IF THE colourful rightwinger Brendan McGahon loses his Dail seat he will be much missed in the precincts of Leinster House, where he is personally well liked by all shades of the political spectrum.
But even his friends are showing some impatience with Mr McGahon who, they say, was his own worst enemy. His behaviour was a textbook example of "How Not to Win Your Party's Nomination for the General Election".
The greatest threat to a TD, very often, does not come from the enemy camp but from his or her own side. Mr McGahon announced his intention of retiring from the Dail, thereby encouraging the ambition of others in the party including his own brother, Johnny, a Fine Gael councillor.
The others were well out of the traps when Mr McGahon changed his mind. He said he needed to earn a living. But instead of trudging the highways and byways in search of votes for the nomination, he sat back and allowed his record to speak for itself.
This was dangerous, even suicidal, given Fine Gael's new rules for the selection of candidates. Shades of China's Red Guards, every Fine Gael member has a vote at the convention.
There were over 1,000 people in attendance at Castlebellingham on Thursday night, but Mr McGahon got only 95 votes out of a total of 780, taking fifth place in a field of six.
He has condemned this as a "derisory vote after 14 years" and claimed that some of those present were actually members of Fianna Fail. Sources in Fianna Fail acknowledge there were "non-Fine Gael" people present.
Mr McGahon's critics will naturally dismiss his comments as sour grapes. The successful pair were Terry Brennan (53), a councillor from Carlingford and former county footballer, and Fergus O'Dowd (46), who has been mayor of Drogheda three times and has campaigned against the nuclear plant at Sellafield, which is a hot local issue.
Mr McGahon has declared that he will reject any attempt by party headquarters to have him added to the Fine Gael ticket, and is expected to stand as
Independent.
For years the most outspoken politician in the state, Mr McGahon has attracted headlines by his abomination of homosexuality, his advocacy of chemical castration for rapists, his proposal to shoot drug barons and his membership of the World Anti-Communist League. He detests the IRA.
He won praise from the Sunday Times for his courage when he took the stand on the paper's behalf in the High Court in Dublin. Mr McGahon told the court he had no doubt that two brothers suing the paper for libel were active supporters of the Provisional IRA.
His unusual forthrightness has not brought much in the way of political reward. His problem was that his views on social issues, which would have gone down a treat in a previous age, were seen as outmoded and almost comical.
Fine Gael might be somewhere between New Right and Wet Liberal, but Mr McGahon was embarrassingly Old Hat.
He was deselected before, in 1989, but the party added his name to the ticket and he held his seat. "I won't take it now," he told Marian Finucane on radio yesterday. "I have been publicly unfrocked and my livelihood taken away from me."
No slouch in the art of self-advertisement, Mr McGahon is already portraying himself as a kind of Fine Gael Dreyfus. He will come before the electorate shouting "J'accuse", but it may not work for him this time.
There no longer seems to be a market for his belt-and-braces conservatism in a world where even Barry Goldwater is supporting gay rights.