PDs’ golden days a distant dream as party ends for Mary and Michael

NOBODY captured that feeling quite like Roy Orbison: the end of a wonderful affair, the time when passion turns to ashes, the day that trust dies. His voice, capable of soaring into melancholy, was the perfect soundtrack for a broken heart.

At least in Mary and Michael’s generation, no-one could make romantic music better than Roy Orbison.

They had been raised to the sound of the Big O, that voice and those lyrics punctuating their adolescent stirrings, their mutual awakening.

And when they had come together, on that famous night when they followed Dessie, when together they had helped to give birth to a new idea — the breaking of the mould, they called it — the spirit of Roy Orbison had been there at the start of the great romance that was to become the PDs.

All through those early years, when others had said they were a party for Only the Lonely, the PDs replied scornfully that all the other parties were Running Scared. When Dessie decided to call it a day, and Mary took on the leadership, Michael decided there and then that her theme tune should be Pretty Woman.

That was typical of him, of course, especially in those early days. Always generous with his time, willing to dash out a speech for Mary or give her a new idea or a brilliant strategy. Everyone knew he was the real genius of the party, the energy that made it hum.

As he often said himself, “all I have to do is dream” — the ideas just poured out. Sack 25,000 civil servants, penalise girls who were having babies outside of marriage, get the Government off the people’s backs and cut taxes. Above all, cut taxes.

Sometimes Mary worried about him even then. He knew he could run everything, and often tried to.

Privately he would speak scornfully to her about the quality of the people who were helping them to run the country — those dreadful FFers, as he called them, and she would be scared because even though she and Michael (especially Michael) had enough talent to run the country on their own, they needed the FFers to make up the numbers. There was that awful occasion when Michael lost his seat for the first time, just when he was sure he was going to be in charge forever.

Mary would never forget that because she had seen another side of him.

“It’s all your fault, Mary,” he shouted at her. “You and your stupid election campaign! You should have let me make all the decisions!”

For months after that he had sulked, and Mary had to do all sorts of things to stop him pouting and help her run the country again. She had to call him ‘Mr President’, and drop all sorts of hints that she mightn’t be leader forever. But she had to admit she needed him — it was really very hard to deal with Bertie and the FFers on her own. He was the ideas man — after all, hadn’t she read that he had “been credited with major responsibility for Ireland’s economic boom by pioneering tax reform, deregulation and competition to end mass unemployment and emigration”.

And that must be true because she had read it on Michael’s very own website.

Even after they had made up, though, he seemed unable to shed the distressing habit of losing his seat in every second election. That seemed to Mary to be a really unreliable thing to do, but it didn’t seem to diminish Michael’s faith in himself at all.

All the rainbows in the sky

Start to weep and say goodbye,

You won’t be seeing rainbows anymore.

Mary was really worried that time when Michael climbed up the lamp-post and attacked Bertie and the FFers. Of course, they often sniggered about Bertie and his gang privately when they were alone together, but Mary didn’t think it was very clever to be going around comparing Bertie to Ceausescu in public.

But funny enough, Bertie didn’t seem to mind.

“Sure I’ve been compared to worse, Mary”, he said to her at the time. “When the real Boss was around, he used to call me all sorts of names if I didn’t sign whatever he needed in time”.

BUT after that last election (Mary often lay awake at night worrying about what Michael would have done if he hadn’t managed to get elected), they were both safely back running the country again, and Michael got the job he really wanted. At least, he got one of them. It wasn’t long before Mary realised he really wanted her job as well.

You would think that Michael had enough to be doing. He wanted to open café bars, whatever they were, all over the country. He was forever declaring war on the gangs that were selling drugs around Dublin and other parts of Ireland, and making announcements that he had won the war — and then it would break out all over again. He wanted to expand An Garda Siochána by one-third using unpaid policemen with two or three days’ training.

And even though nobody in the country, it seemed, agreed with any of these things, Michael was absolutely convinced he was right. But what really began to bother Mary was not that Michael was always telling everyone else that he was right and they were wrong.

He did it at every cabinet meeting and whenever he stood up in the Dáil. But now he had started doing it to her, too. And Mary was having a hard enough time in her own job — no matter what she tried to do, it seemed she couldn’t make the health system come right.

It had seemed like a good opportunity when Michael encouraged her to take the job a couple of years ago, telling her how brave she was. Now she was beginning to wonder if he had really wanted her to make a mess of it.

But Mary thought for sure that Michael would back off after he made a complete mess himself of the situation that arose when the Supreme Court said the law on statutory rape was unconstitutional.

“No big deal”, he said. “With my legal brain, I can fix this”.

But he had blundered about for a fortnight, and then the FFers had to help him patch up some sort of a solution.

Did it make him humble?

I wish, thought Mary. Instead, he decided that if he was leader, if she’d step aside for him, everything would be right. So Mary had to stamp her foot once and for all, and tell Michael it was never going to happen.

But even as she did it, she knew that things would never be the same again. Not between her and Michael, and never again for the PDs.

Setting suns before they fall

They come to you. That’s all, that’s all.

But you’ll see lonely sunsets after all.

It’s over, It’s over, It’s over.