One Feature of this election was quite unprecedented. This was the huge disproportion between Fine Gael's loss of votes and its loss of seats. The party's share of the vote fell by less than 20 per cent, but its share of seats fell by 42.5 per cent.
Nothing like this has ever happened before in an Irish general election, and it is therefore in no way surprising that no one foresaw such an outcome.
The fact is that the proportional representation system that was Britain's last gift to Ireland is only imperfectly proportional. When there are many Independents and candidates of smaller parties a lot of them get too few votes to be elected.
Their votes eventually pass on to candidates of the larger parties or, if those who vote for such candidates do not use their lower preferences, are simply wasted. As a result the larger parties normally get a larger share of seats than their share of votes would seem to warrant.
Now in 1997 the smaller parties and Independents secured more votes than at any time in almost 50 years; but half of those votes were wasted on these candidates, and served only to elect one-sixth more Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael TDs than those parties' shares of the vote warranted.
This time Fianna Fáil repeated its 1997 bonus performance. With a vote share of under 42 per cent, whcih was barely two percentage points more than in 1997, it secured almost 49 per cent of the seats.
By contrast the Fine Gael vote was down by 5½ percentage points, but, on top of that, its 1997 4½-percentage-point seat bonus totally evaporated and was replaced by a seat penalty of almost four points. As a result, with 22.5 per cent of the vote it secured only 18.7 per cent of the seats.
It is, of course, true that on a few occasions Fine Gael has secured slightly fewer seats than its vote warranted, but this time the seat penalty was 2½ times greater than on any previous occasion.
Moreover, because its 1997 seat bonus had been the highest the party had ever recorded, its overall loss of seat bonus was twice as great as had ever previously happened to either of the two larger parties.
OF ITSELF Fine Gael's drop of 5½ percentage points in its share of the vote was in fact in no way remarkable. On no fewer than 13 occasions in the past 80 years one or other of the main parties has experienced a drop in its vote of 4½ points or more, Indeed all three parties have in the past seen their vote drop by between nine and 12 percentage points.
That happened to Fianna Fáil in 1943, to Fine Gael in that same year and again in 1987, and to Labour in 1923, 1944 and 1997.
What hit Fine Gael so badly this time was the extraordinary coincidence of a reversal of over eight percentage points in its seat bonus with a drop in its party's vote. It is this lethal combination that has wiped out half its front bench, leaving it with a major leadership problem as well as with shattered morale.
Why was the Fine Gael seat bonus reversed in this extraordinary way?
Examining the individual constituency results, I can find no explanation, beyond the fact that this time an abnormally large proportion of its seats were marginal, including all 13 of those where it held two seats, 11 of which it lost.
Of course Fianna Fáil also had many marginal seats, but because its vote rose slightly it lost only two of these, more than compensating with six gains elsewhere.
The truth is that 42 constituencies is simply a statistically insufficient number to preclude the operation of random forces that can on occasion produce very quirky results, which are likely to be reversed at a future election.
Of course, statistical factors are only a small and essentially subordinate part of the answer to Fine Gael's current problem.
But if the party could resolve its leadership problem satisfactorily and overcome the morale shock from which it is currently suffering, it is clear that it would have an exceptional opportunity to recover lost seats in a future election, in which there is every likelihood that the quite abnormal loss of its seat bonus in this election will be reversed.
Despite Mary Banotti's uncharacteristic bout of pessimism about the autumn referendum on the Nice Treaty, that occasion will, moreover, provide an early opportunity for a new Fine Gael leader in opposition to play an important national role.