An emphatic victory for Fianna Fáil - on a scale even it can scarcely have expected. Late yesterday afternoon, figures of up to 79 seats for Fianna Fáil were being mentioned, writes Garret FitzGerald.
If, as at that time seemed likely, the party's share of first-preference votes turns out to have been around 40 per cent, for it to win between 45 and 47.5 per cent of the seats would seem at first sight somewhat surprising.
Normally Fianna Fáil's seat bonus has been around three percentage points. But the setback to the PDs, the poor showing of the Green Party and above all the collapse of support for Independent candidates would help to explain such an outcome.
Up to the moment the tns/MRBI Irish Times poll was released last Sunday night the outcome clearly favoured the Opposition - by a larger margin than most commentators were then prepared to admit. For, allowing for a three-point error margin, the opinion surveys throughout the campaign averaged 36 per cent for Fianna Fáil, with Fine Gael at 27 per cent, Labour at 11 per cent and the rest sharing the remaining 26 per cent between them.
But although up to a week ago all the media talk of the significance of minor shifts up and down in these poll figures was illusory, by contrast the two last polls of the campaign clearly suggested some recovery by Fianna Fáil, albeit not on the scale that seemed to be likely yesterday evening.
A Fianna Fáil/Labour government was an outcome that had been persistently pushed by Fianna Fáil and much of the media as perhaps arising from a putative hung Dáil. To my mind that particular scenario was always illusory. It is an arithmetical fact that unless some political party or group of individuals decides to vote against both of the candidates for the office of taoiseach, following the election of the ceann comhairle, one or other of the two candidates has to be elected when the new Dáil meets on June 14th.
And it seems to me unlikely that any party or Independent will in fact vote against both of them.
For, in a tight Dáil situation, such as is likely to exist on this occasion, none of the surviving Independents would secure any advantage by acting like dogs-in-the-manger to frustrate the formation of a government. Independent TDs who are not ideologically committed to one side or the other - if any such survive the massacre of the Independents in this election - will clearly have an interest in attaching themselves to whichever leader could secure office, an arrangement from which they could expect to benefit in due course.
As for Sinn Féin, that party would damage its sought-for credibility by voting against both leaders with the purpose of creating a Dáil deadlock. On the other hand, even without any overt agreement with Fianna Fáil, if Sinn Féin held the balance of power, they could find it advantageous to vote Fianna Fáil into office, and thereafter be able to influence it.
For some time to come, that is the nearest Sinn Féin is likely to get to the direct exercise of power in the government of this State.
I am prepared to believe Fianna Fáil's assertion that it would not form a coalition with Sinn Féin at this stage. But I totally disbelieve the statements of some Fianna Fáil spokesmen that they "will not go into a government dependent on Sinn Féin".
The only honest Fianna Fáil spokesman on this point, who last Tuesday frankly admitted that his party "could form a minority government if Sinn Féin gave them unsolicited support", was Dermot Ahern. If Bertie Ahern needed the votes of Sinn Féin in order to secure a Dáil majority, and were to be given them, the idea that he would then refuse to accept office on that basis seems to me to be a surreal absurdity.
And if no deputies decide against their own interest to vote against both candidates, the only other way in which a Fianna Fáil/Labour government could emerge would be if Labour charitably decided to save Fianna Fáil from the fate of becoming a Sinn Féin-dependent government by gratuitously going back on all it has said for several years past. Given the damage that Labour did its electoral support in 1992 by forming a coalition with Fianna Fáil, that particular option, although theoretically possible, seems somewhat unlikely.
On the other hand, it is not to be excluded that if Fianna Fáil and the surviving PDs were to lack the necessary 83 votes to enable Bertie Ahern to be elected without Sinn Fein support, then towards that end Fianna Fáil could offer the Green Party policy concessions that their special party conference might decide to accept, even perhaps at the expense of reversing their hitherto adamant opposition to a carbon tax.
Would the surviving PDs be willing to make up a third party in such a strange coalition? They might have nowhere else to go.
Finally, the emphatic rejection of Sinn Féin by the electorate of this State is a welcome outcome of this election. Gerry Adams's performance in the four-way debate on Wednesday week may well have contributed powerfully to this result.
As a somewhat partitionist observer maliciously remarked to me, even with the recent remarkable improvement in Irish-British relations, the people of this State are not yet ready to welcome the intervention of a member of the British parliament in the domestic political affairs of this State!