THE recent general election was. For the left wing parties the most important in the history of the State. They had with Mary Robinson's campaign For presidency in 1990 won an election For the First time ever. They had, in the 1992 election and subsequent by elections, ended up with something approaching a halfway respectable Dail representation.
The Labour surge the last time out had given reasonable grounds for believing that the party could, under Dick Spring, eventually become at least the second force in Irish politics, able to challenge Fianna Fail in a recognisable left right competition for ascendancy in the next decade.
The forward march of Irish socialism now looks like a military manoeuvre conducted by the grand old Duke of York.
But there is, in all of this, a paradox. For the general election actually suggested two things at the same time. It showed firstly, indeed, that the left is going nowhere fast. But secondly, it proved that the centre of gravity of Irish politics is firmly to the left of centre. For the strange thing is that the hold of social democratic values in Ireland is obviously greater than ever before.
John Bruton and Fine Gael fought the election with ideas like "inclusiveness" at the centre of their appeal and attacked tax cuts for the rich. Bertie Ahern and Fianna Fail also buried their right ward tendency of recent years and declined to campaign for spending cuts, privatisation or the free market. Both of them did reasonably well.
Conversely, even the rather timid and halfhearted attempts by the Progressive Democrats to sell a classic European market liberalism came to a nasty end. Labour and Democratic Left ended up selling the right goods in the wrong packages. People wanted to buy social democracy, but not from them. This is very cold comfort for the left.
SO HOW does the left pick up the pieces and, more importantly, how does it rearrange them? It has to start by trying to understand what has happened, and to resist two easy explanations. One is the notion that it was all Tony O'Reilly's Fault. The editorial line of Independent Newspapers certainly did not help, but neither should its effect be exaggerated.
The limits of such an explanation can easily be tested by asking whether Labour and Democratic Left would have swept the boards if only the Indo had restrained itself. I am reminded of W.B. Yeats's agonised question, "Did that play of mine send out certain men the English shot?", and Paul Muldoon's reply:
If Willie Yeats had saved his pencil lead
Would certain men have stayed in bed?
If the Indo had saved some printer's ink, would certain voters have held their fire? Certainly not.
And the second easy explanation is that 1992 was a freak occurrence and that the left is eternally stuck with its routine allotment of 25 or so Dail seats to be divided between its shifting components. This is a superficially convincing notion band one that seems to impress most political commentators.
But it ignores an important fact that the 1992 result was entirely consistent with the presidential election of 1990 and with a whole series of broader developments in Irish society. It wasn't just a passing whim, but came out of a very profound anger at the state of moral and political authority in Ireland.
The 1997 election may look very like the 1989 election, and from the point of view of the left like pretty well every other postwar election. But behind the appearance of continuity there has been continual change. Labour captured that mood of change but then lost it again. And unless it accepts that it wasn't just the passive victim of a change in the public mood, it will not be able to come to terms with what has happened.
THE truth is that what goes for the PDs goes for the parties of the left as well they can be either radical or redundant. And Labour dissipated too much of its radicalism.
It promised not just new policies but a fundamentally renovated kind of democracy. And the difficulty of making good on such a promise is that you have to apply it to everything all the time. In most situations, two out of three ain't bad. But when you're promising a new beginning, acting radically most of the time is never good enough.
You can't promise social justice and nod through a tax amnesty. You can't talk about a new attitude to government and then treat the victims of the hepatitis C scandal as problems to be managed.
You can't campaign against the unhealthy links between business and politics and then send out fund raising invitations to business people offering access to the Minister for Finance. You can't argue for a rigorous commitment to equity and then decide that free university fees should have greater priority than dilapidated primary schools.
It may be unfair that the left should be judged by higher standards than either Fianna Fail or Fine Gael. It may be tough that Labour gets no credit for genuinely radical reforms like the Freedom of Information Act. But that's the way it is.
If people want pragmatic, powerholding politics. they have a choice of two catchall parties who are very good at it. Either the left offers something entirely different, or its many able TDs would be much better off doing a deal with John Bruton, joining Fine Gael, and working through the old system. At least then they would be saved the perpetual boom and bust of popular opposition and unpopular government.
This last option is a very real one and it is, for the left, a much better route than an attempt to keep the Rainbow on a life support machine. If it was not already obvious from the history of politics since Independence, the election showed that when small parties campaign in alliance with big ones, they merely boost their allies at their own expense. It is the road to redundancy.
The harder but more promising route is radicalism. It is a route that needs to be mapped out with a coherent and convincing vision of where Irish society should be going. It has to start not with the mechanics of gaining power but with its uses, not with a consideration of how the left wing parties are going to get back into government but of what they want to do if they get there.
It is an ideological rather than an organisational task. And it can be carried out only in alliance with a much broader collection of Forces than the two main left wing parties themselves.
The trade unions, women's groups, religious radicals, the environmental movement and the community development sector have to be centrally involved. Without them, and without an unflinching willingness to expose the roots of failure, the left will be stuck on a mad seesaw, rising and falling but staying fixed in one place.