Are ye right there, Michael
Whenever political demise is imminent for the PDs, it is to this demure yet enterprising figure that his desperate colleagues turn. In 2002, he stuffed his catapult in his back pocket, shinned up a lamp post and took a couple of pot-shots at the bully boys of Fianna Fáil.
This time round he has regaled us on a daily basis with a sensational tale of exploits and derring-do. He's got a good three months out of Sinn Fein.
The referendum (which we would never suggest has even the slightest sliver of electoral motivation) has ramped up the PDs' profile, thanks to him. His performance on Morning Ireland on Thursday morning was a master class in maximising your advantage.
Michael D Higgins was forced into retracting claims he had made about the citizenship status of Nigerian children born in Ireland and Turkish children born in Germany. It was worm-on-a-hook stuff, yet McDowell didn't go for the jugular. Instead, he accepted the apologies with uncharacteristic understatement.
The latest spectacular is his view on the positive role of inequality in Irish society, as expressed in an interview with the Irish Catholic.
"A dynamic liberal economy like ours," he says, "demands flexibility and inequality in some respects to function."
McDowell is cold on the idea of order being imposed from the top down, by Government imposing rules that purport to equality but lead to what he calls atrophy where enterprise, ideas, moral differences, risk-taking and dissent are stifled.
The PDs have always been huge fans of the US and the tardy clichéd American dream. The sales patter goes that everybody has an opportunity to succeed. Rather than equality being forced from the top-down, it assumes an equality from the bottom-up, the notional concept that a child born in a ghetto may one day rise to the top of society.
All very well but it's bunkum.
America demands glaring inequality in order to function. But far from inequality being a positive force, it has led to some of the most glaring and galling divisions. This image of a consumerist society, of an ever-growing economy, of higher expectations, of wealth-creation trickling down, is not borne out by the reality of life for its vast underclass of poor people.
The reality is that the incidence of poverty in the world's sole super-power is higher than in any western country.
In her searing introduction to Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed an expose of low-wage America the British journalist Polly Toynbee describes this America of the shadows.
"The barely reported truth about the American dream is that it exists in a country of widespread, growing and inescapable poverty, where the essential work is done by people paid below subsistence wages."
I don't believe that any Irish politician has fully bought into this model, would be willing to drop wholesale the protections and state supports minimum wage, more generous holidays, welfare, healthcare, education that are at the heart of the European (or Berlin) model.
But since 1997 we have been moving there. Low taxes are now so embedded in the Irish psyche that any attempt to raise them will be guaranteed election losers. Over the next two years, we will see increasing levels of protest about deficient hospital services, about pupil-teacher ratios and tumbledown schools, about a myriad of other deficits in Irish society.
But there's a contradiction inherent in the position. People demand better services but are simply not willing to pay for them. This is evidenced by the Irish Examiner/Prime Time opinion poll that asked if people would be willing to pay more tax so that the State could provide better childcare. A thumping majority said no. There's no such thing as society, only individuals, Margaret Thatcher said. People shouldn't get too outraged at McDowell because he's reflecting an accepted reality as much as voicing an aspiration.
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