Armed with a series of policy initiatives, the PDs are to press for a review of the Programme for Government during the summer as well as a radical national plan for future economic development.
Having outlined proposals for massive road and rail building projects, education services targeted at disadvantaged areas, increased child benefit and further tax reform and tax cuts at her party's annual conference, Ms Harney said yesterday that a review of the Government's programme was now very important.
"The pace of change is so fast, having a four-year programme that is not reviewed at the halfway point is unrealistic," she told The Irish Times yesterday. The programme agreed between Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats after the June 1997 general election does not contain a clause providing for such a review, but there are unlikely to be objections to some review and revision.
Ms Harney also said the plan now being prepared for submission to Brussels in advance of the detailed allocation of the next round of EU funding should be expanded into a broad State-wide plan. "Many of the infrastructural projects we need will not necessarily attract EU funding," she said, but the national plan should include these as well as the ones which will qualify for Brussels money.
The weekend conference set out to give an impression of a party of influence and power preparing future policies and plans. However, the party's general secretary, Mr John Higgins, emphasised the party's problems when he confirmed that at this stage it has no plan to run a candidate in the European elections.
While there is a prospect the PDs might support the campaign of former member and now Independent Mr Pat Cox in Munster, Mr Des O'Malley's weekend statement that he will not run in Dublin, as the party had hoped, makes in highly unlikely the party will contest the election.
The announcement of a four-year £2 billion public home-building programme by the Minister of State with responsibility for housing, Mr Bobby Molloy, emphasised that despite the questions over the party's long-term survival, it still holds and exercises power. Reinforcing this, Ms Harney paid special tribute to Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Ms Liz O'Donnell, for her role in the Northern talks, and also referred to her own central role in the series of inquiries under way into alleged improper business activity.
She claimed her party had won the political debate on policy. When the party was founded its policies - on tax in particular - were seen as unaffordable and unworkable. "There is now no party in this country willing to campaign for an increase in the top rate of income tax," she said.
She identified several problems relating to managing prosperity, including labour shortages, the rapid growth in car ownership and the explosion in demand for housing.
Ms Harney moved to position her party at the forefront of policy debate on how to deal with unprecedented economic growth, calling for massive public and private investment in infrastructure. "You cannot run a first-rate economy with a third-rate road network," she said.
The State has 10 years in which to provide first-class road and rail links as well as water and sewerage services, she said. In a proposal marking a substantial shift in thinking, she said a significant part of the Exchequer's annual Budget surplus should be used to pay for this infrastructure, rather than using the surpluses simply to pay off the national debt.
She also put forward a number of policy proposals which, as Mr Molloy remarked, show that nobody can fairly apply a "rightwing" label to the party. She said the advantages of education must be "marketed" in the communities that need it most. Disproportionate resources must be put into the most deprived communities "if we are to break the vicious circle of disadvantage and despair whereby unemployment and under-achievement are effectively transmitted from one generation to the next."
She rejected the idea of providing special tax breaks to families with children on the grounds that these would not be equitable. "What about children whose parents rely on social welfare? What about fairness and equality?"
The fairest solution, she said, was to increase child benefit and have more and better childcare provision.
She was severely critical of the racial intolerance she saw emerging, saying that as a nation of emigrants "we should know better than most how to treat immigrants". She said clearly she wanted asylum-seekers to have the right to work "and to feel very much part of our society".