A Sticky wicket
To paraphrase Wilde, only a man with a heart of stone could fail
to laugh at the plight of Proinsias De Rossa and his dwindling
band of opportunists.
Apart from the scenes of elation from the count centre in
Cootehill, the highlight of the TV week was surely watching it
dawn on the hapless Proinsias that he could only get elected
without reaching the quota and thanks to transfers from Fine
Gael.
RTE's best ever television election coverage -- Election 1997, all
day Saturday -- saw the cameras stay rolling until 4am to witness
this spectacle, and many Republicans stayed up with them, willing
the bearded Stick to lose.
Here was beauty like a tightened bow; the long humiliation of an
arrogant man.
From other count centres, the news poured in. Eric Byrne thrown
out in Dublin. The shrill Kathleen Lynch, Cork's answer to Mary
MacMahon, also got the chop. Joe Sherlock, that old Sticky
warhorse, once more failed to get his nose in the feed bag.
Suddenly, our hearts raced: Out of the blue there was a chance of
the double! De Rossa was almost sure to lose in Dublin
North-west, while the treacle-voiced Liz McManus looked headed
for the dole queue in Wicklow.
It was not to be. But even as the sorrow welled in our breasts
for poor Caoimhghín O Caoláin - who must, after all, share the
opposition benches with this wretched pair - our delight could
not truly be quenched.
Because it is now clear to all that this evil little bunch of
loyalist sympathisers, the Democratic Left, are politically a
spent force, and will soon disappear completely.
Once, this party had something akin to an ideology shaping its
political principles. True, it was a noxious cocktail of
self-hatred and pseudo-Marxism, but at least you knew what it
stood for.
How Frank Ryan must have laughed from beyond the grave when he
saw the people that abused his name so cynically for years prop
up the Blueshirts in government. And, of course, they became a
seamless part of the Fine Gael tapestry, to the point where even
Labour party ministers became sickened by the sight of them.
So have the voters. Despite the publicity that the party's four
ministers in the last government drummed up so shamelessly in a
willing press, the DL trailed Sinn Féin in the election.
Even more amusingly, the party's own members, in massive numbers,
have simply walked away. Half way through the doomed Bruton
administration, the DL actually ran out of members to appoint to
government quangos. At its recent Ard Fheis - sorry, Party
Conference - the DL had to beg the few remaining members to take
their friends along, just to bring up the numbers.
In fact, the Democratic Left - the name must be a tribute to
Orwell as the organisation espouses neither democracy nor
socialism - is no longer really a party at all. Its TDs, apart
from De Rossa, would feel comfortable in any other party except
Sinn Féin. They have become Independents.
d now, its ludicrous, unionist position on the North is being
by-passed by history. No one, from the White House to Whitehall,
is holding out for an internal solution, except De Rossa and
Paisley.
On Questions & Answers (RTE, Mondays, 10.30pm) this week,
Proinsias was at his most pathetic, trying to undermine Fianna
Fáil by encouraging the PDs to revive their own gut-level dislike
of northern nationalists. Liz O'Donnell, hardly an intellectual
colossus striding the corridors of Leinster House, needed about
five seconds to see right through him.
In fact, it seems likely that De Rossa will soon resign. His
credibility on the North is shot and he has been badly wounded
politically by his failure in the libel courts. We must take him
at his word that he knows nothing about printing fivers; sadly,
this will make it especially hard for him to come up with the
hundreds of thousands of pounds he has ratcheted up in legal
costs.
His three erstwhile flunkeys, Gilmore, Rabbitte and McManus, have
already no doubt seen the writing on the wall. No doubt they plan
some lame caper like a ``merger'' with Labour.
Goodbye now.
By Michael Kennedy
