Labour performance/analysis:Labour is struggling to understand yesterday's disappointing results, writes Miriam Donohoe.
The Labour Party has emerged as the unhappy partner in the alliance for change, with its carefully laid-out election strategy in tatters having failed to deliver the gains it hoped would spring from joining forces with Fine Gael.
Standing still was not the Labour Party's idea of a good election. There was an emerging consensus among the party faithful last night that it had been badly squeezed in what turned out to be a battle between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. It saw its percentage share of the vote drop by 0.6 per cent on the 2002 election.
Referring to the key decision of his leadership to sign up to the Mullingar accord and agree a long-term alliance in the run-up to the election with Fine Gael, Labour leader Pat Rabbitte said after his election in Dublin South West yesterday afternoon: "You're damned if you do and damned if you don't."
The party had 21 outgoing TDs and ran 50 candidates, with at least one candidate in every constituency. Three sitting Labour TDs did not fight the election, but the party was confident its other incumbents would be returned with the strong possibility of picking up half a dozen seats.
Party handlers last night said it was not easy to analyse why it had put in such a disappointing performance.
They argued that while the party was squeezed in the alliance with Fine Gael, it was also a bad day for the Green Party, which chose to fight the election independently.
They refused to accept it miscalculated by focusing on public services, in particular health, in the campaign.
"We were never going to be able to fight Fianna Fáil on their platform of the economy," he said. "We couldn't win that debate. Most people think the economy is doing well. Health was genuinely a big issue and that is what we were picking up, but in the last week people went back to Fianna Fáil."
Mr Rabbitte, who conceded that Bertie Ahern would have a third term as Taoiseach, strongly defended the party's strategy.
"It was a very deliberate calculated strategy to offer the people an alternative . . . The people have spoken. They are sovereign."
When asked about his leadership, he said: "I think you are jumping a great deal of bridges; the seats haven't even been decided yet. The reasons why the mood for change that was unmistakably there shifted in the last week I think will require a lot of analysis. It's quite complex.
"The fact is that people changed horses in the closing stages of this election.
"One of the big factors was that in the last week of the campaign, the election became a contest in the media between Taoiseach and alternative taoiseach."
One of the Labour TDs returned yesterday, Brendan Howlin from Wexford, who is on the wing of the party that did not support the alliance strategy at the party conference in 2004, said the party would now have to give some thought to how it went forward.
There is one stark fact from which the Labour Party cannot escape - the middle-aged profile of its candidates.
While the smiling faces of many fresh-looking Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael deputies were in evidence yesterday, Joanna Tuffy was one of the few examples of "new blood" on the Labour block.