Friday September 8th

Michael Mcdowell was on his best behaviour yesterday but he wasn’t fooling anybody. Before Mary Harney ever took over the leadership of the Progressive Democrats, it was McDowell who famously declared that the party could only ever be either radical or redundant. As he watched Mary Harney declare herself redundant yesterday, he must have been wondering not only if his hour at last has come, but also that only radical changes can save a party now facing its sternest test yet.

Mary Harney’s resignation came at a time of her choosing, but we can be sure it did not come at a time of her party’s choosing. Nine months before an election is not the time to change leaders if there is any choice in the matter. Until the memoirs come out we can only guess whether Harney chose to save her dignity or sabotage her Minister for Justice. Perhaps she simply saw the writing on the wall. After doubling the number of PD seats in the Dail, Harney knows that it can only go downhill on results night next May.

Bowing out graciously in the sleek surroundings of Dublin’s Merrion Hotel gave Harney a dignified send-off, but expect the coming leadership struggle to be brutal. So close to an already tough general election, this month’s race won’t just be about choosing a new leader, but about a new ideological vision for Ireland, and about raw political survival.

The harsh truth facing the Progressive Democrats is that they have all but lost their special place in Irish politics. It’s not all that long ago in historical terms that the party was the third largest in the Dail with fourteen TDs. With the country on the brink of real economic disaster, the PDs were an answer to necessity and the waste of tax-and-spend policies under Garret Fitzgerald and the governments before his. When the country’s finances hung in the balance it was no surprise that the PDs crested to a level of support that seems unimaginable now.

The cruel irony is that the PDs have become victims of their own success. Don’t expect either Fianna Fail or Fine Gael to admit it, but both the big parties have been forced to accept the basic truth of the PD message that market economics work and government spending doesn’t. To be sure, we’ll never be free of pet projects and politically motivated giveaways – and the next budget is on course to be a disaster on both counts – but nobody in Irish politics is even arguing for tax increases of any great size let alone a return to the days when the need for change was strong enough to bring the PDs into being in the first place. Even in the present government it’s been hard to see where Fianna Fail ends and the PDs begin. Charlie McCreevy, out in front with a tribute yesterday afternoon, might as well have been a PD himself. In the Department of Enterprise and Employment job there’s been little if any difference between Michael Martin and Mary Harney, with Martin buying into Harney’s proven policies without even so much as a little tinkering around the edges. ‘No to one party government’ may have been a winner for McDowell at the last election, but it didn’t mean much once the cabinet posts had been divided up.

Just as the other parties won’t admit that the PDs were right, the PDs won’t admit that they are basically out of a job. Where it gets really tricky is what they individually say when asked what makes them so special anymore. In the coming leadership election, the choice for members won’t just be who they want to head up the party, but whether it's time to slip into the mainstream of Irish politics or strike out on a bold course. Liz O’Donnell is the candidate of the ‘softly, softly’ approach. Michael McDowell, needless to say, represents the alternative. Suddenly, the PDs have to ask themselves again whether its time to be radical. It won’t be an easy question to answer.

For a start, the PDs have to face up to the fact that the self-proclaimed party of slim and efficient government has been in office for nine years of waste and incompetence. It’s not easy now to turn around to voters and promise to fine-tune government spending when you’ve been part of the problem for so long. We still lack any real competition in healthcare, transport, energy, or communications in Ireland. These are all major areas of the economy that have resisted the sort of bracing change that catapulted the country generally towards success in the last fifteen years. In each case, the fingerprints at the scene of the crime are those of the government. Whether as the dominant player in the market or through burdensome regulation, the government has failed entirely to force these sleepy sectors into the twenty-first century.

A generation ago the PDs would have risen to the task with an uncompromising political zeal, but you really can’t call yourself the party of enterprise and opportunity and still leave whole chunks of the economy in the economic dark ages. At any point in the last four years, the PDs under Harney could have chosen to break ranks with a tired and unimaginative Fianna Fail and taken a stand on opening up these disaster areas. It really doesn’t take two terms of government to get around to it. If you’re the party of free market economics it shouldn’t take two months. It only takes a little courage.

If it’s too late for the PDs to rescue their economic credentials – and it probably is – it’s not too late for the party to mark out space elsewhere. As the Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell now stands in line to the PDs leadership and at the head of the country’s war against criminals. It’s time now for McDowell to shake himself out of the comfort zone, drop the air of unreality that crime fighting in Ireland has had in the face of surging violence, and start putting criminals behind bars at a serious rate.

It’s an opportunity both to do the right thing and to save his party. The party that sounded the alarm as Ireland’s economics fell apart can now sound the alarm as law and order falls apart in neighbourhoods across the country. The difference gun crime makes is immense. It puts up costs for everyone in business, leaves us all at risk, and victimises the most defenceless most mercilessly. Turning up the heat in the war on crime is long overdue – it would also break the image of a party working for a narrow professional base by doing neighbourhoods on the front line a service when they need it most.

Once in a while, politics enters defining moments. The emergence of the PDs in the first place was exactly on such moment. The landscape hasn’t been the same since. Harney’s bombshell is both a crisis and an opportunity for the party. Just as in the early days of the PDs, there’s no shortage of targets to take on. What remains to be seen is whether they have the imagination to strike out from their traditional policy areas. A new leader will take over at a critical moment for the party, but with the country slipping in competitiveness and with violent crime seeping across our cities, it’s a pretty critical moment for the rest of us too. We may not need the PDs anymore, but we still need their original ideas. It’s time for the party to step up to new challenges and justify itself to the voters.

Sunday September 10th

Michael McDowell yesterday had the look of someone who had played the scene out in his mind a long time ago. For the first time since records began, the Minister had nothing to say to reporters while arriving at the Department of Justice. Nor, it turned out during the day, did he need to say a word himself. The military precision with which the declarations of support rolled in from around the country ensured that by the time Mr. McDowell strode out of his Department into a hazy Friday evening, the election for the leadership of the Progressive Democrats was all but his.

That was the easy part. Now, McDowell is going to have to do rather more than sit in his office notching up the professions of support. The public – as he will be reminded the morning after the victory party – is likely to take a little more persuading. Indeed, McDowell is inheriting a party whose level of support in the polls is less than the statistical margin of error. Worse, with not one of the eight PD seats safe next May, the party’s very existence is hanging within the political margin of error. Let McDowell enjoy his weekend of triumph. He’s unlikely to enjoy what follows.

Where did it all go wrong for the PDs? This is a party, after all, that was for one brief spell the third largest in the Dail. After being in government for two terms and seeing their once radical economic ideas accepted grudgingly by rivals as simple common sense, they could be forgiven for feeling entitled to more than two percent support.

In truth, the PDs have only themselves to blame. It’s no good having successful policies if you don’t actually get out there and argue for them. Take Sinn Fein, who have dramatically disastrous policies on pretty much every issue going, but who still pound the pavements and rope in votes. Whether through complacency or lethargy, the PDs have become one of the laziest parties in the Dail. Indeed, one of the reasons a leadership challenge is so unlikely is that one-time favourite Liz O’Donnell has done so little with herself over the last few years that voters have forgotten about her and supporters given up on her. The party doesn’t even run candidates in most constituencies and bizarrely sat out the last European election.

Take money matters as an example of complacency. Nobody in the major parties would even dare argue for significant tax increases these days. To compare the situation now with the sorry state of affairs when the party was formed demonstrates just how comprehensive the PD victory has been on economics. Nor has it just been a victory of words – astonishing growth over more than a decade speaks for itself. Yet when was the last time you heard a PD politician claim credit for that little success? True, they weren’t the only ones involved and you can’t reduce something as complex as the nation’s finances to one party’s agenda, but the PDs can’t complain that they don’t get the credit if they don’t put themselves out there and ask for it.

It’s time now for the PDs to reassert their role as the government watchdog and open up on government waste and incompetence in all its forms. McDowell actually has a unique opportunity suddenly. Until this weekend, it’s been all but impossible for the PDs to attack government mismanagement because they’ve been part of the problem.

Now, with a change of leader, McDowell could do us all a favour by selling out his coalition partners in the interests of a hard-hitting campaign against the rampant misuse of taxpayers' money. It would take courage, but there is a desperate need for someone at the top levels of government to champion the consumer and the taxpayer and McDowell has the perfect opportunity to save our money and his party by standing up to the budget free-for-all being cooked up in Fianna Fail headquarters. McDowell should make a public pledge against government waste and be ready to collapse the government if Bertie insists on buying the marginal seats at the next election.

McDowell needs to bring the skill and imagination he showed on Friday when he wrapped up the party’s support to the trickier task of shaping a new manifesto. The thing is, there is a whole set of issues out there that are going for the taking. Nobody, to take another example, is making the argument for real tax cuts in the future. Yet when government waste is as rampant and as visible as it is at the moment, you don’t have to work to hard to convince taxpayers that they could do a better job of spending their money that their politicians are doing. With Brian Cowen planning a splurge with the budget surplus, McDowell should argue that if the government taxed more money than it needed, then it should simply give it back to the people – that’s you and me – who earned it in the first place.

But most importantly, the PDs should branch out. They should branch out geographically and politically. It’s a joke to call yourself a national party and yet to be limited to a small fraction of the country’s constituencies, but it’s also a mistake to run as a party of government and yet leave whole chunks of the policy agenda to the other parties. It’s time, after billions of money for no return, to give up on the tinkering approach and go straight to the source of failures in energy, transport, and, for that matter, health – government mismanagement. As a glance at the experience in neighbouring countries shows, public services simply do not work when the government is both paying for the service and actually providing it itself. Now nobody wants to start cutting people off, but there is a real opportunity for a courageous leader to break the mould of failing services by opening up the actual provision of services to the efficiencies of innovative independent enterprise. The government can still pay the bill, but let’s not pretend any longer that they can manage the business. Making that basic distinction between payer and provider is the shortcut to efficiency and it’s a tried and tested model for reform that could be applied across the board. Nothing would do more for buses and trains in this country than opening them up for the next Michael O’Leary and as the most energy vulnerable country in Europe we simply don’t have a choice any longer when it comes to competition in the energy market. If McDowell is looking for targets, he could worse than start right there.

But where McDowell really needs to get busy is with the most critical set of targets of all – the country’s burgeoning criminal underground. This is where McDowell – if he is prepared to raise his game and take on his critics – could really mark out space for himself. At every level of the criminal justice system in this country stands a well-funded, ideologically driven criminal rights movement that works tirelessly and shamelessly to reduce convictions, reduce prison time, and convince us that its not criminals who are to blame for crime but ‘society’, ‘inequality’, or ‘exclusion’. At a time when many in the public debate have lost the ability to make basic distinctions between right and wrong and to blame the aggressor not the victim, McDowell can and should take on those making excuses for criminals and wake up to the growing reality of a crime problem that for far too long he himself has minimised as a passing storm when in truth it is in danger of becoming a permanent fact of life in Ireland.

When your party is on two percent, there’s nothing to lose that hasn’t already been lost. The opportunity is there for unapologetic leadership and if McDowell is prepared to break the mould he may well find that the rewards are there too.

Tuesday, September 12th

Michael McDowell made a lot of promises in the banqueting hall of Dublin’s Westin Hotel in his first appearance as PD leader, but we can be sure of the truth of at least one of them – “I will not disappoint the media”. Indeed, he won’t disappoint anyone who thinks Irish politics has long been in need of a shot in the arm and a break with the politics of flabby consensus. Whatever else can be said about his sudden elevation and political instincts, it’s fair to expect some excitement. McDowell’s greatest tests lie ahead in the short months this side of the election, but if he can turn yesterday’s triumphal posturing into tomorrow’s transformative policies – and the PDs have a habit of surprising their critics – he’ll be well on the way to claiming a unique and well-deserved place in Irish political history.

McDowell is a fighting politician who will need all his brains to lead his party to electoral success in May, but he must be credited with a vital insight – tinkering with the problems we’re all facing isn’t a solution, it’s an avoidance of the problem. It remains to be seen if McDowell’s policy platform is up to scratch – and it will be a day of truth for his leadership when the manifesto is agreed – but in recognising that radical change is sometimes the wisest course of action he has opened up the possibility of urgent and overdue changes.

At a time when his coalition partner is prepared to sell out the nation’s finances to buy the election, McDowell yesterday stood up for economic prudence and slim government. Despite pursuing his running war of words on crime statistics, he yesterday bowed to the obvious and promised to prosecute the war on criminals with the vigour it deserves. When ‘social justice’ is being used as an excuse for politicians to take control of more and more of the economy, he emphasised that all social policy has to be built on strong finances to be possible. And with the alternative government flirting with the fringes of Irish politics in a bid to make up the numbers, McDowell had the honesty and the punchiness to target the inevitable “far-left” baggage in a Fine Gael and Labour coalition. It all signals the courage and conviction needed to rescue Irish politics from the swamp of trendy buzzwords, giveaways, and government by opinion poll. Not bad for the first day on the job.

It’s now time for the Minister to live up to his fine words. There’s nothing unforgivably wrong with a flight of oratory and combative positioning – especially after unanimously claiming the leadership – but only if it’s backed up by the hard work of practical politics and meaningful reform. McDowell’s past record on that count is pretty mixed. He’s quicker to announce reforms than complete them. More worrying, despite posing as the embodiment of principled politics, the PDs have been known to cave to pragmatic dealings when it suited. Now that fully five of the thirteen PD Oireachtas members sit in the Senate it’s long forgotten that the original policy platform McDowell drafted called for the body to be abolished altogether – though McDowell to his great credit didn’t take a seat for exactly that reason. Worryingly though, despite his cutting criticism of the Fine Gael led coalition in his speech yesterday, he’s freely admitted in the past that as recently as 1999 he agreed to meet with John Bruton to discuss rejoining the very same party. That lust for power is not necessarily a fatal flaw – at best if could fuel the drive to make deep and vital changes – but there are real limits to how much he can compromise before he becomes just another figures in the ‘politics of failure’ he yesterday so bitterly and justly attacked.

McDowell put his credibility on the line yesterday with a promise to double the number of PD seats by this time next year. When you remember that it was against all the odds that Harney pulled in even the eight seats they currently have it’s clear that this is a challenge and a half. But McDowell’s political instincts are sharper than those of many of his critics. At the formation of the PDs he predicted Fine Gael would lose twenty-one seats at their next election. He was almost spot on, only two out as they lost nineteen on the day. His ‘no to one party government’ stunt last time out shifted opinion at the last moment. This time, he’ll need to drag his parties out of their suburban comfort zone and get stuck into the neighbourhood problems and rural issues that stand between the PDs and truly national representation. The PDs are probably the Dail’s laziest party when it comes to building constituency support and they’ve nobody to blame but themselves for being ghettoised in fashionable postcodes.

In truth, despite the image, the rich are the last people who need the PDs. Where there’s money, there’s always a way to keep it – as the scandals and tribunals of recent years confirm. Government waste and spending – the politics of the taxpayer-funded giveaway – are most lethal for the small businessman and ordinary taxpayer who get squeezed hardest by the drop in opportunity, competitiveness, and openness. Left-wing politicians like to speak in the name of the poor, but the economics of state dependency leave vulnerable individuals tied to an impersonal and incompetent welfare system. Small government, economic vitality, and personal responsibility towards friends and family make for an immeasurably more humane and successful approach. When monopolies are broken-up and services freed from management by bureaucracy, it’s the consumer and the average family who feels the gains first. McDowell should look to the example of young PD newcomers like Ben Doyle in southwest Dublin who are out on the pavements in places the PDs would never before have ventured as the way towards electoral rejuvenation and take on internal critics who would prefer the party remains the preserve of cosseted south Dublin professionals.

Back when Des O’Malley was dithering about forming the PDs in the first place, McDowell wrote to him to quote no less a statesman than Charles De Gaulle who had remarked that ‘people get the history they deserve’. After years of electoral ups and downs and hand-to-hand political combat, McDowell may be flattering himself with the remark as he contemplates his recent victory. He should remember it as he plots the coming campaign. This is no time for half measures – either for his party or for the country. McDowell may have indulged himself in a little Latin yesterday, quoting Virgil to declare that ‘fortune favours the brave’, but if he’s the intellectual he’d like us to believe he is he’ll know that Machiavelli, that great strategist of power politics, added to Virgil’s words by emphasising that fortune only dictates half of man’s fate – the other half is a matter of will.

All eyes yesterday were on McDowell at the rostrum, but high above him in the aristocratic banqueting hall chosen for the occasion were sculptures of two ancient goddesses, one holding an anchor, the other a scythe. Trust the PDs to park themselves in the middle of privilege and plasterwork, but if there’s a ‘McDowell code’ to be unravelled, it’s that he needs to lift anchor on the stagnant politics of Fianna Fail vote-buying or his party as a whole is up for the chop. PD leadership is not for the faint-hearted and when the political system is filled with shameless operators prepared to buy public support with public money, neither is politics itself if justice is to be done. McDowell proved yesterday that he is a man of promise whose instincts chime with the times but he will need to roll up his sleeves and choose daring over business as usual if he’s to fulfil his promise.

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