The Fine Gael leader, Mr John Bruton, recently visited Killarney, in the south Kerry constituency, to address students and meet some of the local party activists. He will be returning there between now and the next general election to lead the campaign to regain a Dail seat in this political black spot for the party.
The three seats are currently held by the Fianna Fail Minister for Justice, Mr O'Donoghue, the Independent, Mr Jackie Healy-Rae, and Labour's Ms Breda Moynihan-Cronin, who might be most vulnerable to a challenge, given that she dropped 2,500 votes in the last election. But that decline has to be measured against the high of 1992, when the electorate swung to Labour.
The 1997 election was a disaster for Fine Gael in Kerry South. An early convention chose Mr Jim Kelly, a lecturer, to be the party's sole candidate, but Mr Aidan O'Connor, a journalist, was later added to the ticket. This resulted in an intensely bitter campaign between the two, with rival camps pursuing the same Fine Gael vote.
The party achieved almost 20 per cent of the first preference vote and was never in the running for a seat.
However, Mr O'Connor had impressed as a candidate, coming 1,200 votes ahead of Mr Kelly, and he was given one of the Seanad vacancies by Mr Bruton in the run-up to the Seanad election. He failed to win a seat and did not contest last June's local elections.
Mr Paul Coghlan, a prominent Killarney businessman and member of Kerry County Council at the time, won a Seanad seat against the odds. A hardworking and capable senator, and clearly ministerial material should he make it to the Dail, he seemed the obvious candidate until he surprisingly lost his county council seat last June.
Following the last general election, the Limerick West TD, Mr Michael Finucane, who was part of a political miracle when the party took two seats in the onetime Fianna Fail stronghold, headed a commission to recommend a salvage operation in Kerry South. Mr Finucane declined to discuss his report, but it is understood to have recommended an early convention and a two-candidate strategy based on geographical considerations.
This would mean a candidate from the Dingle Peninsula, almost certainly Dingle-based county councillor Mr Seamus Fitzgerald, and one from the other side of the constituency, preferably the Killarney-Killorglin area. Names mentioned include Mr Coghlan, Mr P. J. Donovan, a county councillor from Mr O'Donoghue's home base of Caherciveen, Mr John O'Connor, from Killorglin, who narrowly failed to take a county council seat, and Mr Michael Connor "Scarteen," a long-serving Kenmare-based county councillor. The return of Mr Aidan O'Connor to the fray has not been ruled out.
Exploiting the vote in the Dingle Peninsula, where there is no sitting TD, worked for the party in the past, when Mr Michael Begley, from Dingle, held the seat from 1969 to 1989. The early days were heady, with Mr Begley appointed a parliamentary secretary (minister of state) by Mr Liam Cosgrave in the 1973 to 1977 coalition government.
But the vote drifted away with each election. An exasperated Mr Jimmy Deenihan, the party's North Kerry TD, remarked in a Radio Kerry interview after the last local elections that the Fine Gael infighting in South Kerry was "political cannibalism at its very worst". A high-ranking party source said this week: "We have to bite the bullet in South Kerry soon. Time is not on our side."