The nice thing about being a catch-all party is that very different kinds of people may like you for very different reasons. The nasty thing about being a catch-all party is that an equally wide range of people may despise you from an equally wide range of motives, writes Fintan O'Toole.
Over the last decade or so, Fianna Fáil's ability to generate a broad appeal has become more crucial to the party than ever before. The reason for this is simple enough: its hard-core, nailed-down, do-or-die vote has shrunk.
If you go back to the 1980s, when Charles Haughey was a hugely controversial leader who split both the party and the country, political and economic crises had very little effect on the Fianna Fáil vote. It was, in retrospect, astonishingly solid. In the five elections of that turbulent decade (1981, two in 1982, 1987 and 1989) Fianna Fáil's first-preference vote remained so steady that a historian looking only at election results would assume that this was a period of boring stability: 45 per cent, 47 per cent, 45 per cent, 44 per cent, 44 per cent.
No matter what happened, the party could count on its traditional voters. In that sense, Fianna Fáil wasn't really a catch-all party. It was a feck-the-begrudgers party. The tribal loyalty it commanded was such that it could afford to be despised by a majority of voters and still expect to come close to an overall majority of seats.
Gradually, since the early 1990s, that certainty has evaporated. It's not that Fianna Fáil doesn't have a rock-solid vote. Clearly, there is still a very significant group of people who will not think of voting for anyone else. The problem is not even that this core vote is less loyal. It's just that the core itself is smaller.
Fifteen years ago, it was above 40 per cent; now, it's around 30 per cent. To hold power, the party needs to be acceptable, or at least not obnoxious, to a much wider section of the population than ever before. If it fails to meet these criteria, the result can be devastating.
To get a sense of this, you have to look, not at the big picture, but at the intimate details of the local elections. Just think of the range of county and city council wards where Fianna Fáil will go into the next general election with not a single sitting councillor.
What should be really alarming for the party is that this FF-free zones encompass very different versions of contemporary Ireland. There's lush, overwhelmingly rural Borris in south Carlow, and there's bricks-and-concrete Ballyfermot in west Dublin, a working-class suburb built by Fianna Fáil where the party's one candidate came sixth in a three-seater.
There's south-west inner-city Dublin and Pembroke, where the boom has made many of the home-owners into paper millionaires. There's the mix of new estates and old communities in Galway city south ward, and the burgeoning commuter land of Balbriggan. There are the growing southern suburbs of Limerick city and the mature, largely opulent hills and terraces of Howth.
There's the old market town of Baltinglass, the established western reaches of Waterford city and the new estates of a Liam Lawlor-free Lucan.
This mix of old and new urban areas, commuter-belt villages that are turning into large towns and rural districts is not a bad cross-section of Ireland. But if you add to these new no-go areas for Fianna Fáil, the places where the party has just one councillor, you get an even more worrying picture.
Places like central Tallaght (one Fianna Fáil councillor out of five), Dungarvan (one out of seven), Naas (one out of five), Thomastown (one out of five) and north-east Galway city (one out of seven), are - like Baltinglass, Lucan and Balbriggan - centres of rapid population growth. They point to the future and what they indicate is not, for Fianna Fáil, a pretty sight.
What we're seeing in these places is not the emergence of a new set of loyalties. It is, on the contrary, a volatile ruthlessness. An idea that would have seemed laughable 15 years ago - a Fianna Fáil wipeout - has taken hold in these places. The unthinkable has become perfectly imaginable. This has happened, moreover, in the boom towns even more than in the depressed suburbs. Voters fed on an ideological diet of individualism and self-belief don't think they owe anything to anybody - including the parties who served up the meal.
Contrary to all the hype that has accompanied a significant but modest rise in the Sinn Féin vote (6.5 per cent in 2002; 8 per cent this time out) this isn't about the Provos. In some of the places where Fianna Fáil was wiped out, Sinn Féin was in a position to take advantage. In others, it didn't even have a candidate.
What has happened, rather, is a relatively straightforward shift. Fianna Fáil has spent its inheritance from history and now has to earn most - and in some places all - of its vote. If it's very smart, it can still do so, but arrogance, contempt, incompetence and the investment of political capital in hare-brained schemes like electronic voting or the break-up of Aer Rianta don't count as smart. The result of the next election will depend on whether there's anyone in a tired, cynical and aimless administration who knows what does.