The Labour Party is about to elect a new leader who is almost a clone of the leader who has just retired. If Pat Rabbitte and Eamon Gilmore sound alike and say the same things, it is because their formative experiences were almost identical.
Both are in their mid-to-late 50s, both were born in the west of Ireland. They were near contemporaries in University College Galway, where they both did Arts degrees. They both got their first taste of politics as students' union leaders. Rabbitte was president of UCG students' union in 1970/71; Gilmore became president of the same union three years later. Rabbitte was president of the Union of Students in Ireland from 1972 to 1974. Gilmore was USI president from 1976 to 1978. After college both were trade union officials before entering full-time politics.
Their Dáil careers have been amazingly similar. Both were first elected to Dáil Éireann in 1989 as Workers' Party deputies. Both were among the TDs who broke away from that party in 1992, went on to form the Democratic Left and later merged with Labour in 1999. They are both strong constituency operators in Dublin and have managed to hold their seats in each election. Both have also been prominent and effective opposition frontbenchers, apart from the 1994 to 1997 period when they both were ministers of state in the Rainbow government. They are strong parliamentary and media performers.
In July, Pat Rabbitte, giving the annual Jim Kemmy lecture, conceded that there is a problem with the "Labour brand". While emphasising that he was not talking about something superficial such as the way the party was packaged, Rabbitte said that affluence had changed the way people thought about themselves and that Labour did not reflect the aspirations of the new middle class. He said the party had plenty of policies but what it needed was "a project".
The forthcoming change in the Labour party's leadership - now almost certain to see Gilmore succeed Rabbitte - will not of itself give rise to any repositioning of the Labour brand, however.
This leadership contest could have been an opportunity for a reinvigoration of the party. It might even have thrown up a surprise by electing a leader from a new generation, as the British Conservative Party did in 2005. Tired of being on the losing side in three consecutive elections, and having already changed their leader three times in the previous decade, Conservative Party members rejected the older established frontbenchers and opted for a young leader, David Cameron, who had been an MEP for only four years. Cameron's election overhauled his party's stiff and jaded image and created momentum for transformation.
The Irish Labour Party membership will not get the option of new generation leadership. Labour has only four TDs who are not of the Rabbitte and Gilmore Dáil generation (or older). Three of these - Seán Sherlock from Cork East, Ciarán Lynch in Cork South Central and Joanna Tuffy in Dublin Mid West - were first elected only last May and could not credibly contest. Jan O'Sullivan in Limerick East was elected in a 1998 byelection but has opted to contest the deputy leadership. So the choice for party members is limited to the classes of 1989 and 1992.
Of that class, Gilmore is perhaps the most able and, like Rabbitte and Quinn before him, Gilmore is up to the task of sustaining the party's position at 20 or so Dáil seats and at about 10 per cent of the vote. However, Gilmore's elevation will do nothing to change the wider public perception of his party. On the contrary, it sends a message of "more of the same" and means the task of repairing the party's brand will not be easy.
Rebranding is challenging. Commercial entities spend much money and time on research, marketing and advertising to ensure they get it right. For a political party, without those resources and with only a partial insight into its need to change, rebranding is likely to be all the more difficult.
The most successful political party rebranding in a western democracy in recent decades was Tony Blair's New Labour project. Blair's election as leader represented a dramatic gear shift in the modernisation of the British Labour Party. He went on to adjust the party's name, overhaul the party's rhetoric and even jettison some of its core values. The rebranding was emphasised by the struggle within Labour about the deletion of the iconic Clause IV from its constitution, which committed the party to a policy of nationalisation.
If he hasn't already done so, Eamon Gilmore could do worse then read Alastair Campbell's recently published diaries, the first few chapters of which chronicle Blair's struggle to successfully rebrand his party.
It is important not to overstate the Irish Labour Party's difficulties. The party's vote and seat share has stagnated but it can draw some comfort from the fact that it hasn't gone into reverse. It endures as the third party in the Irish political system. Indeed it is in a stronger position now then in 2002, not only because the Sinn Féin threat has abated somewhat, but because the Greens are now a party of government. Labour also has a fresher line-up in the Seanad. On the other hand, the age profile of its TDs and the hold many of them have on their constituency organisations renders the party's existing Dáil seats vulnerable, particularly to a resurgent Fine Gael.
Because Labour will be seen as having played it safe in choosing him as its leader, Gilmore will have to be all the more radical if he is to solve the problem which Pat Rabbitte identified with the Labour brand.