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Mackay will have infuriated a good portion of the PDs and interested another portion of them. It doesn’t matter. He’s not only barking up the wrong tree, he’s barking up the wrong shrub.
    The PDs were a necessary, indeed vital catalyst in Irish politics. Mary Harney gave us smog-free cities, the party deregulated some areas in serious need of deregulation, and tax was reformed. A lot done.
    The reality behind the electoral meltdown and the rumours that one of their two TDs is now negotiating with Fianna Fáil with a view to conversion, is that Fianna Fáil subsumes small parties and gains a new sense of direction in the process.
    Or put it another way: the PDs may no longer be necessary, because Fianna Fáil has learned how to be them.

D AVID K ENNY
Sometimes the growing pains never go away
    16 May 2010
    A story in the news last week reminded me of an old friend. Before I get to that story, I’d like to tell you about him. Forgive me for being nostalgic, the pay-off is important. Brian and I were thirteen the first time we met. I wasn’t impressed. He looked a bit of a shaper as he marched around the schoolyard, clicking the studded heels of his George Webbs, with his hands in the pockets of an oversized Eskimo anorak.
    We fought – I can’t remember why. It was one of those ‘hold-me-back’ affairs, with a flurry of missed groin-kicks and the loser ending up in a headlock. Brian, as it turned out, was no hard-man: he was rubbish at fighting. It was something we had in common.
    The scrap was a sort of pathetic, pubescent, bonding ritual. We became best friends, constantly messing about to disguise our terror at being weedy First Years, surrounded by giant, moody Older Lads. We slagged everything off – as all insecure thirteen-year-olds do to deflect attention from themselves. Clothes, hairstyles, even bikes were fair game.
    Brian had a twenty-gear Asahi racer, while I had a crock of crap masquerading as a Chopper. He never let me forget it was crap – especially as it didn’t have a crossbar.
    â€˜It’s a girl’s bike.’
    â€˜It’s not. It’s just ... streamlined. It’s a streamlined Chopper.’
    â€˜But it folds in half.’
    â€˜It’s a Chopper.’
    â€˜It’s a girl’s bike and you’re a girl.’
    The bike was eventually ‘stolen’.
    Our afternoons were spent listening to records or cycling around ‘scoping out the talent’. At night we’d slip through back gardens, avoiding fathers filling coal scuttles, to steal apples that we never ate. We whispered instructions to each other on a shared set of walkie-talkies. Their range was about twenty feet. There was no need for them: we could have spoken normally and still have heard each other.
    Brian and I learned how to smoke together. We could only afford cheap tipped cigars. They were disgusting and tasted like burning doc leaves (I once smoked a doc leaf). I accidentally stubbed one out on my arm while swinging from a tree, making monkey noises to annoy the lawn bowlers at Moran Park. The scar lasted for a year. I told my mother that it was a result of two wasps stinging me on the same spot, one after the other. She didn’t buy it.
    Brian and I rode around Dún Laoghaire with our cigars clamped between our teeth, thinking we looked like Clint Eastwood. We didn’t see ourselves as two short-arses playing at being adults from the safety of childhood.
    We went to our first disco together, herky-jerk dancing like mad to Bad Manners to impress the girls. The more we ran on the spot, the more they liked it – so local stud, Macker, told us. What he didn’t tell us was that he had spread the word among the girls that we were ‘special needs boys’ from a care home.
    â€˜We’re ‘in’ there,’ I said, as one waved sympathetically at us. We ran faster on the spot to impress her even more.
    Brian went on my