The disastrous legacy of the Progressive Democrats

Sam Smyth has broken some explosive stories over the last 30 years.

His work gave rise first to the McCracken Tribunal and, later, the Moriarty Tribunal.

He has shown shrewdness, persistence and an ability to form and cultivate valuable contacts over the years. It was with expectation, therefore, that many of us looked forward to his two-part TV documentary series on the Progressive Democrats.

Smyth brought both liabilities and strengths to the project; strengths in the form of his unrivalled contacts among those who were prominent in that party, notably Michael McDowell; and liabilities in that he was personally and ideologically too close to the party to bring an independent perspective, if there is such a thing in journalism.

The series was greatly illuminating of the internal conflicts within the party, in particular those involving McDowell. It was good on the events that led up to the formation of the party. It was great on the rows that led to McDowell taking over the leadership and the collapse of the party under that leadership. But the series avoided the issue of the party’s ideology which, crucially, was the party’s defining characteristic.

When he started the PDs, Des O’Malley was not the ideologue to represent what the Progressive Democrats became. He had superb analytic abilities.

His dissection of Just in Keating’s disastrous mining initiative with Bula in the 1970s was brilliant. His unravelling of the scandal of the export credit insurance scheme in the late 1980s was forensic.

Somewhere along the way – I think it was while he was minister for industry and commerce from 1977 to 1981, and used to be photographed wearing white coats and hard hats sitting on top of JCBs - he caught the entrepreneurship bug and bought into the enterprise thing, replete with jargon and incentives (ie, vast incomes).

Initially, it was all innocent and a musing, but then it took on amore ominous tone.

First, the party advocated cuts in health and education which, unfortunately, were acted up on and did terrible long-term damage. Later, under Mary Harney and, later still, McDowell, almost every single vulnerable group in society was targeted.

Single mothers in the 1997 election campaign (which was covered in the series); asylum seekers (the citizenship referendum was among the most cynical political ploys in our political history); Travellers (McDowell removed funding from their organisations); the poor in general (how did they not think of getting rid of the Combat Poverty Agency long before the Greens and Fianna Fáil thought that one up?); and people suffering from mental illness through the attempted identification of mental illness with criminality (McDowell’s wheeze to site the new Central Mental Hospital on the same site, or proximate site, to the new prison at Thornton Hall).

But, more critically, it was the PDs who exposed Ireland to the full gale of neo-liberal ideology - the unleashing of unrestrained market forces, the deepening of inequality and, of course, ‘light touch’ regulation. They laid the ground for the crisis that has now befallen us.

They were enthused by the property bubble (McDowell wanted to give it a further boost by abolishing stamp duty - remember him saying the exchequer didn’t need the money?); they devised the regulatory regime which allowed the banking collapse to unfold; they were the high priests of excess, especially of incomes for the high earners.

It was the Progressive Democrats who drove this society to become one of the most unequal in the developed world.

And then Harney went into the Department of Health and Children.

There could hardly have been a more inappropriate appointment.

Aside from the false conceit that she could rationalise the health service as her predecessors had failed to do, she brought an agenda to health that was essentially ‘anti-health’. The agenda was one of scorn for the idea of equality across society, in wealth and income, in education and healthcare, in housing and in social condition.

To explain my point, I want to quote from a recent report of the World Health Organisation (WHO) entitled‘ Closing the Gap in a Generation’. It states in the introduction:

‘‘The poor health of the poor, the social gradient in health within countries and the marked in equities between countries are caused by the unequal distribution of power, income, goods and services, globally and nationally, the consequent unfairness in the immediate, visible circumstances of people’s lives - their access to healthcare, schools and education, their conditions of work and leisure, their homes, communities, towns or cities - and their chances of leading a flourishing life.

‘‘This unequal distribution of health-damaging experiences is not in any sense a ‘natural’ phenomenon, but is the result of a toxic combination of poor social policies and programmes, unfair economic arrangements and bad politics."

Harney brought to the Department of Health and Children precisely that bad politics which damaged the health of vast sections of the community.

Her legacy will last far longer than that of the Progressive Democrats.