Madam, - I refer to various reports and comments in your newspaper regarding the future of the PDs.
As one of many bemused observers of the party's travails, I find it difficult to imagine how the now discredited PDs can credibly claim to have a future. Minister for Health Mary Harney currently acts as interim leader and has stated several times that she does not wish to keep leading the party in the long term. The party's other Dáil Deputy remains in talks to leave the party, while Senator Fiona O'Malley has ruled herself out as a leader, fearing she cannot win election to the Dáil in the Dun Laoghaire Constituency, which is now a four-seater.
The party as a whole has fewer representatives nationally, for example, than does the Fine Gael party on Cork County Council alone.
Many would recognise that the 1985 formation of the party was important; but by 1989, when disgraced former Taoiseach Charles Haughey needed the numbers to put Fianna Fáil back in power, the PDs were only too happy to oblige. The PDs became the leech of Irish politics, surviving on the power fed to it by Fianna Fáil ever since.
In last year's general election voters decapitated the PDs by removing 80 per cent of their representatives. The party must now face the reality that all others can see: it's time to shut up shop. It's all over.
- Yours, etc,
MARK WAKEFIELD, Mercier Park, Turners Cross, Cork.