Fine Gael leadership candidates Simon Coveney (left) and Leo Varadkar (right) on the hustings last week

Of the choice awaiting Fine Gael…

Gene Kerrigan writes:

…In the real world, the great majority work because we want to work, and it pays better than the dole, and it opens possibilities for the future.

The great majority of us respect one another. We are occasionally let down, but mostly we recognise ourselves – our ambitions, our fears and our satisfactions – in the lives of our neighbours.

And where our neighbours are brought down by circumstance we wish them well, we hold fundraisers and we send them cards with flowers on them.

And when we’re occasionally brought down ourselves, we’re thankful for the helping hand that keeps us going.

We don’t share the miserable contempt and suspicion of humanity that both Varadkar and Coveney have displayed in this competition between the second-rate politician and the third rate.

These wretched people, so mistrustful of their fellow citizens, are in the process of waving goodbye to a beloved Taoiseach.

A Taoiseach who lost an election in 2007, couldn’t get a majority in 2011, took a hammering in 2016, who helped fashion a prosecutorial system that can’t prepare statements for a trial; who presides over hospitals where people die on trolleys in noisy corridors; who can’t keep track of the number of scandals that have afflicted the police force; who still seems complacent about the number of people sleeping on the streets..

…And as he leaves, two of those who helped him make this country what it sorrowfully has been reduced to are competing to replace him. And doing so in campaigns that offer a little hope, wrapped in a whole lot of suspicion and hate.

Is This Really The Best Fine Gael Can Offer? (Gene Kerrigan, Sunday Independent)

Earlier: Five More Days

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