That Ruairi Quinn is older than the man he succeeds and a lot older than Brendan Howlin, the man he defeated, might suggest that his leadership will be safe rather than creative. I wouldn't bank on that.
First of all, it's a myth that fresh new ideas come in the main from younger people, and secondly, Quinn is a team man who will encourage and develop a fresh ideas brigade within his party.
People in a coalition with Lab our might have found Howlin easier to deal with, in one regard. He will give you hell in the process of making a deal with you but, once the deal is done, he will go through hell to defend it. Quinn, although he presents as a blunt and clinical decision-maker, is more easily influenced.
During the day of the presidential election count, I had a short but significant tiff with him on RTE television. I opened the engagement by criticising the Labour Party for the damage its latest head-hunting expedition had done to Adi Roche and her charity.
Quinn observed that I had alluded to this in an earlier Irish Times column. In fact, he said heavily, he read my column with great care each week. (I'm new enough at this column-writing to be both flattered by the remark and hopeful that the Editor might be watching while it was made.)
He said he took (if I remember rightly) "grave personal exception" to what I had said and written on this score. At that point, the TV programme took a different tack - indeed, it may have been that someone called "seconds out" for the bout of verbals between John Bowman and Eoghan Harris.
Afterwards, one of the production staff asked me if I had noticed how much more it had taken out of Quinn to make the criticism than it had taken out of me to absorb it. She was right: he fights with people only when all other methods of persuasion have failed, does it badly (witness his pre-presidential election performance on Questions and Answers), and hates every minute of it.
He has a lot in common with Bertie Ahern. Both are consensus men who avoid confrontation and instinctively seek to placate and to pacify. Even his infamous comment to then Taoiseach Albert Reynolds, "We've come for a head, yours or Harry Whelehan's", shows his concentration on practical options, not on outraged opportunities for rhetoric.
The outrage years may be over for Labour. They probably should be. The national mood is changing and the whistle-blowing of the last five years is unlikely to happen again. Indeed, some of the aspects of Quinn's life which were used against him without much success during the leadership campaign may be quite useful to him in the changed context through which he must lead the Labour Party.
Suggestions about the amount of money he was making on overseas lecture trips failed to create the great resentment they might have generated a few years ago.
These days, the view is that you don't have to be poor to be in Labour, that competence on the international stage is a prerequisite for a leader of that party and, if he can make a bit of money while he's in opposition, let him at it.
Quinn has a lot going for him now, not least his location. Labour must win back Dublin and he is well-placed to appeal to the Dublin floating voter, who likes to toy with a sanitised socialism as long as it doesn't carry unpleasant possibilities, like property tax.
Although he may have given up hope of becoming Labour leader when a more youthful Dick Spring got the job, the intervening years will have proved useful to him. He has a good deal of ministerial experience under his belt, although his victory indicates the short memory of some of his colleagues: while he was minister for finance, Labour TDs were openly critical of how inaccessible he was.
This leader is a practical man who learns so that complaint may not be made about him again. However, no matter how practical or goals-driven he is, the aim of winning a seat in all 41 constituencies is an aspiration rather than a realistic goal. He will be doing very well after the next election to come back with 33 deputies, particularly since he may suffer from Albert Reynolds's and John Major's problem: succeeding a larger-than-life leader. Both were overshadowed by the megalithic presence and image of their predecessors.
Dick Spring's continuing presence and avowed interest in a front-bench position is both good and bad news for the new leader, as is the bloc of votes which went to Howlin. Quinn knows better than anyone the level of threat represented by those votes.
It may be small and is certainly not likely to be exacerbated by his style. There will be no Blairite forcing through of the policies or opinions of one man in this new Labour Party.
He will take the best and most popular policies his people produce and build on them. He did refer, on the day of his accession, to "new Labour". I wouldn't, if I was in his shoes. The mood expressed by that slogan belongs elsewhere and I don't mean to the British government. It was owned by the Spring administration long before Blair got to the top.
Although "recover, re-use and recycle" is a good policy for industries, it's less applicable to political parties. The reality is that the Labour Party, once in recent history, was placed in the path of the tide that leads on to fortune, which swept it to 33 seats - and it is unlikely to happen again in the foreseeable future. This will not prevent idealists and party theorists from spouting in the next few months about "strengthening the organisation", "improving communications" and "creating greater participation". That's what every party in a down-swing does, it's a form of self-therapy.
Quinn knows there's nothing to it and he needs to consolidate the party's position. It's easy to forget, when we notice that at the last election Labour lost a huge number of seats, that it was left, nonetheless, with its second-largest representation in the Dail. That's not a bad base from which to build. Inevitably, on the day of his election, journalists wanted to know if he would take Labour into a coalition with Fianna Fail. A bit previous, that question. The first task will be to make the most of being in opposition. This will allow him and more importantly, his more radical elements, room to manoeuvre. They can attack, build reputations, establish positions.
As they do, his interests may quietly coincide with those of Bertie Ahern - a few years of FF/ PD government would suit both of them, not least because it would give Quinn time to distance his party from any perceived taint from its years in power.