Labour must realise that those who want change don't just want different people running the system - they want a different system, writes Fintan O'Toole.
For many years the Leaving Cert history exam paper usually contained a question on the Labour Party.
Until Dick Spring's breakthrough in 1992, the question was one of the easiest for students to predict. It was generally a minor variation on the theme of the 1980 paper: "Account for the weaknesses of the Labour Party as a force in Irish politics from 1914 onwards."
The question disappeared in the 1990s, but it might well be back in the next few years. Ruairí Quinn's retirement yesterday revives the feeling that the most significant thing about the party is its failure.
All political careers, of course, end in failure. Labour Party leaders seem to have a choice between two kinds of conclusion to their political lives. They can be summarily executed by the electorate, as happened to Frank Cluskey, and, most recently, to Dick Spring.
Or, like William Norton and Brendan Corish, they can peter out slowly after a hopeful start, as the enthusiasm and idealism of a rosy dawn fade into the dreary frustration of leading the least successful socialist party in western Europe.
Having flirted with the first possibility in the general election, when he came close to losing his seat, Ruairí Quinn has opted for the second. He leaves the stage, not in a blaze of operatic tragedy, but in the slow fade of weary disenchantment.
As the first member of his party to hold the office of minister for finance, he seemed to be a flesh-and-blood milestone in Labour's advancement towards the position of being a credible alternative government. In that sense, even the crowning glory of his political career stands as a stark reminder of promises unfulfilled.
Likewise, the very fact that there were few direct calls for his head in the wake of a very poor general election performance was, perversely, a sign of how tough his successor's job will be.
No one demanded his resignation because no one believed that Labour's difficulties could be solved simply by a change of leader. Everyone understood that a new voice at the top was a necessary but by no means sufficient condition for the party's renewal.
It is not that things are entirely bleak for Labour. It did badly last May, of course, losing a sixth of its votes. In spite of having, as Ruairí Quinn pointed out on RTE radio's Five Seven Live last evening, the second-largest parliamentary party in its history, it failed to have a single first-time TD elected and has no young stars.
(The three gains that balanced out the party's three losses were all former TDs making a comeback.)
But Fine Gael did much worse and even Fianna Fáil actually got its third-worst vote since 1932. Labour's troubles, in other words, are those of the old political establishment as a whole.
The election showed, too, that even coming off the back of the biggest boom in the State's history, there is a significant constituency for alternatives to free market economic liberalism.
The success of Sinn Féin, the Greens and independents campaigning against social exclusion showed that the section of the electorate which is still engaged with politics is willing to listen to radical ideas.
Ruairí Quinn also leaves the mainstream Irish left more united than at any time in the history of the State.
The huge fault lines within the Labour Party in the 1970s and 1980s - over Northern Ireland policy on the one hand and the principle of coalition government on the other - have almost disappeared. The biggest challenge that the party faced on the orthodox left, the Workers' Party/ Democratic Left, has been largely absorbed through the merger which Ruairí Quinn handled with such skill.
Two of the elements for a relatively successful Labour Party - a radical constituency among the public and a coherent organisation - are thus available to the new leader. The third - broader public disillusionment with the present direction of State policy - is probably on its way, as the nation wakes up from the boom with a hangover of institutional and infrastructural failure and the same old problems of inequality still staring it in the face.
Labour, then, is by no means moribund. There is every reason to believe that the next five years could be a much more productive period for the party than the last five, as an electorate with high expectations is offered declining public services.
The problem for the new leader, however, will be that there will be no automatic gains. With so many alternative channels for dissent, Labour must, at one and the same time, defend its base from Sinn Féin and the Greens, and expand its appeal into new areas.
Before choosing that new leader, therefore, Labour needs to ask why Ruairí Quinn failed. He is highly intelligent and articulate, a serious socialist, with credentials of experience in high office that no previous leader brought to the job. He made mistakes - his ill-judged debate with Gerry Adams on The Late, Late Show, for example - but no terrible ones. He was a good party manager, widely respected by his colleagues and the wider membership. He should have been a contender.
The difficulty, however, was not with Quinn but with what he represented for the public. He came across, above all else, as a European social democrat, a man who identified strongly with the big left-of-centre governing parties of post-war Europe.
His demeanour was that of a politician who felt that there was nothing more normal and natural than that a man like him should be prime minister of a progressive western European democracy.
His job, he seemed to assume, was to make this seem as obvious to everyone else in Ireland as it was to him. And at one level, he did this brilliantly. Having achieved the pinnacle of the Finance ministry, he succeeded completely in showing that a socialist could manage the Irish economy without frightening the horses or prompting a flight of capital.
If Labour sees its primary political task as providing reassurance, therefore, it should be down on its knees begging Ruairí Quinn to stay on after all. No one is ever likely to be as good at that job as he has been.
If, on the other hand, it reflects on the insufficiency of that strategy, then it has to think, not just about a new leader, but about a new style of leadership.
The basic problem for Labour is that its historical timing is off. It finally succeeded, in the 1990s, in working its way fully into the political establishment just at the moment when the political establishment was earning the contempt of the public.
After a long siege, it set up residence in part of the city, only to find that the city itself was infected with a plague of corruption and cynicism. This is rotten luck, but it is a reality that the party has to face.
The lesson of the May election is that those people who want political change in Ireland - and they are no more than a significant minority -- don't just want different people running the same system. They want a different system.
They want to be spoken to clearly and honestly. They want politicians who can articulate a new set of public values for a society that can no longer rely on nationalism and Catholicism to give it a sense of purpose.
Labour's traditional concerns of equality, social justice and pluralism are as relevant to these needs as they ever were. But they have to be apparent in something more than the manoeuvrings of an old-style and not very impressive political machine.
Before its members choose a new leader, Labour needs to think about its own hinterland, and to consider who can best represent, not just the Labour Party but, in an old-fashioned phrase that may be worth reviving, the Labour Movement.