Adams unsuitable to lead the opposition

IT seems like a certainty that Fine Gael and Labour will form the next government, with each securing its best ever result giving it the largest majority any Irish government has ever had.

But we must not forget the sideshow that is the importance of choosing the next leader of the opposition. Fianna Fáil seems likely to be the third-largest party but independents may have more seats. If they do they can all join together and form a technical group which would exceed the seat number of Fianna Fáil and give that new group the right to be the main opposition.

This could be bad enough, but the worst-case scenario could be that a union of Sinn Féin and some United Left Alliance TDs would join and claim the right to be official opposition.

If the utter grotesqueness of the people of Louth voting for Gerry Adams to be a TD, in the very place where the bodies of those disappeared by Adams’ IRA friends are still being found, were to come to pass, then the real horror would be ending up with Adams as leader of the opposition. People who live in constituencies where there is a real danger of SF gaining a final seat, should think long and hard about the sort of people they want representing them and they should be careful what they wish for. Because as Mr Adams himself likes to remind is about his IRA friends, they haven’t gone away you know, and once that genie is out of the bottle there will be no going back.

Desmond FitzGerald

Canary Wharf

London