THE PROGRESSIVE Democrats would have won 12 seats in the 2007 general election, had the party pulled out of government following revelations about payments to then taoiseach Bertie Ahern, according to party founder Dessie O’Malley.
Mr O’Malley also said the decision by then leader Michael McDowell to resign from politics when he lost his Dáil seat, “sounded the death knell of the party”.
He said: “That was kind of spur of the moment, sort of petulant stuff. I think he regrets that. He told me afterwards he did.”
Speaking on RTÉ’s Marian Finucane programme, he said of Mr McDowell’s resignation, that “the election wasn’t over at all. Just his count was over and there were still people hoping to get elected. Unfortunately, not very many of them did. But that really sounded the death knell of the party.”
Mr McDowell had not long become party leader when there were revelations from the Mahon tribunal of payments to Mr Ahern.
Asked if he would have pulled out of government, Mr O’Malley said: “I rather think I would. I said that to several people at the time but of course I couldn’t say it publicly but I feel I can say it publicly now.”
He did not say it to Mr McDowell at the time. It would have been up to the then leader to approach him. “For me to initiate it I think would have been regarded as interference.”
However, he believed had the party pulled out of coalition “one of the results would have been that instead of getting two seats in the subsequent general election we might have got 12.
“And it would have revitalised the party in a major way because in a sense the party was a victim of its own success because it was in government for so long.”
In an extensive interview, Mr O’Malley said the Progressive Democrats’ achievements included lower taxes and great advances in getting “a more realistic approach to the North of Ireland”, because “at the time Fianna Fáil said the unionists had no rights whatever, the whole question of the principle of consent didn’t arise”and Ireland would be “a unitary state”.
He said the bulk of the party’s economic policies were implemented by Mary Harney as party leader “and I think she’s entitled to huge credit for that”.
He agreed he might have been Taoiseach had he stuck with Fianna Fáil but “but it would have been too high a price to pay. You would have had to accept all kinds of stuff which I just wasn’t prepared to do.” He added: “I don’t think I’d have survived very long because once I displeased certain elements they’d have got rid of me very quickly.”
He said his greatest achievement was to stop the 1984 Aviation Bill, which imposed a fine for anyone selling airline tickets at less than the price which “Aer Lingus had fixed with their cartel”.
