On the Saturday before the election, Enda Kenny gave a three-word answer to a question about Bertie Ahern's prospects of forming a government with Labour: "Dream on, baby", writes Fintan O'Toole
Now, if Pat Rabbitte is asked the same question, his answer should be even more laconic: "Yes, please". Labour has no realistic route to government, either now or in the foreseeable future, except in partnership with Fianna Fáil.
It is a quarter of a century since a Fine Gael-Labour coalition won a general election. Since then, Labour has fought six general elections with either a formal pre-election or an implied post-election pact with Fine Gael on offer to voters. None has come to fruition. The only rational conclusion about the future of Fine Gael-Labour pacts is: "Dream on, baby".
That leaves Labour with just two short- and medium-term options. It can try to do what Dick Spring managed in the late 1980s and early 1990s and become the dominant opposition force. But that strategy would be unlikely to succeed again. It was based on the ambition to displace Fine Gael as the second party in the State.
By 2002, Fine Gael was indeed, in Enda Kenny's phrase, on a life-support machine. But, faced with the perceived responsibility to provide a coherent alternative government, Pat Rabbitte chose not to turn off the life-support machine and instead to administer a reviving shot of credibility. As a result, Fine Gael goes into the new Dáil reinvigorated and self-confident. It will dominate the opposition and there is little Labour can do about it.
So Labour is left with the only other desirable option: doing a deal with Bertie. This may not be an option at all, of course, and even if it is, words have to be eaten and flak has to be taken. There would be howls of indignation. But the fact is that there would be nothing dishonourable about Rabbitte going into government with Fianna Fáil. He did what he promised to do and offered the voters a change of government. It is not his fault that the voters declined the offer. A Fianna Fáil-Labour coalition would be far truer to the outcome of the election than a Fianna Fáil coalition with the PDs, whose aggressive free-market policies were decisively rejected. Rabbitte thus has an unassailable democratic argument for a deal with Fianna Fáil.
The obvious question, of course, is why Fianna Fáil would possibly want such a deal, when it would mean the concession of far more power, and more cabinet seats, than is necessary. Voluntarily conceding power is not what politicians do. But there is in fact one very good reason why Fianna Fáil would do a deal with Labour: it virtually guarantees that the party can win the next election, even without Bertie.
Barring a catastrophe, Fianna Fáil and Labour can be practically certain of at least a decade in office. They could look forward confidently to the respective heirs of Patrick Pearse and James Connolly occupying the GPO for the 2016 celebrations.
The rub, of course, is that the pact would make much more sense for Brian Cowen than for Bertie Ahern. Cowen would be shielded against any post-Bertie dip in Fianna Fáil's popularity. But since the big payoff for Fianna Fáil is precisely in the period after Bertie retires, there is less in it for Bertie. He would have to take the pain of disappointing some of his cabinet hopefuls, and indeed of demoting some of his present ministers, knowing that the rewards will be reaped after he's gone.
To make sense for Bertie, the deal would have to contain three conditions. Labour would have to sign up for a five-year term, with no wobbles even if the Mahon tribunal gets awkward. It would have to agree to a long-term alliance, including the fighting of the 2012 election on a joint platform. And Rabbitte would have to take the job no one in Fianna Fáil actually wants: minister for health.
Yet this last condition is exactly why Labour should, if it can, do the deal. The one real and fundamental difference between the alternative coalitions in the election was on health policy. It is not a matter of detail, but a crucial moral and philosophical divide. Fianna Fáil committed itself to the PDs' policy of consolidating apartheid in the health system by using public money and public land to build for-profit hospitals on the grounds of public hospitals.
It is a huge and virtually irrevocable step towards an official policy of valuing the lives of the rich more than those of the poor. And it became clear that, for all the bluster of the campaign, Fianna Fáil's heart isn't really in it. When able ministers like Cowen and Séamus Brennan turned out not to know the cost of the policy, it suggested that they've been in deep denial about it.
If Labour could reverse this policy and build, as Rabbitte says it could, 2,300 public beds in five years, its swallowed pride would not taste so bitter. Rabbitte would have achieved something monumental in Irish politics and Fianna Fáil would be able to look forward to 2016 with a belief that republicanism actually means something.