Opening salvoin electionbattle fired

Statement: The following are edited extracts from Michael McDowell's opening remarks at his press conference in Dublin yesterday…

Statement: The following are edited extracts from Michael McDowell's opening remarks at his press conference in Dublin yesterday.

My own view is that success in politics always follows those who look forward rather than look back and that fortune in politics always favours the brave. As the Romans put it: fortuna favet fortibus.

Those who see politics as a matter of survival are condemned to a battle of survival. To those who see politics as a matter of opportunity will flow the opportunities and successes that the people of Ireland hope for and vote for.

This morning, I spoke by phone to An Taoiseach in Helsinki. As always, we had a warm and cordial conversation. In the course of that conversation I assured him that it was my determined intention, in assuming the leadership of the Progressive Democrats at this point in the life of the Government, to stand by the commitment that we collectively entered into with our partners in Government to run a full term and to deliver to the Irish people on the Programme for Government which has been our agenda since 2002.

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It follows that this party fully intends to follow through on those commitments and to face the electorate in the summer of 2007 on the basis of having discharged that commitment loyally and effectively.

The leader of Fianna Fáil and I also agreed that it was not our intention to fall over the finish line in the manner of an exhausted long-distance runner but that each of us, as leaders of separate political parties, would use the next six to eight months to generate policies and platforms which will enable each of our parties to seek not just a renewal of our mandates to govern but to set out a vision to bring Ireland forward to new heights of prosperity, social justice and national achievement. We share the value that politics is not about survival, but achievement.

Attempts to bring about a marriage of convenience in pursuit of office by the two largest Opposition groupings, by handcuffing those parties together in the hope that political credibility will follow on, are as unlikely to succeed in 2007 as they were in 1997.

Put bluntly, the parties to the Mullingar Accord simply have no credible potential to govern on their own and are desperately seeking to conceal the fact that their only prospect of acceding to office is in conjunction with the Greens and Independent far-left deputies.

You can't have one without the other. And the entire political enterprise, in reality, amounts to a recipe for a slump coalition and a return to the politics of failure, paralysis and under-achievement. I believe that the Irish voters will vote decisively to reject a return to the politics of failure.