MARY HARNEY, the new leader of the Progressive Democrats, has targetted "women and youth" as potential party supporters. There are a number of things wrong with that, not least that she sees women and youth as being two entirely different, mutually exclusive categories.

She obviously thinks that the adult woman is an oul' bag who needs help to cross the road, whereas men are forever young. (Has she watched the Irish football team recently?) Worse, she may very well believe that the female of the species has never know what bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, when to be young was very heaven. As if all youth was exclusively male. It would appear that first-time female voters do not come within her conscious ambit.

The other thing wrong with her appeal to youth is that it's a waste of time, compared to the electoral rewards that would follow precisely from concentration on women. While it is true that half the population is under twenty-five, Mary Harney has failed to grasp that most of them are in nappies. The rest are, roughly speaking, awash in a narcissistic dream of sex, drugs and rock and roll.

There is no use appealing to them to get up, go out and vote. They wouldn't hear you over the sound of their Sony-Walkmans, and they never get out of bed before dark anyway.

That is as it should be, and they should be left alone to enjoy themselves without politicians or other busy-bodies interfering with their god-given right to toy with testosterone in privacy. Real life will cripple them soon enough. In the meantime, real women are doing the job of setting the country to rights and Ms Harney should consult them about how best to do that.

BEACH BUM

The fact is that for the first time in the Western World, forty per cent of the population are like the PD leader: over forty years of age. From that startling, little-recognised fact, much follows, of a revolutionary nature, particularly with regard to women. In the first place, we live longer. Men fall dead about the place, with alarming regularity, of heart attacks and such. This means that us women have to struggle on, trying to make ends meet on the pension money they've left behind, which itself means a huge increase in our discretionary spending power. Men drink and eat too much, they're always running off to America to follow bad football teams, and it's a big saving for us the day they die.

Ms Harney should enquire closely into the ambitions, hopes and dreams of female pensioners, who are tough oul' gougers indeed and resent the way the government is always trying to take their well deserved money offa them. They have very definite ideas, for instance, on inner-city transport plans, which should be designed to whisk them into town for a deserved rest and recreation period, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks of the year, in search of service (a definite growth industry) and luxury goods (the new mood among the female elderly is to spend, spend, spend and to hell with the childer who've got their health, strength, and a good forty years ahead of them to save up for delightfully rainy days when there's nothing to do but examine one's purchases over several glasses of hot whiskey).

The rest of us have equally definite ideas on what is to be done now that we have cleared away the political undergrowth and are about to take our place in the sun. Past experience has richly taught us that there is no use whatever in relying on men, boys or girls (I was twenty-four before I stopped being a beach bum and embarked on the task of changing the entire world).

HIT PARADE

Contemporary experience should have taught Ms Harney that women are determined to hold onto what they have and resolved to improve their prospects come hell or high water. Those who staffed the polling booths that day still recount with wonder and amaze stories of women young (relatively) and old streaming to cast their votes for Mary Robinson in 1990.

Fergal Finlay, currently managerial adviser to Dick Spring, has written of the mother pushing a pram with two minutes to go before the poll closed. She had waited in vain for "that bastard" of a husband to come home and take care of the child, would not be denied her chance, and brought the baby with her. Others have recorded the historic sight of rural women walking miles into the village without their men, taking no chances about a lift on the tractor or the creamery cart.

What we have we will hold onto, and we want much more. Feminists who began in the Seventies are only getting into their stride now. It's fun being fifty, as no lesser a person than Eamonn McCann keeps telling us (I wouldn't know for a while yet). And we're more reliable than we were.

Put bluntly, we won't be swanning off for a summer on the continent right in the middle of a general election. Some of us do have to work for a living, unlike students and other dossers. We know the cost of that living; the ESB bill is engraved on our hearts, like Calais.

Show me a young person who knows the price of a pound of butter and I'll show you a PD politician who knows the number one record in the Irish hit parade.