Election 2011 - New EU deal needed to rebuild hope

THREE weeks from today it will be all over bar the counting. The country will have voted and unless our pollsters are as divorced from reality as Taoiseach Brian Cowen’s Government seemed to be a Fine Gael/Labour coalition will assume power.

Though that prediction has not been seriously challenged by anyone, not even the old, omnipotent Fianna Fáil under its new leader Micheál Martin, it would be foolish to write off the most powerful, the most influential and most deeply entrenched political movement in the history of this Republic.

History provides a recent parallel and stark warning for our would-be government. In the three years leading to Britain’s 1992 general election Labour, under Neil Kinnock, consistently topped the polls to the point that they developed a swagger that often slipped into premature triumphalism. This counting-your-chickens delusion reached a high point at an infamous rally in Sheffield which, though some analysts still debate this, must have cost Labour the election.