Back to the future with the Civil War parties

IN most of what is written and said about Irish society just now, the key word is confident. After the election, some epithets suggest themselves as being more appropriate: wary, hesitant, cautious even, perhaps, cynical.

Given a clear choice of options, we chose "none of the above", Offered a snooker table scattered with a range of inviting colours, we chose to play a safety shot. Asked to think about the 21st century, we gave the kiss of life to the two familiar parties that have dominated the 20th.

Just five years ago, in a mood of hope and anger, the Irish electorate did something that seemed to be in tune with the times. With Irish institutions of all sorts running into trouble, it decided to give some grief to two more of them, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael.

Instead of swinging between the two fixed poles of Irish politics, it, swung against both of them, That mood of change was wider than party politics. It was reflected in Mrs Mary Robinson's election to the presidency and even more so in the wide acceptance that she gained while in the office. It was evident in the willingness to listen to allegations that the Roman Catholic Church had abused its power, in a new welcome for women in public life, in a healthy scepticism about all sorts of official pronouncement, Labour benefited from, and in a sense was burdened with, that shift in attitudes, The burden lay in the a between expectation and possibility. The mood was much broader and vaguer than anything that could be summed up in a programme of government.

It was about all sorts of things - sex, religion, demographics - that no party could really control. Labour was like a child being pushed on a swing by an over enthusiastic parent. With too much force at its back it was always in danger of falling off, And change, in any case, turned out to have a dark side. The political system proved very hard to transform. Having floored Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, Labour had to help each of them in turn to its feet. The sheer scale of the collapse in the moral authority of the church meant that many of us experienced change as a process of loss and grief rather than joy and relief, Last year's divorce referendum suggested that much of Irish society was not so much anxious to embrace change as grudgingly resigned to it, old certainties have gone, but nothing very definite has taken their place. The new, high tech, globalised economy offers a better future, but for the present it leaves fundamental problems of poverty and unemployment unresolved. We've never had it so good, but we're not quite sure what "it" is.

In this mood, the Rainbow's appeal to stability backfired on its two smaller components. The electorate chose stability all right, the catch all continuity of the two Civil War parties, The boom has given mainstream middle Ireland a new take in the way things are.

Radicalism of any kind is unappealing.

So, strongly committed ideological candidates such as Michael McDowell, Proinsias De Rossa, Michael D. Higgins and Des O'Malley did badly. Parties offering any kind of modification to the consensus that has dominated public life suffered badly. The right wing radical sin of the PDs found few takers, The Greens failed to make a widely anticipated breakthrough.

So did the Catholic right, which failed to translate into votes the nostalgia for a supposedly simpler Ireland that was evident in the divorce referendum, Labour and Democratic Left, seeking a mandate to tilt the consensus in favour of the weak and vulnerable, didn't get it.

To put it at its most simplistic, there were two kinds of voters - those with a lot to lose and those with nothing to lose, Those in the first category, the many beneficiaries of the economic boom, went for the safe, familiar faces of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael.

Those in the second went for the candidates furthest from the establishment: radical republicans, colourful characters, locale heroes done down by the Dublin media, Marxist revolutionaries. Anyone who fell between these two stools by offering that might be called a "boom plus" option (the economy will be kept going but directed towards different ends) lost out.

Even those who did gather an anti establishment vote were in most cases articulating Quite traditional concerns. Sinn Fein managed to animate republican sentiment in areas where it has always been strong. The relative success of the Socialist Party's, Joe Higgins came because it filled n niche that was vacated by Democratic Left and Labour giving voice to the anger of the urban dispossessed, And the plethora of Independents expresses the most traditional impulse of all, a preference for the local over tie national.

The overall impression from the election is that of a society exhausted by a period of unprecedented change. After a series of extraordinary upheavals, it wants a quiet life, After a campaign, which failed to convince it otherwise, it seems to have low expectations of politics.

It wants managers, not visionaries, centrists not radicals. It wants neither an attack on the poor nor a reorientation of priorities in their favour. It wants a nice, decent consensus seeking, deal making government that will effectively stop the process of change at the point "it has now reached. And it has given its support to two nice, decent, virtually indistinguishable men, John Bruton and Bertie Ahern, It is anybody's guess how we will feel in the coming months when we find that a quiet life is not an option for a small open society in a global economy.