The Reform Alliance - Renewal is still essential

Convention assures us that first impressions mean a lot. If that is true, then the political establishment will not lose too much sleep over Saturday’s Reform Alliance party conference that was not a party conference.

Fewer that 1,500 people, most of them at least middle aged, turned up. It is hard to see the process becoming the agent for change its principles imagine it might be.

Convention — and history — assure us that the first item on the agenda of any fledgling organisation in this country is the split. We had a glimpse of that when the alliance’s figurehead, Lucinda Creighton, sought an endorsement from the floor for her and her colleagues’ opposition to the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill. Just a few of her audience were enthusiastic in their support. The great majority sat silent and glum-faced. This episode seems it may be a short-lived adventure in our political history but it would be a terrible mistake for our Government to imagine that the craving for reform has in any way subsided.