The Labour Party now has two months to decide the thrust of its approach under a leader who will be the first to have been chosen by an Irish party on a ballot of members.
Ruairí Quinn's unselfish decision to announce this week that he intends to quit in October allows the party to embark on a logical course and make the two changes at once - when the result of the postal ballot of all 3,600 members is known.
Ideally the winner - on the strength of his or her campaign - will be the author of Labour's new departure. And that, members hope, will not only reflect a sharper social democratic edge defining the party but the electorate's growing frustration at the failure of the Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrat coalition to live up to either party's election promises.
Independent commentators, as well as Labour strategists, have admitted to being puzzled by the success of the coalition partners in May, especially when Fianna Fáil's poor campaign and refusal to debate are compared with Labour's well-prepared and scrupulously costed policy on health, generally agreed to have been the central issue in the election.
For Labour, there's also a stinging irony in the electorate's anger now given its willingness, during the campaign, to take Fianna Fáil's word for it that Labour was unreliable on cost and delivery.
Leaders, former leaders and would-be leaders are at a loss to say why Labour didn't fare as well as Quinn, among others, had expected.
Dick Spring said it should have made more of its points of difference with Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Progressive Democrats. Quinn himself said Labour should have adopted a more popular approach - made more use of slogans was how he put it.
Many, like Róisín Shortall, believed the electorate still suspected that if Labour were given the chance it would join Fianna Fáil in government as it had done in 1992.
Some commentators who prefer to discuss the leadership of the party than its direction say there are too few likely contenders. I disagree. Labour has had some leaders, like Frank Cluskey, who were better than the party they led; others, like Dick Spring and Ruairí Quinn, are still highly regarded by the European social democrats among whom they served (as John Bruton acknowledged).
There are several potential leaders in the party now - Pat Rabbitte, Brendan Howlin, Eamon Gilmore, Michael D. Higgins, Liz McManus - all of them capable of arguing the case for social democratic advances.
The conservative parties would like to see Labour confined to what they regard as its traditional areas, so-called welfarist issues in spending departments where the big boys with tight fists and expensive cronies rule the roost and can keep an eye on them.
It's not like that any more. Quinn was an exemplary minister for finance - if only the wretched McCreevy had followed his example - and Spring's forensic examination of Haughey's affairs left the latter without a hiding place. And if everyone on the Government's side were as well informed about animal welfare as Mary Upton, Joe Walsh would have fewer worries. But it's easier to continue with the pretence that Labour is a tax-and-spend party than to respond to the evidence which shows the party's authority and the wide experience of its members.
Besides, anyone who attacks Michael D. Higgins's case for public service broadcasting in particular is bound to be applauded these days by the big battalions of the press - in the Murdoch and O'Reilly papers. These sensitive people are shocked to the core by RTÉ's power and influence.
But they are not alone, as the president of the National Union of Journalists, of which I'm a member, makes clear in the current issue of the Journalist, the union's magazine.
The president, John Barsby, uses RTÉ as an example of a broadcaster struggling with a government's hostility. "If there is any public service broadcaster that has suffered from the enmity of government it has to be Ireland's RTÉ," he writes.
Barsby's account of 500 job losses, competition from Sky, UTV and TV3, and disappointment at the Government's response to a request for a licence fee increase - €63 sought, €18 granted - was written before the moderately encouraging forum report.
But, as he points out, RTÉ is not the only station experiencing commercial pressure and political interference. The Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, who owns the country's biggest private TV networks, is trying to exercise control over RAI, the public service broadcaster. In Denmark a draft media law outlines plans to privatise the public network TV2. In Portugal the government wants to transform the public service network into a single channel. In Iceland the public service broadcaster is in danger because politicians don't want to increase the licence fee.
You may not have heard of the issue of high finance, international and public service broadcasters and the competing interests of local audiences and media billionaires until the FAI case cropped up. Now it's clear that it's as wide as the continent.
You're bound to have been listening to the codology - from Bertie Ahern, Micheál Martin and others - about health service cuts that aren't really cuts. You may not remember the fun we had in the 1980s when the taoiseach of the day, Garret FitzGerald, explained a reduction in the rate of growth as the decelerating rate of acceleration. Maybe, on reflection, Ahern had better not try to get his tongue around that one.
dwalsh@irish-times.ie