The presiding goddess of the Irish left is a bogus Aurora. False dawns brighten the gloom of repeated failure, heralding a day that never breaks. Catherine Connolly’s stunning victory in the presidential election lights the way to a possible transformation. But it also sheds light on the great paradox of Irish politics: a left-of-centre country that has never had a left-led government.

We’ve been here before. Mary Robinson’s victory in 1990 showed that the left could win a national election and put wind in the sails of Dick Spring’s Labour Party. Yet by the end of what would have been her full term, Bertie Ahern, Mary Harney and Charlie McCreevy were swanking with a Celtic Tiger fed by tax cuts and deregulation.

The veteran champion of the left, Michael D Higgins, won the presidency in 2011. His win did not seem to be an isolated event – Labour had won 37 seats in that year’s general election, Fianna Fáil was in meltdown and the long-awaited realignment of Irish party politics was visible on the horizon.

What happened? Labour helped to implement a brutal austerity programme in which working people paid for the sins of property developers, a corrupt banking system and the follies of deregulation.

In both........

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