ANALYSISThe PDs had the courage of their convictions and won over the other mainstream parties on key issues such as taxation, even if many commentators subjected them to a diet of constant abuse, writes Stephen Collins
THE NEAR certain winding up of the Progressive Democrats next month has been inevitable since last year's general election disaster. Reduced to two Dáil seats, the party was no longer viable, as the leadership has now acknowledged. The harsh reality was cloaked for a while by the fact that Mary Harney continued to serve as a senior Minister but the speculation of recent weeks over Noel Grealish's departure plans presaged the end.
The party didn't help itself earlier this year by picking the worthy but totally inexperienced Senator Ciarán Cannon as leader instead of Fiona O'Malley, who had the advantage of five years in the Dáil, a bubbly, likeable, personality with a relatively high public profile.
Still, it probably didn't matter who took over as leader. The party's death warrant was signed on the night of the election.
Looking back over 23 years, the remarkable thing is that the PDs survived for so long. Apart from its first general election breakthrough in 1987 it has always skated on the brink of electoral disaster. It only needed one run of bad luck to push it over the edge.
That bad luck struck with a vengeance almost immediately after Michael McDowell took over as leader from Harney in the autumn of 2006.
There had been a tussle between the two a few months earlier when McDowell claimed Harney had not honoured a commitment to step down. In the event she gave way and he took over for the run up to the general election.
Disaster struck immediately with the disclosure in The Irish Times of the Mahon tribunal investigation into Bertie Ahern's personal finances. The new PD leader at first supported Ahern, then challenged his initial account and finally backed him. From that point on the PDs were fighting for survival.
It can be argued that the party was on the slippery slope from the moment it agreed to go into a second government with Fianna Fáil in 2002, when they were not needed to make up the numbers.
That meant the party lost the leverage it had between 1997 and 2002. McDowell's challenge to Ahern on the payments issue was undermined by the fact that Ahern could have continued in office without his junior coalition partner.
When McDowell repeated the mistake of flip flopping on the payments issue at the start of the general election campaign, the party's fate and his own was sealed. If he had withdrawn from government, as he threatened during the first weekend of the campaign, the PDs might have had a chance of salvaging something. As it was events took their course.
Finally, McDowell's decision to throw in the towel on the night of the election undermined any remote prospect the PDs might have had of recovery.
It was also a sad end to his own political career during which he had a number of significant achievements to his credit, whatever his legions of detractors might say.
Now that the party has come to an end, its influence on the course of Irish political, social and economic affairs can be assessed with some degree of objectivity.
On the economic front, it undoubtedly played a role in the transformation of Ireland from an economic basket case in the 1980s to one of the most prosperous countries in the world. The extent of that role is a subject for debate but things would hardly have turned out the same if the party had never existed. From the very first, the PDs set out with a liberal economic agenda and a heavy stress on tax cutting. This agenda was reviled by all of its opponents 20 years ago yet in the intervening period most of it was implemented.
As well as implementing its policies in government, the PDs managed to shift the political centre of gravity.
It has often been remarked that Margaret Thatcher's greatest achievement in Britain was not that she changed the policies of the Conservative Party, it was that she changed the policies of the Labour Party.
In Ireland the policies of all the other mainstream parties have shifted decisively in the direction of the PDs.
The presence of the PDs in government allowed Fianna Fáil to agree to policies it would have been slow to implement on its own. To be fair to Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Labour, all of those parties wrestled with the economic problems of the 1980s and came to accept the need for stringent control of public expenditure to get borrowing down.
What was unique to the PDs was that the party laid such emphasis on the need to cut taxes on work to stimulate economic growth, job creation and prosperity.
The PDs were in the right place at the right time, but it took some courage to propose and develop its agenda in the face of deep hostility from its political opponents, almost all of the media and the social partners.
In political terms, the main achievement of the PDs was, paradoxically, to make Fianna Fáil the semi-permanent party of government. By forcing Charles Haughey to abandon the Fianna Fáil core value of not participating in coalition governments in 1989, the PDs set Fianna Fáil on a path that has allowed it to enter government with anyone.
Once Fianna Fáil discovered the advantages of coalition they did a deal with Labour in 1992, went back to the PDs in 1997 and then on to the Greens. The corrosive effect of Fianna Fáil's near permanent grip on power for parliamentary democracy has become obvious in recent years, and there is no sign of it coming to an end.
It is ironic that the party, which was established to oppose the abuse of power by elements of Fianna Fáil, ended up by tightening that party's grip on power and patronage for almost 20 years.
As Fianna Fáil went from strength to strength the PDs struggled to find even a small niche for themselves on the political spectrum.
It should have been able to broaden its base and establish deeper roots in the community, particularly in urban Ireland, where its tax cutting philosophy directly benefited a swathe of ordinary middle class voters.
Instead, the party always lived on the edge and never even had one safe seat in Dublin. That was the problem well before the last election.
A year before the last election opinion polls showed that there was not a single safe PD seat in the country. The party had always lived on the boundary of success or extinction on a share of the vote that ranged between 3 and 5 per cent, and the writing was effectively on the wall before McDowell ever took over.
He coined the phrase that the PDs had to be radical or redundant. In the event, it was the failure to be radical enough during the 2002 to 2007 period, and particularly its failure to risk all by pulling out of government with an increasingly discredited taoiseach that sealed the party's fate.
Few in the media or political world have been willing to give the PDs any credit for the economic and social changes of the past two decades. That media hostility, particularly to McDowell, also played a part in ensuring the party was never given the credit for its achievements but was instead subject to a constant diet of abuse.
One of Ireland's most distinguished economists, Prof Dermot McAleese, commented some years ago on the general reluctance to acknowledged the role the PDs had played in promoting the economic changes of the past two decades.
The former member of the Central Bank board, remarked that the emergence of the PDs in 1985 had a more positive influence on the economy than many were prepared to recognise.
He expressed the firm opinion that the low-tax, pro-business economy that developed in the 1990s was based in large part on PD policies.
"They proved that there was a constituency for this and they gave the intellectual power to it," he said.
Now that that economy is facing a crisis in the autumn of 2008 it will be interesting to see which, if any, of the political parties has the courage and vision to challenge the current sacred cows and develop a workable vision of the way forward as the PDs did 23 years ago.
• Stephen Collins is Political Editor of The Irish Times and author of Breaking the Mould: How the PDs Changed Irish Politics (Gill and Macmillan, 2005; €22.39 publisher's website price)