Labour analysisThe Labour Party will be doing a lot of soul searching in the coming weeks after seeing its alliance electoral strategy with Fine Gael backfire, coming back to the 30th Dáil with 20 seats, one fewer than in 2002.
The party saw its share of the vote drop by just over half a per cent and found itself squeezed in what turned out to be a battle between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. Many of its partner's gains were at the expense of the smaller party.
The postmortem on the strategy which failed to deliver the gains Labour had hoped for will begin with a parliamentary party meeting on Wednesday and a National Executive Council meeting on Thursday.
The party had 21 outgoing TDs, and ran a total of 50 candidates in this election, with at least one candidate in every constituency. Three sitting Labour TDs didn't fight the election - Sean Ryan in Dublin North, former ceann comhairle Seamus Pattison in Carlow-Kilkenny and Joe Sherlock in Cork East.
But the party was confident its incumbents would be returned and targeted half a dozen other seats.
One incumbent, Breeda Moynihan Cronin, failed to be returned in Kerry South, while the party didn't win in Dublin North, despite a brave effort by Brendan Ryan to fill his brother's seat. In Carlow-Kilkenny the two candidates, Jim Townsend and Michael O'Brien, were squeezed, but the party hung on to Joe Sherlock's seat in Cork East with his son Seán.
The party failed to make the breakthrough it hoped for in many constituencies. In Kerry North Labour was bitterly disappointed that its candidate Terry O'Brien didn't take the seat which Dick Spring lost in 2002, despite huge support from the Spring family machine and several visits during the campaign by party leader Pat Rabbitte. Labour saw its vote down by more than 11 percentage points there.
There was little joy either in either of the Tipperary constituencies, with the party dropping its share of the vote by more than 3 percentage points on 2002 in Tipperary North with Sen Kathleen O'Meara failing to make it again in her third attempt.
In Tipperary South Phil Prendergast struggled to make any impact with Labour again showing a slight drop on the last time out.
The strategy to run two candidates in Dublin South backfired and there will be recriminations here. Alex White and Aidan Culhane never looked like winning a seat despite a rise in the party vote there. One of the party's bright young hopes, Dominic Hannigan, failed to make it in Meath East, and Eric Byrne was in a dogfight for the last seat in Dublin South Central, losing out to Sinn Féin's Aengus Ó Snodaigh.
It wasn't all bad news. The party succeeded in picking up two new seats with Joanna Tuffy in Dublin Mid-West and Ciaran Lynch in Cork South Central.
Veterans such as former leader Ruairí Quinn in Dublin South East, Brendan Howlin in Wexford, Willie Penrose in Longford-Westmeath, Jack Wall in Kildare South, Emmet Stagg in Kildare North, Eamon Gilmore in Dún Laoghaire and Liz McManus in Wicklow were returned.
Sources in the party argue that while Labour was squeezed in the alliance with Fine Gael, it was also a bad day for the Green Party which chose to fight the election independently. They are standing by their conviction that people were concerned about public services and in particular health but concede it was never going to be able to fight Fianna Fáil on the economy.
"In the last week of the campaign it turned out to be a contest between the Taoiseach and the alternative taoiseach. We were never in the frame after that," one party worker said. "In the end people went back to Fianna Fáil."
Brendan Howlin TD, who is on the wing of the party that didn't support the alliance strategy, has said that the party will now have to give some thought to see how it goes forward to win votes for Labour.
Dublin North East TD Tommy Broughan said yesterday the party performance was "profoundly disappointing".
What didn't help was the fact that the Labour Party was competing in a very crowded area on the left of Irish politics with Sinn Féin, the Greens, and the Socialist Party for company.
The general view is that the party ran its most professional campaign ever and the question of the leadership might arise only if Mr Rabbitte takes action on his own admission over the weekend that the party's adoption of an alliance strategy did not pay dividends in a poor election.