Come back Gerry Adams, all is forgiven. That might well be the unexpressed sentiment of many Sinn Féin supporters following last week's disastrous performance in the presidential election.
After twenty years of meteoric electoral growth with Adams as leader, the party's southern vote collapsed, just eight months after Mary Lou McDonald succeeded him.
The Sinn Féin candidate came fourth behind the president. The runner-up was a wealthy man who complained about the poor getting such a good deal and third was another very wealthy man who apparently appears on television. As the only party-political candidate, Liadh Ní Rada's 6.4 per cent of the votes for SF was a remarkably poor showing.
A Cork woman, she never came higher than third in any of the five Cork constituencies. In the eleven Greater Dublin constituencies, which SF hopes will be its future power-base, she managed second place in only one of them and she was a poor fourth in half of them.
So was this just a blip on the party's road to power in Dublin, or does it signify an end to the rise and rise of Sinn Féin? Where does the party go from here and what impact will it all have on SF in the north?
The main conclusion is that Mary Lou failed her first big test. She made three mistakes: running a candidate, running that candidate and running that candidate in a very odd campaign.
She could have joined the other parties in giving the president a free run and then claimed credit for his victory. It was a win-win situation. But Mary Lou triggered an election, which she could only lose.
If she insisted on competing, the obvious election issue had to be an anti-Brexit campaign. That could have been best achieved by running a northern candidate (Adams was the obvious choice) under the slogan, "Don't abandon the North". With almost continuous negotiations in Brussels making the daily news, SF's election campaign would have been permanently centre stage, with a relevance that no other candidate could have achieved.
The party's strength up to now has been its ability to write the electoral agenda. This time they had no agenda, no posters with the party logo, no SF markings on the electoral bus and no clear message of what they stood for. Mary Lou had originally said that they wanted to hold what she called a national conversation. It never happened.
Although a woman of undoubted talent, Liadh Ní Rada came across as being uninterested, as if she either did not want to be there, or believed that the election was an unnecessary distraction on her way to the Arás. Her main newsworthy item was her willingness to wear a poppy, a move which was promptly dismissed by Mary Lou after the election, with the retort that republicans do not wear poppies.
And therein lies Marty Lou's problem: Sinn Féin's southern message for voters is both confused and confusing. In terms of what we used to call the national question, it has drifted towards a pro-British stance in terms of symbolism and language, to Fianna Fáil's advantage. In the context of social and economic policy, it veers from left to right as the occasion demands. (Their northern policy is more simple: the DUP are a right shower.)
That confusion was quickly reflected in the poor response Ní Riada's canvassers were getting on the doorsteps. But Mary Lou changed neither the direction nor intensity of the campaign. She later said she had shown leadership by triggering an election. She did, but she forgot to say that there are two types of leadership: good and bad. Hers was bad.
Organisations achieve success by having a skilled and able leader. Most members believe that it is easy to run the organisation - until the leader leaves. Talent is not appreciated until it has gone. Like him or loathe him, Adams brought the party to where it was before last week.
It will now find it harder to achieve power in the south. Leo Varadkar is already talking of a coalition, not with SF, but with Labour and some smaller parties. If that happens, Fianna Fáil's erratic courtship with the SDLP could have an interesting northern outcome.
So unless Mary Lou proves herself in the forthcoming southern general election, she is unlikely to last as party leader. In choosing her as his successor, Adams will be seen as having made a mistake. But, like all his decisions, this one will work to his reputational advantage. It is always good for a retiring leader to be succeeded by someone less able.
