Irish Examiner editorial comment: The 31st Dáil - A mandate for profound reform

WE have just had the most spectacular, groundbreaking election in modern Irish history.

The change has been so sweeping, so very hard-nosed that the inevitable hyperbole can barely describe the reality.

A once almost omnipotent party has been so reduced that it will be little more than a marginalised relic of other times in the 31st Dáil. Even if Fianna Fáil are shocked, and they would not be human if they were not, by the slap in the face they cannot deny that their fate, this day of reckoning decades in the making, was inevitable.