Progressive Democrats - Remember founders’ courage

IT WAS not quite a Barack Obama moment but when, almost a quarter of a century ago, Des O’Malley, Mary Harney, Michael McDowell, Bobby Molloy and others established the Progressive Democrats they gave rise to a huge sense of relief and optimism among a considerable number of people.

Relief that a number of Fianna Fáil members finally found the courage to reject the dominant culture in the dominant party. A culture fostered by its dominant figure, Charles Haughey.

The raw courage required should not be underestimated. That the vast majority of their party colleagues could not find it within themselves to cut the umbilical cord underlines this.

All of these years later it is still difficult to consider the GUBU years (grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented, paraphrased from a comment by then Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, while describing a strange series of incidents in the summer of 1982 that led to a double murderer being apprehended in the house of the Irish Attorney General) without feeling that our country was on the brink of something dangerously anti-democratic, dangerously corrupt and destructive.

The series of public meetings around the country that followed the party’s establishment were indeed Obamaesque. People who had lost faith utterly in our political system; people who believed that our public affairs had lost essential integrity, dared to hope that the Progressive Democrats might be some sort of a light at the end of a long, dark tunnel.

For Irish people old enough to recall those times, it is still chilling to imagine what political life might have been like without Des O’Malley’s leadership. No matter what the party became, their bedrock and founding principle was a commitment to honesty, transparency and democracy. But that was all so long ago and the time has come to recognise it is time for the party to call it a day. The passing, however, need not be a sad one as their achievements were considerable.

When the remaining members of the PDs gather this weekend for a final farewell they should celebrate what they achieved over 23 years rather than the decline of recent years.

The PDs were a single-generation party of conviction politicians. Their claim to the high moral ground was lost when it flip-flopped over support for Bertie Ahern’s financial dealings during last year’s election campaign. And when their leader, Michael McDowell, abandoned them, and Mary Harney declined to fill the void, there could be no coming back.

Essentially they were a one-issue party that found their genesis in their opposition to Charles Haughey. Their economic and social polices were not as radical as they would like to believe. Mostly they were what was once disparaged as the concerns of the petty bourgeois. They were not terribly different in instinct from two of the larger parties in the Dáil. Ultimately they lost touch with the populism their establishment harnessed. They just ran out of steam.

Nevertheless they were courageous when courage was needed, principled in a corrupt time and prepared to risk everything for the common good. If they did nothing else they should be honoured for that.