Remarks by Minister Michael McDowell, TD
Leader of the Progressive Democrats
September 11th, 2006
Tánaiste, ministers, deputies, senators, ladies and gentlemen of the press, I want to thank you for coming here today. And I want to thank my colleagues in the Progressive Democrats Parliamentary Party for the great honour and privilege that they have given me and for the great trust and responsibility that they have vested in me as third leader of the Progressive Democrats, the party which since its foundation 20 years ago has proven to be one of the great political successes of the independent Irish State.
It has established, beyond doubt, its record and its central role in unleashing the potential for national development which was, for so many years, pent up and frustrated by the politics of failure. At the outset, I want to address some words of gratitude and acknowledgement to my predecessor as party leader, an Tánaiste Mary Harney. Mary Harney brought me into the Progressive Democrats, picking out, from a file of letters, a letter I had written to Des O'Malley in 1984 urging him to form a new political party.
Mary Harney drove the process by which the Progressive Democrats came into existence. Des O'Malley and she put their political capital, their careers and their credibility on the line for Ireland when, in the dark days of December 1985, they raised the flag of hope for a generation of Irish people who had been betrayed by the politics of failure into believing that Ireland's destiny was failure and underperformance.
Moreover, it was Mary Harney who generously and selflessly brought me back into politics in 1999. As Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment she has a record as the most successful employment minister in the European Union. Not content with that huge achievement in turning Ireland from a country of mass unemployment to a country of full employment, she has had the courage and the patriotism to take political responsibility for the radical transformation of our health system so that an area of neglect and underperformance may, in a short number of years, be transformed into one in which the Irish people will take the same legitimate pride that they take in all the other achievements that we have seen in the last 9 years.
I want to thank Mary Harney for her friendship, her patience but, above all, for her patriotism. And I am immensely relieved and strengthened by her determination to see through the process of reform in her ministry of Health and Children. Truly, she will be a hard act to follow. But then, she herself had a hard act to follow when she succeeded Des O'Malley as leader of the Progressive Democrats. I want to thank my colleagues in the Parliamentary Party for the confidence that they have reposed in me in unanimously asking me to lead them into the next election.
I guarantee them that they will receive, in return, unrelenting effort and commitment on my part to ensure that this party will play as decisive a part in Irish democracy in the coming years as it has done in the twenty years since its foundation.
In this context, I want to say an especial word of thanks to my wife Niamh and our family for their generous support of all that I have done in the past and to thank them for what I know, will be sacrifices of family life, as I take on this new role and responsibility.
It is my fixed and unalterable intention to unite the Progressive Democrats in pursuit of their goals and to avoid in every way disunity and distraction. I want at this point to thank Liz O'Donnell and Tom Parlon for their generous and selfless agreement not only to nominate me for this post but also to join in the leadership of the party so that we can, together, keep a clear focus on the major task that lies before us. Inevitably, over a twenty year period, politics delivers, to those who participate in it, a measure of good days and bad days.
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. I have spoken of the task that lies before us.
We can see it two ways. 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.
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. In that light, it is my intention to grow the Progressive Democrats, to build on Mary Harney's achievement of doubling the party's strength at the last election, by bringing every single member of our 13-strong parliamentary party into Dáil Éireann as TDs along with new and fresh candidates who have rallied to the party's colours and who, I am confident, will rally to the party's colours to double the strength of the party in Dáil Éireann and to confirm it as having a central and dynamic role in the development of this state.
While my primary focus today is on the business and the future of the Progressive Democrats, I think it is only right to point out some fundamental realities which have not changed since the election of 2002. 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 underachievement which has always characterised their periods in office - as opposed to power - in the past. I believe that the Irish voters will, when this fact sinks in, vote decisively to reject a return to the politics of failure.
And it is our intention, in the Progressive Democrats, to bring that message to every corner of this island with the political objective that next year's general election will not result in a Dáil consisting of political shards but, on the contrary, will result in a government with a confident and ambitious programme and mandate to continue the dramatic progress that the Irish people have made since 1997.
Social justice is made possible by successful politics and successful government. Our capacity to protect and strengthen our environment and to make our economic growth environmentally sustainable depends on successful government and a successful economy. One is not the enemy of the other. To those who might be tempted to vote for change for change's sake, my message is clear: what is on offer is a change for the worse. To those who have supported the Fine Gael party in past elections, my message is also clear: vote for those whose policies you support and who you know will implement them; reject the strategy of handcuffing yourself to a Slump Coalition united only by pursuit of office.
To those who are concerned about the environment and have voted in the past for the Green Party, my message is equally clear: protecting our environment and making Ireland's success environmentally sustainable will be best served by those who create the resources to do so. Giving up on growth will damage our capacity to make all of the local and global decisions necessary for the protection of our environment.
Lastly, to those who have in the past supported Sinn Féin, the Progressive Democrats offer a vision of Republicanism which is inclusive, outward-looking and economically sustainable. My message there is to reject the heavily-disguised, neo-Marxist ideology of the Provo puppet-masters who have perverted and betrayed Republicanism for the last 30 years and have set back the cause of reconciliation of Green and orange by decades.
Our aspiration for Irish Unity is based on Performance, Persuasion and Reconciliation. It is based on a unity of hearts and minds. Our programme for this party is ambitious. Our vision for Ireland is ambitious. We have proven in the past that we can transform vision into practical achievement. Out of our short twenty-year history, 12 have been spent inside government. These have been periods of unprecedented success for the Irish people. We acknowledge the huge contribution of our partners in government in creating that success. We have in the past confounded the pessimism of those who have commented on Irish politics from the twin perspectives of cynicism and fatalism. Today we say to the Irish people that, as far as the Progressive Democrats are concerned, the best is yet to come.