At the Progressive Democrats' 15th birthday bash in a Limerick GAA club on Thursday night, Des O'Malley took understandable pride in the survival of his political offspring. He pointed out that the PDs have now lasted longer than any other challenger to the three-party system in the history of the State.
Yet somewhere in the back of his mind he must have felt as many fathers do when they contrast the euphoria of birth with the reality of having a moody, ill-at-ease adolescent. Fifteen, after all, is an awkward age, characterised by wild swings between a demand to be taken seriously and a feeling that nobody understands you.
O'Malley may be one of the most remarkable - and indeed admirable politicians - of recent decades. His creation may be, as his successor Mary Harney claimed at its annual conference last month "the most successful new party of the last 50 years". But no one at the party on Thursday night can have been unaware of the haunting absences.
The two key figures at the party's launch on December 21st, 1985 - O'Malley and Harney - may still be around. But O'Malley will retire at the next general election and no party has ever seen such a haemorrhaging of talent.
Michael Keating, the party's first deputy leader has disappeared into a fog of unsavoury allegations in the British courts. The founding chairman Michael McDowell is by contrast the State's leading law officer. Pat Cox has forged his own remarkable career in European politics. Promising young TDs like Geraldine Kennedy and Anne Colley have left politics. Martin Cullen has faded into the Fianna Fail wallpaper.
Along with these ghosts, Thursday night's feast was haunted by tantalising visions of lost dreams. The PDs' first public rally, in the prosperous Dublin suburb of Sutton, attracted over a thousand people. The first opinion poll to measure its impact - an IMS survey for the Irish Independent - gave the new party an astonishing 19 per cent support.
Less than a month later, an MRBI poll for The Irish Times, showed it ahead of Fine Gael as the second most popular party in the State, with the support of precisely a quarter of the electorate. And even when this initial wave of enthusiasm inevitably subsided the PDs turned in a very impressive performance in their first general election in February 1987, taking nearly 12 per cent of the first-preference vote (twice Labour's share) and 14 seats in the Dail.
Now the prospect of virtual annihilation at the next general election is very real. And to the question of where it all went wrong, the party already knows the answer. Michael McDowell supplied it when, still within the tent, he warned that the PDs had to be radical or redundant. The problem with radicalism, though, is that it is a relative term. Yesterday's radicalism is today's orthodoxy.
The PDs, admittedly, were always going to have a hard time surviving the political demise of their father-figure. Few parties after all have ever been so closely identified with one politician. In that first 1987 election, the posters of the three main parties carried the usual broad slogans: "There is a better way"; "Let's build the nation"; "People matter most". The PDs replaced this rhetoric with a personal appeal: "Dessie can do it." Doing it without Dessie (and ultimately without the man who deserves to be regarded as the party's co-founder, Charles Haughey) was always going to be tough.
But it is much tougher if you don't remember that eaten bread is soon forgotten. The very achievement of so much of the original PD platform - tax cuts, privatisation, the liberal agenda, rapprochement with Unionism - has deprived the party of its core appeal. Mary Harney's statement in her leader's address last month that "If you want to know what `PD' stands for, it stands for promises delivered" misses the point that there's no market for goods that have already been delivered.
Thus Michael McDowell's more downbeat assessment in the blueprint that underlay his failed attempt at a reverse takeover earlier this year. His claim that "the PD label is dated and carries a lot of negative baggage of economic elitism, FF factionalism, niche ambitions, revisionism and smallness" carries the bitter ring of truth. Instead of claiming credit for promises delivered, the party needs to be able to present a radical vision of the future. What Mary Harney offered last month was a set of generalities about social inclusion and economic progress.
Yet there is still a constituency for two elements of the original PD appeal. Ironically, one is listed among Michael McDowell's bugbears: "economic elitism". There is a definite niche for a nakedly right-wing party that doesn't pretend to be caring and sharing. And there's more room than ever for a party of uncompromising probity that will simply not tolerate corruption. Whether the PDs have the stomach to break the social consensus and to be more than the watchdog that didn't bark will determine whether it is still around for a 20th birthday party.
fotoole@irish-times.ie
