Date Published: 15-Mar-2011

Nothing can have better illustrated the devastation which had befallen Fianna Fail in the General Election than the graphics representing Dail chamber seat occupancy which were published in some of the daily newspapers in the past week.

Fianna Fail, who up to a week previously were regarded as ‘the natural party of power’ for eighty years, were now confined to a very small area indeed of the Dail chamber, while Fine Gael and Labour sprawled all over the place.

In those graphics, FF looked like some sort of slightly puffed-up Progressive Democrats from a few elections ago. People were trying to put words on it. I heard Eamon Ó Cuív TD being interviewed about how sparse the front bench must have looked when it was reduced to less than a handfull. But I think Ó Cuív might have been more familiar with those blanked-out photos occasionally used to show the effects of emigration on football and hurling teams in small clubs in rural areas.

What happened in the election was that someone took that Fianna Fail ‘team picture’ and wiped out more than 50 of the faces with which we had become familiar …. and replaced then with ranks of Fine Gael, Labour, Sinn Fein and Independents; new faces which we are all going to have to learn to recognise from the news bulletins.

Ó Cuív is one of those who will have to attempt to pick up the pieces – including a rare old battle which is going on at the moment to stop long-term senators like Donie Cassidy and Terry Leyden, who haven’t any ambition or chance of being new TDs of the future, from running for the Senate. In other words, what Fianna Fail now wants to develop is winners for the future.

Right now though, that looks like it will be a tough business indeed and it will be interesting to see if the FF powers-that-be still have the influence and the backing to implement the kind of ruthless regime which Fine Gael introduced in the wake of the FG 2002 General Election disaster.

It ruthlessly used the Senate and the the 2009 Local Elections to rebuild the party. Remember, Fine Gael in 2002 had fallen from 54 Dail seats to 31, but by the Local Elections of 2009 Enda Kenny had rebuilt it to the point where it swept to its biggest number of Local Council seats ever.

That’s the base from which Fine Gael achieved its success of a week ago. It was in the wake of the Local Elections that Enda Kenny first went on the record as saying that from that point, FG could take 70 or more Dail seats. Some laughed, but the base had been laid for a push for power.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.