Dermot Ahern

Things could be worse for Brian Cowen, of course. He could be Gordon Brown. However Cowen's future is assessed this weekend, and whatever long odds bookmakers offer on the Taoiseach still being in office in a year's time, he is the very model of a secure leader compared to his British counterpart. Brown has lost the support of his party and his people. Cowen, for the moment, has been abandoned only by the people.

And there endeth the good news for the Taoiseach. The election results, whatever way you parse them, analyse them, explain them, interpret them or spin them, are a disaster for Fianna Fáil and for Cowen. He has been an enormous failure since he was elected Taoiseach, without any mandate from the people of Ireland, in May of last year. The way he allowed the nation's mood to drift from optimism to pessimism reflected the manner in which, as finance minister, he had presided over the drift in the nation's finances from healthy to horrendous. He and his key ministers panicked, and were seen to panic, once the enormity of the challenges became apparent. He and Brian Lenihan presided over budgets, and mini-budgets, and supplementary budgets that only fostered the sense of drift. Cowen never empathised, he never inspired, he never convinced and he never led.

He wasn't entirely the architect of his own downfall of course. Bertie Ahern, who received his own stinging rebuke from the Dublin Central electorate on polling day, is the main cause of Fianna Fáil's new low, along with Charlie McCreevy, Mary Harney and all the other laissez-faire lackeys who looked the other way while their fiscal policies bankrupted the country they professed to be serving. But Cowen, as finance minister for several of the boom years, was close enough to the action to make any sympathy for his current plight misplaced.

Make no mistake about it: these election results – whatever happens to Eoin Ryan when the European votes are counted today – are Cowen's failure. Fianna Fáil TDs and councillors (the very few that are left) have to deal with that reality this weekend. A victory for Ryan might tempt some in the party to accentuate the positive after such a bad few days, but this would be a mistake. We now are as certain as we can be, on the basis of these results, that Brian Cowen cannot lead Fianna Fáil back into government after a general election. The party will not have enough seats on its own. With the Greens unlikely to increase their Dáil numbers (more likely they will lose a few) Cowen would require Sinn Féin to at least double its seat tally, and then agree to keep a deeply unpopular Fianna Fáil party in power, for him to undergo the most unlikely political survival.

But all that's for another day, although it's a day that might come sooner rather than later if the Green Party decide that it's time to head for the hills, or if worried Fianna Fáil backbenchers become convinced that their political careers are about to end in even more failure than the words "Fianna Fáil backbencher" normally convey.

We're talking about two entirely different dynamics here. On the one hand, you have Fianna Fáil TDs desperate to delay a general election for as long as they can in the hope that the party will be in better odour with the people than it is now. Part of that change, they may decide, will require a new leader. On the other are the Greens, who may decide that the only hope of rescuing a future from the ashes of these results is to prompt a general election on some point of rediscovered principle, and hope that they gain some kudos for bringing the worst government in Irish history crashing down.

The problem for the Fianna Fáil TDs is that if they change their leader again, a general election is inevitable, because while one Taoiseach unelected by the people is just about acceptable, a second would start to look like a coup. A new Fianna Fáil leader has to mean a general election. And the problem for the Greens, of course, is that whenever a general election comes, they risk the fate of all small parties hubristic enough to believe they could change Fianna Fáil – and are eaten alive. It should all make for an exciting summer of intrigue, speculation, rumour and, hopefully, historic political events.

There's Hard Neck, And Then There's Hyprocrisy

Non-story of the week was the fuss over whether Fine Gael would ever go into coalition with Sinn Féin. Of course it would, at some point, if the Dáil numbers allowed it. So too would Fianna Fáil, Labour and the Greens, opportunity permitting. The most bizarre contribution to the controversy came from justice minister Dermot Ahern who said he found it "stomach-churning" that Fine Gael could even consider going into government with a party which cannot bring itself to make an outright condemnation of the murder of Garda Jerry McCabe. Is this the same Dermot Ahern who, in 2004, passed on to the then minister for justice Michael McDowell a letter seeking better prison treatment for Michael McKevitt, the leader of the organisation which killed 29 people and two unborn children in Omagh? There's hard neck, and there's hypocrisy. I'll leave you to decide which was on display in this case.