'GILMORE for Taoiseach', blasted the slogan on the posters on 29 November 2008. At the top of RTE's Nine O'Clock News, political correspondent David Davin-Power gave a live broadcast from the Labour Party conference in Kilkenny. He was surrounded by Labour supporters holding red posters with the 'Gilmore for Taoiseach' message emblazoned across them.

The message was clear. The two main parties lacked the fresh thinking to rebuild the economy so it was time for the electorate to abandon the status quo and let Gilmore lead the country.

Seventeen months on, as the party prepares for its 2010 conference in Galway next weekend, Gilmore continues to be the most popular political leader in every opinion poll.

But the latest Red C/Sunday Business Post opinion poll put Labour at 17% and they have remained in the mid to high teens in opinion polls for a year. On those figures, Gilmore won't be Taoiseach. So have Labour hit a ceiling? Are there internal concerns that they should be doing better?

A stalwart Labour TD played down the suggestion that there might be concerns over the opinion polls. "I'll put it this way, we have a parliamentary party that is fairly experienced and we know that 17% is very close to the best performance the party has ever achieved in a general election," he said.

"Hardened politicians tend to see it that way rather than being disappointed that party support is not steadily increasing in the polls. With people not focused on a general election it is hard to know how we will do."

He predicted "a lot of twists and turns" before the general election. "The situation is deteriorating at such a rate that estimating what the climate will be like when it comes to a general election is really more unpredictable than ever before," he said.

"Our official policy is to make this a three-cornered fight and we don't need to increase our support a great deal to be in that three-cornered fight."

He said that a more pressing demand is to persuade high calibre candidates to stand for Labour. The party will adopt a two candidate strategy in constituencies where they already have a TD. The Sunday Tribune can reveal that Labour has identified people like former Progressive Democrats TD Mae Sexton, who is currently an independent Longford county councillor, as one such candidate. She is expected to join sitting TD Willie Penrose on the party's Longford-Westmeath ticket.

Seven weeks on from the George Lee debacle Fine Gael is on a good run of late and internal rumblings about Enda Kenny have dissipated. Although his party's New Politics political reform proposals are not perfect, the document was well received and Phil Hogan's exposure of the Dublin Docklands Development Authority (DDDA) as a financial basket case have left Labour in Fine Gael's shadow.

Is this a source of worry for Labour? The party stalwart added, "It's a case of swings and roundabouts and these things seem to balance themselves out. It is no secret that we have been working on a similar document to the New Politics document for some time. It's just that Fine Gael got theirs out first so we cannot be seen to be following their lead.

"On the banking debate Eamon has scored hits in the house that overshadowed Fine Gael. Eamon's performance on the day after the bailout [when he accused Taoiseach Brian Cowen of 'economic treason'] had an impact on the streets. That does not happen very often so it is swings and roundabouts."

Cork East TD Seán Sherlock does not think that the country wants to give Fine Gael an overall majority. "I believe that if we are holding firm at 17% in the polls we will increase that between now and the election," he added.

Another Labour TD said, "We were stuck on 10% in the polls for quite a long time. It now looks like we are stuck on 17%. There was a time when we would have settled for 17% but now it is seen as a disappointment to be hovering there and not moving into the 20s on a more sustainable level. I thought that we would break the over-the-20% mark in the last two or three Red C polls but we seem to be stuck at around 17%.

"I am not too sure why we are not growing further. Eamon has brought up the party vote to a certain level through his own style of leadership but there is still work we need to do as a party in terms of creating a broader view of our party that is not focused on the leader."

It is often said that one of Enda Kenny's strengths has been his attempts to recognise his own weaknesses as a party leader and set himself up in the role of chairman rather than chief.

A Labour figure admires the way Fine Gael is always talking about its team to compensate for any perceived weaknesses Kenny may have. The Labour figure said, "We need to be doing more of that. Fine Gael's starting point was an unpopular leader in the eyes of the public. Eamon is popular with the public so we need to capitalise on that by promoting the front-bench team around him."

And come election time, he said, "Anything less than 30 seats would be disappointing as we have a strong possibility of winning a seat number in the mid to high 30s as we are in 'Spring Tide' territory."

A key Labour strategist believes that apart from one big shift towards the end of 2008 and beginning of 2009, Labour have been in the high teens, Fianna Fáil in the mid-20s and Fine Gael in the low 30s in polls.

He said, "The story of the polls is their remarkable consistency with Red C, Millward Brown and MRBI all putting us between 17 and 22%. When Dick Spring entered the 1992 election campaign, he started off on 12% on the day the Dáil was dissolved and ended up on 19% four weeks later after the election.

"Our current standing on 17% is our new 10%, it is a platform from which we will build and that will be a big challenge."

The strategist claimed that anything north of 30 seats is a realistic general election seat target for Labour. The 33 seats won in the Spring Tide in 1992 were yielded from 19% of the vote. The party plans to run over 60 candidates in an attempt to create what some pundits have labeled a 'Gilmore Gale'.

If you draw a line from Dublin to Kerry, Michael D Higgins in Galway West and Willie Penrose in Longford-Westmeath are the party's only two TDs above that line.

The strategist said, "Our traditional heartlands are Dublin, a bit of Leinster and a bit of Munster. We have an opportunity to gain seats in every Dublin constituency, including the three where we have no seats.

"In other constituencies we have an opportunity to go from one to two seats, especially in the four and five seaters. We will also be looking to re-establish ourselves in places like Louth, Meath East, Carlow-Kilkenny, Kerry North, Tipperary North and South.

"With John Kelly in Roscommon and Frank McBrearty in Donegal South West we have good candidates.

"The next general election will be a once in a generation opportunity for Labour."

Gilmore will not be the next Taoiseach, but a return to the heady days of the 'Spring Tide' is not impossible to imagine.