The delegates were subdued, the speeches generally low key. There was an acknowledgement that the party has been battered over the past year, and a sense of frustration both at the absence of Michael McDowell and the paralysis the long "will he? won't he?" saga has caused.
But while some delegates privately spoke less enthusiastically than in the past about their leader, there was absolutely no talk of an alternative. Ms Harney defused any tension after dinner on Friday when, in a very human and well-received speech, she admitted mistakes and indicated determination to "move on" to the next business.
And the next business is attempting to define to voters a party whose very existence is under threat in a crowded political market place. The party is going to concentrate on marketing the small number of realistic Dail candidates it has, in a strategy that has an echo of Mr McDowell's proposal for a loose central organisation with regional components.
Nationally, Ms Harney is setting out to define the PDs as the polar opposite of the "tax-and-spend" Labour Party. Yet she has set out all the social aims put forward by Labour. At the weekend she committed her party to ending educational inequality and child poverty, to increasing child benefit and old age pensions, and to creating equal access to healthcare.
The problem in seeking a distinct identity as the anti-Labour option is that Labour is saying it wants these things, too, as surely Fianna Fail and Fine Gael will during the next general election campaign. And these are mostly aims that require the spending for which Ms Harney criticises Labour.
The distinction Ms Harney makes is that she will not curtail the ongoing downward movement of tax rates in order to achieve these aims. The PDs hail the political consensus of the last decade on the need for tax cuts as their single most important contribution to economic prosperity. Tax cuts will continue, she says, but creating an equal and fair society will happen in parallel.
Just how much of the social concern and equality agenda she will implement under the constraint of tax-cutting commitments she did not say. Many of the social policy commitments - investment to end educational disadvantage and child poverty, a £100-a-month child benefit payment and a national motorway network - will cost money.
While Labour will fund its spending through curtailing further tax cuts, using the long-term pension fund or even borrowing, Ms Harney says she will not. "We will only be able to deliver on these ambitions if we can sustain the impressive growth of recent years," she said. "And that will require a continuation of tried and tested Progressive Democrat policies."
With all parties rhetorically committed to the social inclusion agenda, the economic debate in the run-up to the next election will be confined to how much of it the various party proposals can deliver. For the PDs, delivery is conditional on continued growth and prosperity.
The rhetoric of the parties that depicted each other as dangerous extremists throughout the 1997 general election campaign is converging. Ms Harney said: "We must use the fruits of prosperity to help the more vulnerable groups in Irish society - the young, the old, the ill, the excluded - the people who are in danger of being left behind by the economic boom.
"We must use the fruits of prosperity to modernise this country, to provide it with a 21st century infrastructure, to put our public services on a par with the best in the world."
It could as easily be an extract from the Labour document proposing their £3 billion extra spending over three years. Indeed, senior PD sources acknowledge that the market is a little crowded with politicians tasking the language of social justice right now.
It is for this reason that they have taken the strategic decision to make a sustained attack on Labour and warn of the danger of a "lurch to the left". But the strategy is risky. The ideological exchanges between the two left both losing out in 1997 as the two main parties gained. Labour sources yesterday said they were unlikely to be responding in kind this time.
The weekend also revealed a clear shift away from the party's pretensions to being a national movement. Instead, there is a concentration on the small number of good candidates the party has a chance of having elected. Senior party sources said they had learned "not to spread our net too wide" but rather to concentrate on individual candidates in individual constituencies.
Ms Harney spoke of marketing high-quality, independent-minded candidates rather than leading a tightly organised and "one message" national movement. "We don't need people just to read scripts and to go through the sound bites that were handed down to them," she said.
This attitude, coupled with Ms Harney's emphasis on TDs' right to vote according to their own views, may contain the seeds of a Government crisis. A PD free vote on the abortion issue next year could yet thwart the demands of four Independents for a referendum, and even threaten Government stability. However, there will be a lot of political negotiation before that comes about, and it is doubtful the PDs want an election brought about by the abortion issue.
"People have their own view, and in the PDs they are entitled to that," said Ms Harney.
She and party chairman Mr John Minihan placed the emphasis on individual candidates building local support: getting "bums on seats in Dail Eireann" as Mr Minihan has put it. Ms Harney recognised that many of these candidates will be struggling to win final seats in four and five-seat constituencies. "There will be lots of Floridas," she said, in reference to the deadlocked US election. "But I'm determined to turn the Floridas to our advantage."
