FF bid to heal rift with McDaid

Fianna Fáil was tonight making frantic efforts to mend a damaging rift with renegade ex-minister Jim McDaid after he withdrew his support for the Government.

The Donegal TD’s shock move amid a deepening row with constituency colleague Niall Blaney’s supporters reduces the coalition to a razor-thin majority in the Dáil.

The party’s chief whip Pat Carey is leading a drive, which includes senior Fianna Fáil officials, to get both men across a table to hammer out a resolution to the spiralling animosities which have now spilled over onto the party’s grip on power.

“We’re hopeful that a resolution to this will be found,” said one party source.

Dr McDaid and his followers stormed out of what he branded a “farcical meeting” of the party’s newly-formed local grouping in Letterkenny and Milford last night in an argument over who could vote for party officers.

The former tourism and sport minister then wrote to Mr Carey to say he was withdrawing his support for the Government.

“It was made clear to me last night that I am superfluous to the requirements of Fianna Fáil but I will not stand over the party being decimated either locally or nationally,” he wrote.

Dr McDaid has voted with the Government, or abstained, since resigning from the parliamentary party last year over its scrapping of the cervical cancer vaccine plan.

But in his letter to Mr Carey, he said he now felt free to vote against them if and when he deemed it necessary.

The move allows for a split Dáil in which the Ceann Comhairle would have a casting vote.

Repeating his calls for a General Election, he said it would be in the interest of Fianna Fáil and by extension the country.

Mr Blaney, who has been at loggerheads with Dr McDaid since his Independent Fianna Fáil returned to the party fold in 2006, insisted he had tried to ease tensions between both sides.

“I never set out to get rid of Jim McDaid or any personnel out of Fianna Fáil,” he said.

“It certainly wasn’t my aim.”

Mr Blaney said he left a telephone message early this morning with Dr McDaid but he hadn’t heard back to him, adding that he would do whatever he could to resolve the matter.

“There’s only one loser over all this debacle in Donegal and that’s Fianna Fáil,” he told RTE.

“I have no doubt that the Opposition are laughing at us.”