Politics: I knew Mary Harney when she was a student in Trinity College, well before Jack Lynch appointed her to the Senate in 1977. After her subsequent election to the Dáil, one evening in late 1984 (I cannot now recall whether this was before or after the parliamentary party whip was withdrawn from Des O'Malley), she and I were sitting together in the Oireachtas Members' Bar when she turned to me and said that she would like to join Fine Gael, writes Garret FitzGerald
I said I would be delighted to have her in the party. And I suggested to her that an optimal time for such a move might be when we signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement, then under negotiation - an event which at that time I believed would take place in the spring of 1985. As it turned out that negotiation was not completed until November of that year.
In the meantime Des O'Malley had been expelled from the Fianna Fáil party, following his vote for the Government's Contraception Bill in February 1985. Some time later, Ì phoned him and arranged to meet him in the house of a mutual friend in Limerick, when I was on my way to Kerry. I said to him when we met that I knew we both shared a deep concern at the danger to our society if Charles Haughey secured an overall majority at the next general election, adding that if Des joined Fine Gael, I would find some way to appoint him to the Cabinet. Such a development would, I believed, help to forestall that danger.
He recoiled at my suggestion, saying that he simply could not join Fine Gael. In that event, I responded, the only way he could help to block a Haughey overall majority would be for him to found his own party. There we left the matter. But from Stephen Collins's excellent book on the Progressive Democrat Party we now know that Michael McDowell had already proposed such a course to Des O'Malley, and that it was under serious consideration from spring 1985 onwards.
Since the mid-1940s I had known Michael McDowell's parents and his grandparents, Eoin and Agnes McNeill - and during the 1960s I had come to know Michael and all his siblings. In 1977 he joined us on holiday in Spain - not in France, as Stephen Collins suggests.
He became active in Fine Gael in my Dublin South-East constituency, helping with the preparation of policies before the 1981 Election, and several years later was elected chairman of Dublin South-East constituency executive. In that capacity he launched a move against me on policy grounds, and by the force of his oratory seemed to come close to winning the support of a majority of the executive - until he went over the top, and lost his audience. He then resigned from Fine Gael - and his February 1985 letter to Des O'Malley represented his next political move. I should add that despite these events he and I have always remained personal friends.
Stephen Collins describes well the frantic efforts made during 1985 to get the new party off the ground - and its remarkable success in winning middle-class support in the run-up to the 1987 election. I have to say I was surprised, as I think most people were, at the extent to which in that election a new party, comprising mainly Fianna Fáil dissidents, won most of its votes - as many as three-quarters, it would seem, on the basis of the preference voting - at the expense of Fine Gael, rather than Fianna Fáil. I recall calculating at the time that but for the PDs' emergence on the scene, the Fine Gael vote in the 1987 Election would have dropped only from 39% to 36.5%.
That election, in which the Fianna Fáil vote actually declined, represented a victory for the PDs rather than Fianna Fáil, which nevertheless, by something of a fluke, was returned to power as a minority government on the casting vote of the new Labour Party Ceann Comhairle, Sean Treacy, for its leader, Charles Haughey.
The PDs had a clear advantage over the two main parties in that they were not seeking support from the community at large, but only from a section of middle-class voters who favoured policies that were liberal in both social and economic terms - the latter meaning what is now called "neo-liberal". That highly focused approach freed them from the kind of constraints that in the larger parties too often breeds over-caution on potentially contentious issues.
Stephen Collins illustrates the benefits of this greater freedom of action by quoting from PD Senator John Dardis's account of the first party meeting that he attended, when Des O'Malley summarily dismissed "the old talk about a united Ireland" and also refused to support a teachers' pay claim.
As Stephen Collins records, the PDs' 1987 election programme involved such economies as abolishing the Office of Public Works and the Senate, and financing current public spending in part at least from once-off sales of State assets, whilst simultaneously ignoring the need to provide for the £550m increase in spending that arose from the normal carry-over into 1987 of existing commitments to public service pay, social welfare, and debt servicing. Theirs was a populist document which, luckily for them, they did not have to implement!
Stephen Collins mentions my decision to extend the 1987 election campaign for an extra week, but this was not, as he suggests, designed to bring the electorate around to accepting Fine Gael's tough budget proposals - for I doubted that this would be possible - but rather to give Ray McSharry time to convert Charles Haughey to the need for such action, about which he had been in persistent denial ever since his own 1980 failure to act in this matter. My tactic worked: Charles Haughey was finally forced to accept the need for drastic action.
I have been interested to learn from Stephen Collins's book that Des O'Malley's willingness to agree an election pact with Fine Gael in that election was over-ridden by Bobby Molloy and Michael McDowell. I had always wondered why our agreement had foundered - but I nevertheless asked Fine Gael voters to give their second preferences to the PDs, which one-half of them did.
In the Dáil after the election, the PDs refused to follow Fine Gael in supporting the new Fianna Fáil Government's belated espousal of our efforts to balance the budget - a stance to which I had committed Fine Gael as soon as the election results had shown that we had lost, and one that Alan Dukes loyally followed, with his "Tallaght Strategy".
Stephen Collins discloses that "some senior party members came to the conclusion that they had made a big mistake by not adopting a formula like the Tallaght strategy". He explains that Des O'Malley and Bobby Molloy were still mesmerised by the Fianna Fáil tradition in Opposition of always attacking the Government, even when it is implementing the policy that in government that party had itself advocated!
As Stephen Collins points out, this populist inconsistency damaged the image of the party at a very early stage of its development - and also led it, in its 1989 post-election discussions with Fianna Fáil about a Coalition arrangement, to pursue an anti-business line, by advocating almost £1.5 billion personal tax cuts at the expense of taxation of business - a proposal Charles Haughey wisely rejected.
In his concluding summing-up Stephen Collins is kinder to the PDs than I would be. He correctly gives them credit for raising questions as to the right balance between lower taxation on the one hand and better social and public services on the other - an issue that requires perennial debate. But the PDs have consistently argued this in ideological terms, rather than seeking pragmatically a better balance between these two strategies. And they have bid for popular support by putting the emphasis on lower personal taxation, whereas it is low corporate taxation - a Fine Gael/Fianna Fáil policy that pre-dates the PDs by 30 years - that principally generates economic growth.
The price we have paid for reducing personal taxes to the lowest level in Europe has been a heavy one, socially - for this has helped to create in Ireland the most unequal society in Europe - but also in economic terms. Serious economic damage has been done because of the PDs' populist pursuit of this objective in tandem with their fellow-ideologue Charlie McCreevy's largely wasteful or unproductive spending increases, at a time around the turn of the century when impending full employment was already creating inflationary pressures.
As a direct result of this combination of misguided policies, within a period of about four years Ireland ceased to be any longer one of the most competitive economies in Western Europe, and the consequent serious loss of competitiveness is currently making it very difficult for us to hold our own in export markets.
Stephen Collins does not attempt to address these thornier aspects of PD policy, but that is the only ground on which I can criticise a book that provides an excellent, and I believe very accurate, account of the first two decades of the history of this new party - the survival of which has been remarkable in the face of the imperfections of our PR system. This electoral system has awarded the PDs 10 and four seats respectively in two successive elections, 1992 and 1997 - in both of which they received a share of the vote that was identical to two decimal places: 4.68%.
In conclusion, it would be ungenerous and unfair of me not to endorse warmly what Stephen Collins has to say about the events of December last year when Mary Harney and Michael McDowell "seized control of the Irish Government's policy on the North . . . [ when] Sinn Féin leaders refused to sign up to a formulation that would have committed the entire republican movement not to engage in criminality of any kind in the future. McDowell refused to let go of the issue, but Ahern and Blair gave the distinct impression that they did not regard [criminality] as a deal-breaker and the public was left in the dark as to its actual significance".
The PDs certainly deserve the gratitude of the Irish people for their intervention at that time - and for making it clear that if after the next election Sinn Féin were to support Fianna Fáil on the vote for the Taoiseach, the PDs votes on that issue would go elsewhere.
Former taoiseach Dr Garret FitzGerald's latest book, Ireland in the World: Further Refections, was published earlier this month by Liberties Press
Breaking The Mould By Stephen Collins Gill & Macmillan, 280pp. €27.99