Politics is not about office, it is about building support for campaigns. Significant change occurs not through parliamentary action, rather through a process of persuasion and argument. The contention that politics is about implementing one's policies in office through coalition arrangements is essentially misconceived.
I have argued this here and elsewhere for the past several months and, I think, I have failed to convince, which, given the context, is unfortunate! The great changes that have occurred in society have come about not through legislative or governmental initiative but through campaigns.
The campaign for the abolition of slavery was led by the Quakers and by William Wilberforce, an Anglican evangelist. Wilberforce was elected to parliament at the age of 21 and became the parliamentary representative of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. He never held office. But he and a brilliant researcher, Thomas Clarkson, and their Quaker friends succeeded in persuading the British parliament to pass the Slave Trade Act in March 1807. That was of momentous consequence.
The campaign to abolish slavery in America was again led by the Quakers and supported, incidentally, by the likes of Daniel O'Connell, who spoke in America in its favour.
It wasn't a parliament or congress that was responsible for the abolition of slavery, it was campaigning politics which persuaded people to change their minds, minds that had been fixed on the "common sense" of slavery for millennia. And that was precisely what Daniel O'Connell achieved here with Catholic Emancipation.
Similarly with democracy. The divine right of kings was the dominant ideology for millennia. It was only in the 20th century that "democracy" in Britain came to mean the equal right of every adult to vote.
It was because the mindset of the American colonisers had been changed to accept the idea of democracy (such as it was) that resulted in the US constitution in 1788 providing for an elected government of "all" the people, bar women and slaves.
The rights of women were secured not because of alliances of parties in government but because of the women's movement, primarily - also because economic forces led to pressures to extend the workforce to women.
The Green or environmental movement itself has had great influence, in Europe particularly, not because of anything the Greens have done in government but because of the success of the movement in alerting electorates to the imminence of ecological disaster.
Perhaps the most influential politician in Britain in the past 50 years was someone who was in "power" for only a brief few years, during which time he achieved almost nothing but who as a campaigner changed British politics, or helped to do so, decisively. This was Enoch Powell. He helped change the way Britain thinks about immigrants (disastrously, in my view, but that is an aside). It was he who became the first neo-liberal in British politics and paved the way for Thatcherism. It was he who prompted the euroscepticism that prevails in British politics still. He was not the only influence or maybe not the most important influence and, of course, economic forces had a huge part but Powell was more important an influence than anyone who held "office" since 1960 in Britain bar a few.
No party in government can now change the power relations in Irish society, make any radical difference to the distribution of wealth and income, or alter the reality of massive inequality in healthcare and educational opportunity. They cannot do it because the electorate does not buy into it, because indeed the electorate is deeply opposed to it.
This is because people are convinced the present ideology or system is the "only viable" one, the only system that makes "common sense". Just as it was argued a few hundred years ago that slavery made "common sense", some people were born masters, others born slaves. Just as an oligarchy made "common sense", the idea of entrusting a largely ignorant electorate with the decision on who should govern made no "common sense", only those with a "stake" (ie property) in society and with an appreciation of the great issues should be allowed decide. It was "common sense".
In a few hundred years it is likely people will look back at this era in wonderment at how rational, compassionate people could have justified the scale of inequality that now prevails in this and other western societies, how it was possible to reconcile the vast wealth and extravagance of a small proportion of the populace while a sizeable portion lived in misery, without influence, without power, without the capacity to participate meaningfully in society, how this could have been the "common sense" of this time.
And my point is that the task of politics primarily is to rail against this "common sense", to expose the absurdities, the unfairness, the immorality of the kind of society that has emerged and to campaign for a fairer, more equal, more just order. It is with those who can steer that change the real "power" resides.