Fianna Fáil won a third term, not because everything is fine but because no one else made a convincing case that they could make it a lot better, argues Fintan O'Toolewho believes the TV debate was a crucial turning point
Anyone looking for a perfect vignette of the election campaign needed to look no further than the election count in Wicklow.
Minister for the Environment Dick Roche romped home with more than 10,000 votes - a huge personal and political endorsement for a man whose record on the environment had been much criticised. But he did so in a count centre in Arklow where the toilets had to be locked and there was no drinking water, because of concerns that the supply had been polluted.
It was a nice encapsulation of the case for a Fianna Fáil/Green coalition: the same basic policies but with a serious attempt to address the environmental and planning problems of rapid growth. But it also put the election result itself in a nutshell.
In the face of Bertie Ahern's brilliant personal triumph, it is hard to remember that this was no sweeping endorsement of a government that, since its 2002 performance, actually lost nine seats.
Fianna Fáil won a third term, not because everything is fine but because no one else made a convincing case that they could make it a lot better.
That count in Wicklow was significant, too, because it took place in what turned out to be the cockpit of the election: the commuter belt that stretches from north Wexford, through Wicklow and Carlow, Kildare, east Meath and Louth.
This is the new Ireland, shaped by the boom of the last 15 years and inhabited in part by displaced Dubliners with no fixed allegiances to any political tribe. These are the people who have faced the problems of disorganised growth most acutely. They are the ones who spend the equivalent of half a working week on clogged-up motorways, whose children are lucky to get into overcrowded primary school classes, who struggle with inadequate childcare and the consequences of planning that serves developers rather than communities.
But they are also the ones with most to lose. They have high mortgages and in many cases significant levels of personal debt. They need cars to get to work. They need two jobs to keep their heads above water. They are on an economic high wire and they have a long way to fall. The loss of a job could leave them high and dry and the end of the property boom could leave them with negative equity.
If they were to be persuaded to take a risk, they also had to be persuaded that there was a tangible reward to be gained. They were not convinced, and Fianna Fáil performed superbly in what was supposed to be the region in which it was most vulnerable.
The key to the election was thus, a phrase indelibly associated with one of its biggest losers: radical or redundant. Michael McDowell's famous description of the choice faced by his own party, the Progressive Democrats, turned out to be a precise harbinger of its doom and his own. But it also applied to the other side of the house.
In the context of the last decade of prosperity, "more of the same" was always going to be an attractive option. If you wanted continuity, you needed to look no further than Bertie Ahern, the familiar, unchanging presence, impervious to crisis, scandal and the political weather. If you didn't want more of the same, the alternative had to be radical enough to avoid redundancy. The much-vaunted "mood for change" had to be crystallised into a sense that real change was possible.
It is easy to say that the PDs were all but wiped out because people didn't like the kind of real change they represented - the aggressive free-market economics summed up in McDowell's dismissal of equality as a primary goal of public policy. But it is just as likely that the PDs lost out because they were not aggressive enough. They provided in the course of the campaign a perfect microcosm of redundancy posing as radicalism. By threatening to pull out of government over Ahern's personal finances, and then losing his nerve, McDowell neatly dramatised the way in which the PDs had become the watchdog that didn't bark.
Having lost their most important cabinet ally in Charlie McCreevy, the PDs also lost their position as the sharp edge of Fianna Fáil's economic populism. Ahern's deft mid-term shift back onto the centre ground (claiming to be a socialist, inviting Fr SeáHealy to address the party and so on) posed a challenge to the PDs' free market radicalism.
Except in the area of health, the PDs largely shirked it, making themselves the appendix of the body politic: an unnecessary add-on. This in turn allowed voters to express some degree of anger at the outgoing coalition without risking a real change. They could poke the Government in the eye and still feel confident that Ahern would be Taoiseach and things would go on as before.
Likewise, Sinn Féin lost out, arguably, because it has become too respectable. It ended up being a party of protest that was protesting too little, a process exemplified by the failure of its strategy of replacing the old-style hard man Nicky Kehoe with the more soft-centred, telegenic Mary Lou McDonald in Dublin Central.
And those who point to the defeat of the Socialist Party's Joe Higgins as evidence for a broad rejection of radicalism, should bear in mind both the stellar performances of far-left candidates Clare Daly in Dublin North and Richard Boyd Barrett in Dún Laoghaire and the fact that had Dublin West been a four-seater, as it should have been, Higgins would have held his seat with some ease.
The most important failure to articulate a sufficiently different alternative, however, was that of Fine Gael and Labour. Enda Kenny was in this election, as in all of those into which he has led his party, a superb leader of Fine Gael.
But he was not a good leader of the Opposition and, indeed, he has never grasped the distinction between one role and the other.
Kenny's safe, defensive and risk-averse performance in the crucial leaders' debate with Ahern did Fine Gael no harm. But it did a great deal of harm to Labour and the Greens. Swing voters who might be inclined towards those parties saw a choice between two potential taoisigh, one of whom has presided over a decade of peace and prosperity, and the other who was offering the same dish cooked by a less deft chef.
Given the unresolved doubts about Kenny's capacity to lead, those voters, especially in the commuter belt, were always likely to see a change of government as something of a risk. The question therefore was: is it a risk worth taking? If you're going to gamble, you want to know that there's a real pot to be scooped. You don't bet €1,000 to win €10, but you might bet it to win €10,000.
The biggest challenge for the Opposition parties was this: how do you offer political change when you're not offering economic change?
Fine Gael and Labour essentially accepted the current economic framework and concentrated on their ability to deliver better public services within it. But conceding so much ground on the economy was a critical mistake. There was almost a conspiracy of silence around the underlying reality that "more of the same" is not in fact a real economic option.
The economic boom has been led by exports but Ireland has been steadily losing competitiveness in export markets. Construction, property prices and consumer spending have partly replaced the basic activity of making things and selling them abroad.
It is not, either economically or environmentally, a sustainable model, and the broad consensus among the social and economic stakeholders represented in the National Economic and Social Council is that Ireland needs to make a quantum leap into a new economy. The economy, too, faces choices between radicalism and redundancy. The NESC's radical solution is a shift towards an innovation-led society in which social investment and entrepreneurship are integrated.
In their joint appeal to the electorate, however, Fine Gael and Labour chose not to talk about any of this. In a sense, they had a vested interest in telling voters that the economy could just cruise along. They needed to envisage a steady continuation of economic growth in order to fund the various promises they were making, especially on tax, health and policing. So their fundamental message became that old Irish bull: the same only different. That message gave voters too few reasons to take a risk.
This is why the TV debate was such a crucial turning point. Kenny and Pat Rabbitte had decided that they could not attack Fianna Fáil at its strong point - the economy - and in the post-election discussions, both have defended that decision.
But Ahern had the guts and the skill to attack the Opposition's strong point - health. It didn't much matter that he attacked on the basis of some dodgy figures and that his own party's costings turned out to be every bit as shaky. What mattered was that instead of conceding ground, he went out and occupied the enemy's territory. The wavering voters in the key battlegrounds saw just one leader with the courage to take a risk.
That strategy reflected a belated realisation by Fianna Fáil that 2007 could be a repeat of 2002, with the electorate invited to vote against the Opposition rather than for the Government. This was all the more important because, in the event, Fianna Fáil got a brilliant result on the basis of a poor campaign.
The concentration in the first two weeks on Ahern's personal finances distracted attention from the party's unusual confusion on basic issues. Much of it centred on Brian Cowen's unease. It was clear that he was unenthusiastic about the party's promised cuts in stamp duty. He directly contradicted Séamus Brennan on the issue of pensions policy. And Ahern ended the election correcting his figures on the cost of the Fianna Fáil/PD strategy of subsidising the building of co-located private hospitals.
None of this really mattered in the end because Fine Gael and Labour were telling the public that there was no significant debate to be had about the future of the Irish economy. If you're offering "the same only different", you should not be surprised that people opt to leave out the "different" bit.