In 1992, self-examination by Fine Gael defined it as a party in crisis. It still is and is now searching for a new leader, writes Mark Hennessy
Standing in the sun outside Leinster House, former Laois-Offaly TD Charlie Flanagan reviewed the Fine Gael wreckage. "We're still looking for the black box," he said, still able to smile despite his own defeat.
These are days of black humour in the party's ranks. Left with just 31 TDs and a leader ready to quit the scene, Fine Gael's faces a mountain to climb, more steep than the one faced by Garret FitzGerald in the late Seventies.
For a start, Fine Gael must decide what it wants to be: a catch-all party or one which drifts slightly left or right of centre and no longer tries to be all things to all people.
The choice will be difficult. The party's grassroots cannot be led just anywhere. Remarkably loyal, they are, however, ageing, conservative and largely rural, according to a survey in the recently published book, Days of Blue Loyalty.
However, the seeds of the party's difficulties lie not just in the short and ill-fated reign of Michael Noonan, but rather stretch back to the end of Garret FitzGerald's leadership in 1987.
Then, the party went for Alan Dukes, rather than accepting the caretaker-style leadership of Peter Barry while Dukes, Bruton and other younger candidates prepared themselves to take over. Divisions created by this battle never healed.
Following another defeat in 1992, the then Fine Gael Leader, John Bruton, launched a review of the party's health. The prognosis was poor. "There can be little doubt that Fine Gael is in a state of crisis," it read.
Accurately forecasting increasing political fragmentation in the years ahead, the Commission on Renewal said the blame could be laid at the door of "the apparent failure of party politics". Since then, however, Fine Gael has been slow to take the hard decisions.
While petty slights have been common, ruthlessness has been rare. Candidate selection has been less than rigorous, unlike Fianna Fáil, for instance, which has been prepared to lose TDs in the hope of overall gains.
Fuming about Noonan's leadership, one TD said: "Look, there were places where we should have run two people and three people in places where we had two, if he had only had the balls to face people down.
"If we had run three candidates in Laois-Offaly, we could have held the two seats that we had there. But Noonan would have had to take on the Flanagans and the Enrights." Since FitzGerald's era ended, Fine Gael has spent just 2½ years in power, and then only by accident. Increasingly irrelevant in the Dáil's arithmetic, Fine Gael was seen in the same way in the election by voters.
"I am sick to death of being in opposition. I went into politics to be in government," said Cork South West TD, Jim O'Keeffe, passionately. Such hunger will be needed everywhere for the decline to be reversed.
Arriving for the parliamentary party meeting yesterday, the Fine Gael TDs elected in last week's general election had the look of troops leaving the frontlines of the Somme; mournful for their fallen comrades, weary, but glad to be still alive.
OVERCOMING his weariness, Fine Gael's leader in the Seanad, Maurice Manning, who played a high-profile role in the campaign, described it as one of the most important gatherings in the party's history.
The party's outspoken Mayo TD, Michael Ring, who has promoted "parish pump" politics to win and hold his Dáil seat against the odds, spoke for many.
"Fine Gael has got to stop behaving like a party in government when we are in opposition.Let's tell the people who we will represent and who we will not represent, so that we end up representing somebody. I have told them that in the parliamentary party so many times."
Here, however, the parliamentarians are sharply divided. One former TD said: "We should be talking to people like Pat Rabbitte in Labour. Not Quinn, because he is going nowhere, but we should be trying to create a real social democratic alternative." Nonsense, say others.
"We went down that route with Michael Noonan and it didn't work. We were telling people that they should give up some of the money they got from Charlie McCreevy for hospitals and we got told where to go," said one TD.
One likely leadership challenger, Carlow-Kilkenny TD Phil Hogan has already begun to hone his campaign message.
"We have to get back to basic principles: pro-enterprise, pro-self reliance, pro-Europe, fiscally prudent, strong on law and order."
For now, the other candidates are likely to be Richard Bruton, Enda Kenny, Denis Naughten and Simon Coveney, while John Bruton stands, like Cincinattus in the days of Rome, ready to re-enter the fray.
None is perfectly built for the role, though some have potential. Richard Bruton is intelligent, busy and Dublin-based, though seen as indecisive and too nice for a job that will require a hard man.
Though immensely liked, Enda Kenny has rarely shown the application that will be needed during dark, lonely night-time journeys to constituency meetings in the middle of nowhere.
Longford-Roscommon's Denis Naughten and Cork South Central's Coveney are both untested, though Naughten has the edge - if he can lose the image of a conservative Roscommon farmer.
Fine Gael's pin-up boy, the 30- year-old Coveney, showed his mettle when he skippered his family's Golden Apple yacht around the world to raise funds for the Chernobyl Project.
In the Dáil only since October 1998, Coveney is, however, still a political neophyte. In recent days, he has been put in charge of housekeeping arrangements for the party in Leinster House as Fine Gael's defeated TDs clean their desks.
In reality, Fine Gael will have to decide on its next leader before it fully decides on the direction it wants to go in over the next five years in Opposition.
It will be a difficult voyage.