meeting that he had not attempted to smear Mrs McAleese. He had only asked what the Taoiseach and Tanaiste thought of Mr Adams's "endorsement" of her.
This is true, but the effect was to suggest a smear. His comments came as his party was being accused of having had some involvement in leaks of confidential documents damaging to Mrs McAleese from the Department of Foreign Affairs.
They came on the same day as Mr Eoghan Harris went on radio to condemn Mrs McAleese as an extreme nationalist, and the same day that it emerged that Mr Bruton and Mr Harris had lunched together the previous week.
Some on Ms Banotti's campaign say that there had been a drift towards her in the initial period, and that this halted once Fine Gael was perceived, rightly or wrongly, to have joined in a smear campaign against Mrs McAleese.
Many reject the view that Ms Banotti was cheated of victory by Mr Bruton's alleged ineptitude.
"Mary Banotti got 30 per cent of the vote, which was very credible," declared one Bruton defender. "We had a fear that we might not do as well in a presidential election as we had done in the general election, but the opposite was the case. That's the bottom line."
For many it is not the bottom line.
"Mary Banotti would have come very close to winning if John [Bruton] hadn't got the Fianna Fail vote out. If you throw in something that will polarise voters back to their traditional parties, then we lose, as our core vote is much less than Fianna Fail's. It's simple, but the party just didn't think about that."
Several normally enthusiastic supporters of Mr Bruton contacted by The Irish Times this week were still in a rage.
"We were running smoothly, she was closing the gap and he f---d it up," says one supporter.
Yet there is no sense of the party dividing into factions, and Mr Bruton's continued leadership is not now in question.
There are difficulties ahead. There could be a long period out of government.i Quinn and Mr Brendan Howlin, are both Labour people who feel at home in government with Fianna Fail. Two Dail terms in opposition would be deeply demoralising for a party that seems to thrive only in government. Mr Bruton must establish himself as the leader of the opposition.
For eight years Dick Spring's Labour has had more influence than its numbers deserved. It regularly seemed to lead the opposition and control the government.
The presidential election post mortem is over. Mr Bruton's longterm success or failure will be determined by how well he ensures that his Fine Gael, and not a postSpring Labour Party, is seen as the real alternative to the present Government.