This Party ain't big enough for Both of Us

When I was up in Rossport last week I heard a joke that went somewhere along the lines of the following:
What do you get if you put 2 anarchists into a room?
A: 3 Splinter groups.

It’s unfortunately close to the truth that people who are on the left tend to be somewhat confrontational by nature whereas people on the right have such a need for order that they always toe the party line no matter it might go against the better part of their natures.

So I have to admit a certain degree of schadenfreude at the schism in the soi-disant progressive democrat party at the moment.

It seems that our good friend Micheal McDowell isn’t happy being a millionaire lawyer who’s running the justice system even though he’s in a party that received 3% of the vote at the last election. It looks like he’s just as fed up as the rest of us at seeing Mary Harney take up so much space in the media and he wants the top job for himself.

This is a bit like 2 bald men fighting over a comb except that only one of them is a bald man and instead of a comb it’s the leadership of a party that’s doomed to go the way of Clann na Poblacta within the next few elections.

Baldy McD is telling us that Harney promised him that she’d step down and let him fill the considerable space that she’d vacated. Yeah, well, politicians say stuff that they don’t really mean sometimes. Year before last Bertie claimed he was a socialist, but this week he dismissed socialism as a “failed ideology” and the leader of the socialist party as a nitwit who presumably couldn’t hold an intellectual candle to the man who said he wanted to bring posterity to Ireland when he took the leadership of Fianna Fail in the ‘90s.

We’re obviously going to hear 2 completely different accounts of the so-called leadership pact between the PD heavyweights. Famously, Tony Blair took Gordon Brown to a posh restaurant in London to carve up the labour leadership between them and some hacks over there have been writing about nothing else ever since, though in the bigger scheme of things it hardly matters as they’re both going to do whatever George Bush tells them to.

It’s quite possible that Harney did the same with McD but that he had to wait so long for her to finish eating that he was so groggy that he didn’t really know what she was saying.

Yesterday they went to lunch again together and insisted this wasn’t to clear the air, which isn’t surprising as I’ve never known a big lunch to have that effect, especially if you order the three-bean salad.

But if McD really wants to lead the most unpopular party in the country, he’s going to have to make a heave for the leadership pretty soon. Well, good luck to him, I say, as it’s not going to be easy pushing Mary Harney out of her place and he may need Tom Parlon to bring a few of his strongest oxen up from Offaly to help displace her.

Of course, once she’s gone I’m going to have to write about something else, as I can hardly go a posting without pointing out how overweight, surly, arrogant and extreme she is.

The good news is that her removal could help avert an economic downturn as Harney will no longer need to try to look good for her job, which will provide an enormous boost for the chocolate cake industry, while the governments savings on restaurant-based expenses will allow them to bring in more tax cuts.

Mmmm….Tax Cuts.