Michael McDowell taught the PD's a valuable lesson

Michael McDowell persuaded the Progressive Democrats (an Irish Political party) that he should be their leader. He did this by being intelligent, hardworking and ambitious….. Unfortunately, along the way the political party seemed to loose site of the fact that your leader needs to be a good politician also!

And Michael McDowell was not a good politician. He failed to get himself re-elected in last week’s election and oversaw the biggest meltdown of a political party in Ireland’s history. In the end he left the PD’s the way that he had run them, as a one man band. Many of his senior colleagues were left to claim that they learned of his retirement from television programmes!

Brendan O’Connor (a Sunday Independent journalist) claims that the electorate let themselves down by not re-electing McDowell, how condescending is that. The fact of the matter is that even the ‘man on the street’ could see that Michael McDowell was not a team player at any level, not as a local representative, not as a party leader and certainly not as part of functioning government.
National Government must be one of the most intricate team sports around, it’s certainly no place for show boating.

All political parties would do well to learn and re-learn the lesson…. To succeed in politics, you need to be a good politician. Intelligence and genuine patriotism is not enough……

….. the Greens might want to reflect on why their Party Leader wasn’t returned to office until the eighth count, before it’s too late.

As for the PD's, I hope Mary Harney does pick the party by the scruff of the neck and rebuilds it. It could become a party worth voting for.