Leo Varadkar may remember it as the Black and Tan election – and it has left him and his party battered black and blue.
The row over commemorating the Royal Irish Constabulary became a lightning rod for public anger in the first week of the campaign.
The image of an out of touch and privileged Government elite, too long in power to hear the public mood couldn’t have been starker.
And Leo let the stink linger for days before Charlie Flanagan was forced to bow to the public mood and cancel the event.
It was as if Fine Gael had fired the opening shots of the war – and hit themselves directly in the foot.
From there on the Wolfe Tones’ Come Out Ye Black And Tans might have been the soundtrack to the campaign.
The rebel song was still ringing out raucously yesterday in the RDS as Sinn Fein members celebrated the opening of the first ballot boxes.
The Government’s commemoration shambles played beautifully into the hands of the party and put a spring in their step as they hit the campaign trail.
They already had Leo and Simon Coveney to thank for the timely boost of the return of Stormont.
After years of blocking the formation of a Government, Mary Lou McDonald was able to bask in the return of power-sharing three days before the election.
Leo also made a mistake by trying to bully Mary Lou off the electoral stage.
Along with Micheal Martin the old boys’ club closed ranks to exclude the Sinn Fein leader from the first TV debate on Virgin Media – and from Government.
It was another own goal. Most pundits had the absent Sinn Fein leader as the winner on the night.
But even after she was allowed in for the follow-up RTE showdown, the Fine Gael strategy was to double down on attacking Mary Lou and her party.
A social media campaign was wheeled out with a line-up of the same Fine Gael ministers who have been the faces of housing and health crises.
Minister after minister answered “no” when asked if they would do business with Sinn Fein.
The campaign was derided widely and thrown back at Leo with the question edited to: “Will Fine Gael ever sort out the housing crisis?”
And the Government’s record was perhaps the Taoiseach’s biggest contribution to the Sinn Fein surge.
It became the rallying cry for an entire locked-out generation.
Polls show one-in- three voters under 25 flocked to Sinn Fein.
They are the young people who can’t buy a house, can’t afford to pay soaring rent and can’t move out of home.
Against that mood sweeping the country, Leo’s decision to campaign on “the economy, stupid”, with pledges of tax cuts and threats that no one else could negotiate a post-Brexit trade deal, backfired spectacularly.
Around 1% of the electorate said Brexit affected how they voted. These are the very young voters Leo’s parliamentary party colleagues felt would respond better to his face on the poster.
It was why they dumped Enda Kenny for a young leader who liked to rub shoulders with Kylie Minogue, wear funky socks and go jogging with visiting heads of state.
But when the litmus test arrived on Saturday it was a reminder that Leo was elected Taoiseach not by the people, but by his privileged pals in the Fine Gael parliamentary party.
He was seen as aloof on the campaign trail and wooden in debates.
It has left many Fine Gael insiders wondering just why they ditched a proven winner in Mr Kenny.
Or why they didn’t turn to Simon Coveney who was the choice of the party members around the country. Saturday was Leo’s first big test as a vote-getter among communities all across Ireland and failed spectacularly.
In his own constituency his personal vote at 8,476 was way behind poll-topping Sinn Fein candidate Paul Donnelly’s 12,456.
In the end it was a Sinn Fein surplus that helped pushed him over the line. It must have felt like the final humiliation.
