After a tumultuous few months of hand wringing, convention dates, reminders, and exposures, which reminded me of a lump of driftwood left behind by the tide, and now being fought over by a swarm of beetles, the secret meetings, the handshakes, the infighting, and whisperings of splits in the camp, followed by weeks of speculation over who was going to get the nod at the Fianna Fáil convention, all we ended up with was a 68-year-old pensioner from Dungloe, born on the March 10, 1948, in Burtonport, which used to be a busy thriving fishing port but is now a ghostly shadow of its former self.
