Pigs nearly flew over Mary Harney's constituency on Monday when she proclaimed to her supporters that solidarity is a keynote theme in the Progressive Democrats from now on. Solidarity will tie us together in building "a society based on merit".
Her swift appropriation of what might have become Michael Noonan's crusade for social justice was a happy sign that at least some members of Government are starting to articulate the need to invest as determinedly in society as in the economy.
But in the midst of this were stirrings of despair. Can a political party really be all things to all people? Has Ms Harney been overloaded with competing advice about how to rebrand her party? The Tanaiste's image as a straight talker has always won her support, even among many of those opposed to her politics. The Harney "product", if we may so describe her, is now being rebranded. She may have weathered the worst effects of her role in the Hugh O'Flaherty affair.
What is on offer is a made-over Harney, with made-over policies borrowed from across the political spectrum. Innate, and potentially creative, tensions between the market and the individual are smoothed over.
MARY Harney's own repositioning has been in ways a joy to watch. She is a new woman for a new PD age. Soft-focus interviews with Marian Finucane and Pat Kenny over the last few months began to portray her womanly qualities: sensitive, caring and ready to give more priority to her personal life.
She told Finucane she realised her personal life had taken second place to her career, and hoped to set that right. She told the rest of us she had felt overloaded after the O'Flaherty debacle, and needed a break to get herself on track again. This we understand.
Surprising as it was to see Harney in Oprah Winfrey mode, such a smart, achieving, all-woman package was undeniably attractive to floating voters. But Harney had never played the gender card before. On the contrary. This was quite a change for a politician who once seemed the real-time answer to Professor Henry Higgins's question: "Why can't a woman be more like a man?"
Harney's career was a textbook example of what a woman had to do in order to get to the top in politics. Forget your gender, forget your private life, keep the prospect of having children on the back burner, and hope you achieve your goal before it's too late. She made a virtue out of not showing solidarity. It was - still can be - a good strategy for success. She didn't play weepy, she simply got on with the job. Those were the positive attributes.
In getting on with it, however, the kind of solidarity that, rightly or wrongly, a woman in politics can demonstrate was not only left behind, but often trodden underfoot. Signs of womanliness, or gender-related challenges, were sometimes treated as signs of weakness. Harney could be extra tough on the traditional problems of her own sex. Remember her harsh, ill-judged words about young, single mothers? Remember her refusal to join her sister deputies across parties working (in solidarity) to upgrade the so-called female issues such as childcare, health and creating a better gender-balance throughout political life?
HARNEY'S political priorities mirrored her personal decisions. She did not work to change the family-hostile scheduling with which the Dail conducts its business. Her interest in expanding the number of women in the workforce coincided with pressure on the labour market rather than happening because she wanted everyone to get a fair crack of the whip.
Harney's voice counted loudly in Government because she is a woman, and women stereo typically know about such things. So her politics carried the day when she consistently opposed any measures that would give working parents a payment or tax break in respect of their childcare costs, while also failing to promote measures to give direct support to parents who work in the home.
She argued such measures were unfair. But without them, women were disadvantaged in making their choices. No doubt Harney believes her own achievements are based on merit, and she is partly right. But weasel words like "merit" can be a way of excusing the hard questions about who this society acknowledges, and who it chooses to reward.
For all we know, the real Taoiseach and the real Tanaiste, as merit would have it, are at present too disadvantaged by their lives in a halting site, or their duties caring for disabled children, to take up their leadership roles on behalf of the nation. Such issues are now part of a wider equality agenda, which Harney has promised to deliver. I must thank her personally for her response to years of campaigning by Hospitals' Trust workers, an acknowledgment that touched my family.
But if the Tanaiste is now set to make the caring card a matter of party policy, her theories of merit, fairness and justice need setting straight. The Sweepstakes workers finally won fairness, but not justice. Unless she changes the way the meritocracy and solidarity stakes work, people like them will always lose out.
mruane@irish-times.ie