Already paralysed by the damage they suffered in the last general election, the Progressive Democrats are more embattled than at any point in their 13-year history. Their predicament has come into sharp relief following a dismal result in the Cork South Central by-election.
In reality, it was small wonder that the party's candidate, Mr Peter Kelly, got fewer than 1,000 votes. It had gone into the by-election without either a general secretary or a press officer. A feature of the PDs in recent times has been the haemorrhaging of its key personnel to work elsewhere.
As membership officer, Mr Con Mangan is the only full-time paid member of staff in the party at the moment.
In the days before voting in the Cork by-election, but after the latest poll showing them at 2 per cent in the popularity stakes, the parliamentary party met for what party sources described with diplomatic delicacy as "some very frank discussion".
Senator Helen Keogh bluntly told her parliamentary party, now eight in number, that one of the main reasons for the PDs' ills was the fact that they had failed to establish themselves in the public eye as a separate party in government.
According to another source, there was a realisation that "we have to get our act together"
"We are 15 months in government, and the polls are showing us at 2 or 3 per cent. We are even trailing Sinn Fein. Everybody [at the meeting] was saying we cannot allow things to slip further . . . that we have to do something to renew and revitalise the party from the bottom up," the source added.
Denying that her party was slipping into oblivion, the Tanaiste, Ms Harney, insisted this week it had a future. One of its treasurers, Mr Paul MacKay, confirms that the PDs' debts have been reduced to £250,000 from £400,000 in the past year and that paid-up membership stands at 3,000. Acknowledging that the worst time for the PDs came in the aftermath of the last general election, Ms Harney said: "Most people, if asked, would like us to survive. It is a question of inspiring them to vote for us in sufficient numbers.
"I'm not saying it is easy. It has been particularly difficult for the past few years. Any party that goes from where we were to where we are now has a problem. The challenge now is to redefine ourselves and rejuvenate", she said.
She begins a tour of the country meeting the faithful on Monday in Limerick and, in the coming weeks, will sanction the appointment of a new general secretary. The full focus of her organisation's attention will then turn to the local elections, preceded by an annual conference.
When the by-election votes were counted last Saturday, the bleakness of the opinion poll was harshly borne out. Mr Peter Kelly had managed to secure only 971 votes. PD support had fallen from 4.19 per cent in last year's general election to just 2.26 per cent. All this in the constituency where Mr Pearse Wyse and Mr Pat Cox had kept the party seat warm at about 13 per cent.
As the PDs' core vote steadily drifts away, the party still appears to be suffering from a kind of post-traumatic anxiety in the wake of the 1997 election.
Much blame for the regression is being attached to the fact that, as Tanaiste and Minister for Enterprise and Employment, Ms Harney has little or no time to devote to her party. Her portfolio is large and she is engrossed in a plethora of inquiries and tribunals involving complex issues which are yielding no concrete results just yet and for which she gets small credit from voters.
In retrospect, should she have abandoned the Tanaiste's Office, established by Dick Spring? "In abandoning the structure of the Tanaiste's Office, she abandoned a considerable resource that could have carried some of her Government work. It was another example of the party hoist on their own petard because of naive high-mindedness", one lapsed PD said.
Failing to reinvent itself as a niche party is seen as another reason for the slow downturn. Critics say it is not that the PD values are less relevant, but that the party has failed to redefine itself in changed circumstances. Eventually the main political parties came to wear their clothes or the issues the PDs championed faded from the political agenda.
The PDs' tax and tight-spending policy goes back to 1986 when Ireland had a huge public debt and high unemployment. But the party never did get credit for having much of its tax-cut programme adopted. Instead, last year at a time of Budget surplus it engaged in a suicidal error of judgment by campaigning on cutting 25,000 Civil Service jobs in the middle of an election campaign. It was trounced as a result.
Its stance as a liberal party on social issues has also been undermined with the resolution of controversies like divorce and adequate contraception legislation. With the Belfast Agreement in place, and following the ceasefires, the North has become less and less a source of political agitation in Leinster House. So another issue that marked the PDs out from Fianna Fail has been removed.
Since joining coalition with Fianna Fail, the PDs have rarely demonstrated a separate view. This has been a deliberate policy on the leadership's part.
At the height of its popularity in 1987, the party harvested 14 Dail seats; that fell to six two years later and jumped back to 10 in 1992. It is this roller-coaster pattern that buoys up the faith of the party's optimists.
The problem with this scenario is that, of the safer seats (if such an animal exists in the Progressive Democrats) at least one will go through natural wastage. Mr Des O'Malley is to retire from politics in the next general election in Limerick East, once a bedrock of PD support that delivered two seats to the party up to 1997.
Unless the party experiences a surge of support in the 1998 local elections, its future looks goosed.
But for people like Ms Helen Keogh optimism is part of the PDs' daily diet.
"It is demoralising every time you open a newspaper to read about the demise of the PDs. The party is a long time dying and is still not dead. Anyone writing us off is doing a Mark Twain. I'm not going to lie down and die", she declared.
