Will Reform Alliance become the new PD’s – or just Fine Gael wearing a different coat?

World of Politics with Harry McGee – harrymcgee@gmail.com

Perhaps it’s the political anorak in me, but not alone am I old enough to remember the first ‘monster rallies’ of the Progressive Democrats in 1986 – I have to admit that as a student I actually attended the meeting in Leisureland.

I’d become addicted to current affairs at school and one of my favourite journeys  was the walk up from Glenard to O’Halloran’s shop on Threadneedle Road on the last Thursday of every month to get the freshly minted copy of Magill magazine.

Charles Haughey was always a phenomenon, a figure of intense curiosity and interest… irrespective of whether you hated him or adored him. And with Haughey there were the two states of mind – there never seemed to be any in between.

And Magill had a fascination with him along with everybody else. But what marked it out was its ability to take politics and lift its coverage from the humdrum to the lively, provocative and questioning.

The putsch against Des O’Malley within Fianna Fáil had been a dominant theme in the magazine for months. And in the early months of 1986, a new party was formed comprised mainly of Fianna Fáil dissidents.

But there were a few other key figures from other parties – mainly malcontents – including another phenomenon in the making, Michael McDowell, and the less interesting and less savoury Fine Gael TD Michael Keating.

I have some memories of the Leisureland meeting. For one it was packed to capacity and it looked like a Japanese commuter platform at rush hour with people being physically squeezed in the door.

Of course, the Galway meeting was given an added impetus by the sensational defection of Bobby Molloy to the new outfit. With the likes of Mary Harney and Cork TD Pearse Wyse already on board, each meeting acted as a catalyst transforming a Fianna Fáil splinter group into something else entirely.

It was clear at that meeting that at that particular moment in time those present were fed-up with the Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael hegemony, particularly with a very divided Fianna Fáil and there was an appetite for something new – a new force in Irish politics that was not to the left not that owed its beginnings to whichever side you belonged to in the civil war.

Over the subsequent two and a half decades, it has become clear that the need for a new niche party was very much of its time and became less so as time went on.

Although the PDs began as a home mainly for disgruntled Fianna Fáilers, it was Fine Gael from which it stole most of the votes in subsequent elections.

The space it had carved out for itself ideologically over time coalesced with that of Fianna Fáil, especially when the two parties were in government together. McDowell’s choice for the PDs – be radical or redundant – was borne out. It was the latter that was to be its fate.

When it comes to permanence in Irish politics there are the two main parties, the Labour Party, and (unless the party loses its way completely) Sinn Fein.

Is there a need for a new niche party? Well, if there was one, I would say it would have to be slightly to the left as the market to the right of the graph seems to be very well served already. The problem with the left is that it’s not one idea – it’s a myriad of ideas always competing with each other.

That’s one of the reasons you get so many splinters, so much fragmentation, so many hairline cracks. On the right the message is much more simple – capitalism needs no grand or intellectual theorist to explain what it’s about.

On Saturday, the Reform Alliance is holding a day-long conference in the RDS in Dublin. First things first. The group of seven parliamentarians (five TDs and two senators) have gone to great lengths to say they are an alliance, never as a party.

The only real question is, politically, is this alliance the precursor to another new party… PDs for the 21st century.

Again what’s emerging is being formed from a group of dissident from a particular party. All were expelled, with the exception of Denis Naughten, over the abortion legislation.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.