Gareth Walshof St Colmcille 's Community School in Knocklyon, Dublin, explains why he's fed up with the Government

There are many things that rile me about the Government, and one party in particular. Firstly, and most conspicuously, I see a Taoiseach who bullies in leaders' debates, babbles about questionable briefcases and bawls about his financial situation. I see a party of incompetence. Promises aren't kept, junior infants have no schools, the elderly have no nursing-home spaces and there is pitifully small respite for parents of children with special needs.

I see a party desperate for power and willing to compromise fairness for it - although I'm sure this is an offence against democracy that the people of Jackie Healy-Rae's constituency will gladly accept. I see a party that's afraid to put itself on the line. Fianna Fáil claims credit for peace in the North, yet it doesn't seem to endorse peace elsewhere - in Iraq, for example. Need I point out that this isn't Fianna Fáil's only shortcoming as regards Shannon?

I see a party that's unwilling to take responsibility for the more difficult Government departments. The Taoiseach appointed Mary Harney to be Minister for Health and Children. This to me seems as ludicrous as appointing Beverley Flynn as Minister for Finance. Mary Harney's party was rejected in the recent election; she herself was lucky to keep her seat. Therefore the public clearly doesn't have faith in this party or its policies. So why put her in charge of the health of the nation?

I see in Fianna Fáil a party that has been happy to let the health service fall apart over the past 10 years, then blame it on a smaller party. My granda, 82 years old, waited hours on end on a trolley in a hospital. A respectable elderly man, with cardiac failure, he was at his most vulnerable at this time, yet in some respects he was treated with the least care and compassion. (Once he was finally seen to, the nurses did their very best.) My granda died peacefully in a hospital bed; others haven't been so lucky in the past decade. Mary Harney's health policy has created a new phrase: not deathbeds but death trolleys.

In Fianna Fáil I see a party that stands for little yet tries to put the opposite across. It is a party that claims all popular ideas as its own. After all, what other party claims republican views, has green and environmental credentials, conservative values and a socialist leader? In Fianna Fáil I see that there is a fundamental consensus that settling for less is easier and that promises are vote-getters - and that alone. I believe that most, though not all, of Fianna Fáil feels no moral obligation to the nation to make Ireland better. I have seen all of Fianna Fáil as it is at present, and because of it, coupled with Fianna Fáil's past, I dread our Fianna Fáil future.

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