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PB February/March 2024 February/March 2024 29
Fine Gael’s then incarnation was too far to the
left economically for him so, when Desmond
O’Malley was expelled from Fianna Fáil in
1985, McDowell became a co-founder with
him of the PDs
T
o mark 25 years since the demise of
Progressive Democrats, Ireland’s
great liberal party, I thought it would
be good to trace the outworking of
that ideology through its principal
proselytiser, the still influential and articulate
Senator Michael McDowell, who led and then
brought down the party, which in 1987 peaked
with 12 seats but in 2009 returned only 2 TDs,
the last sting of the dead socially-and-
economically-liberal wasp.
Background
Michael McDowell, grandson of Eoin McNeill,
the man who sensibly tried to call o the Easter
Rising, was born in 1949 and educated in
Gonzaga, UCD, where he graduated in
economics, politics, jurisprudence and Roman
Law, and the King’s Inns.
Elections
Starting o as a foot soldier for Fine Gael’s
Garret FitzGerald in Dublin South East, for
whom he became director of elections, he
found that party’s then incarnation too far to
the left economically so, when Desmond
O’Malley was expelled from Fianna Fáil in 1985,
McDowell signalled support and became a
co-founder with him of the Progressive
Democrats (PD) party. He served as a PD TD for
Dublin South-East from 1987 to 1989, 1992 to
1997 and 2002 to 2007 when his election stunt
of climbing a lamp-post with a “One-Party
Government? - no thanks” poster is widely
credited with depriving Fianna Fáil of an overall
majority and ensuring the second term for the
PDs in government.
Positions in government
He was Attorney General from 1999 to 2002,
Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform
from 2002 to 2007, Tánaiste from 2006 to
2007, leader of the Progressive Democrats
tellingly briefly from 2006 to 2007, when it
ended in ignominious tears in a miasma of
triumphant Sinn Féin hooting around the RDS
count centre, and McDowell burst up the party
which was dissolved two years later
Former PD firebrand, Senator Michael
McDowell, is doing only ok; and has lost his
liberal, or any coherent, edge
By Michael Smith
Post-PD machinations
In 2009 he tried to negotiate a return to Fine
Gael but by 2011 he was calling for a new ‘right-
of-centre” party.
He has been senator for the National
University constituency since 2016 and
campaigned eectively against abolition of the
Seanad that year though in his heyday he had
favoured it.
Phoenix Magazine never lets o predicting
his return as a force to the Dáil but he is now 72
and perhaps losing his touch. He is an unpaid
Irish Times columnist and an adjunct professor
of law in UCD, where his wife, Niamh Brennan
is the professor of accountancy.
He believes our problems now are small by
comparison with what they were; and clearly
that the PDs righted many of the Statist wrongs.
He considers eorts to polarise the haves from
the have nots come from a time warp. In 2019
a large, dead rat was found in Michael
McDowell’s Leinster House oce.
Generous and approachable
I’ve known Michael McDowell, though not well,
for a long time and he has always been
approachable, pleasant and helpful. Even
generous. Some years ago he agreed to front,
pro bono, a legal action in which Jonathan
Sugarman and I would dish the dirt on Unicredit
Bank whose breaching of credit ratios told a
tale of how Irish banks got into a position where
they needed bailing out. Through no fault of
McDowell’s the action collapsed in its early
stages. Some weeks later I received a writ on
behalf of his client, dodgy former Donegal
County Manager, Michael McLoone. That
SLAPP action has never been put out of its
misery. Our relations remain courteous.
Anti-egalitarian
His market orientation is not of much appeal
any more. Worse, although in January 2016
McDowell told Marian Finucane he regrets
McnotDOingWELL
It still is, depending on wht rel mens
POLITICS
30 February/March 2024 February/March 2024 31
inequality, he was its chief ideological sponsor
in government, even claiming the economy
“demands inequality in some respects”.
In 2004 he told the Economist Survey of
Ireland that he “sees inequality as an inevitable
part of the society of incentives that Ireland
has, thankfully, become”. He was quoted by
The Economist magazine as oering a robust
defence of the gap between rich and poor in
Ireland. And he told the Irish Catholic that “a
dynamic liberal economy like ours demands
flexibility and inequality in some respects to
function”. It was such inequality “which
provides incentives”.
He said: “As far as I am concerned liberal
politics and liberal economics go together. In
a liberal society, equality of opportunity is an
equal opportunity to become unequal. A
society which legislates and controls in every
way to create some sort of mathematical
equality just doesn’t work”. In his pomp he
believed: “Driven to a complete extreme, the
current rights’ culture and equality notion
would create a feudal society”.
McDowell sat at the Cabinet table for a
decade while the country was run – to
disastrous long-term eect – in the interests of
elites and cartels, including the legal one he
still feeds o.
McDowell pulled the plug on the Citizen
Traveller campaign when it dared to be
controversial. He delayed and censored the
reports of his department’s own inspector of
prisons, Judge Dermot Kinlan. He put the boot
into the Equality Authority when he had
Ministerial power over it, arranging for the
obstructionist Angela Kerins, as chairperson to
thwart the subversions of the dynamic Niall
Crowley, as CEO.
Liberal?
In his prime, a more innocent era in politics,
there was a battle between the ancient and the
modern. During the 1990 Presidential election
campaign Michael McDowell came to the
rescue of Mary Robinson being attacked by a
raving Pádraig Flynn for poor personal family
values. McDowell put him down as
“disgusting”. It seemed a triumph of the
modern and the liberal. But was it just a
triumph of the gentlemanly?
The PDs were liberal, to the point of
Thatcherism, on economics but they were not
that radical on social reform. Their ‘Constitution
for a New Republic’ (1988) did not allow for
divorce and — after publication of a Preamble
which excluded him — in what Sean O’Rourke,
the then political correspondent of the Irish
Press, called “the quickest U-turn in recent
Irish political history” reintegrated ‘God’,
though the PDs would of course have got rid of
all that “In the name of the Holy Spirit” stu.
The PDs did not support same-sex marriage.
They were big promoters of privatisation,
public-private partnerships and deregulation.
Michael McDowell was thwarted by the then
ubiquitous publican lobby in his eorts to
liberalise licensing laws to facilitate ‘European-
style’ café bars. So bought into getting the
dead hand of the state o the punter was he
that in 2006 he proposed abolishing stamp
duty on housing, on the basis we could aord
it. That measure would have further inflated the
rampaging property market and expedited its
cataclysmic crash. Yet McDowell was still
defending the proposal a decade later.
Garda Reform
As Justice Minister, McDowell was a reforming
minister who reacted positively to each new
report of the Morris Tribunal into Garda
corruption. There was to be a new Garda
disciplinary code, new protocols on the
handling of confidential informants, video and
audio recording of all interviews in Garda
stations as a matter of course, and new training
in improved interrogation techniques. The
Garda Síochána Act 2005 established the first
ever Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission
and the Garda Inspectorate and the Garda
Reserve. It set out for the first time in law the
functions and objectives of the Garda and also
established the Garda Commissioner as the
Accounting Ocer for the Garda Síochána. A
2017 piece in this magazine by Gerard
Cunningham, ‘McDidwell: zeal for Garda reform
dwindled after McDowell’s departure’, made
the case that his successors had dropped the
ball on Garda reform.
Planning Tribunal
On the other hand, being a no-nonsense half-
time barrister, he was always keen to trumpet
the profligacy of the Planning Tribunal, going
so far as to overestimate its cost at €1bn
around the time there was talk of curtailing it.
In the end, the Irish Times estimates it cost
under €200m.
Defamation
His Defamation Bill, which grounded an Act of
2009, replaced the torts of libel and slander with
one of “defamation” and introduced a useful
new plea of “fair and reasonable publication” as
a defence to defamation. It did not introduce any
requirement of real harm as a component of
defamation. The legislation is not perceived as
having achieved the radical pro-media eect
long advocated — by the media.
Judicial Reform
He lost it a bit with his criticism of the Judicial
Appointments Bill in 2017. He said a proposed
lay majority on proposed appointments council
was “an attack on the system”. He accused
Shane Ross of having a “personal agenda” in
wanting the lay majority, using his position as
a senator to tout a position that will have
endeared him to the judges he appears before
as a senior counsel. He also wrongly said
equivalent bodies in Scotland, England and
Northern Ireland did not have lay majorities.
He filibustered the Bill which fell and was
eventually replace with an Act that removed the
lay majority. The hysteria was not justified.
Nobody says that for example An Bord Pleanála
should have its appointments recommended
by a body with a majority of planning
professionals rather than a majority of informed
lay people.
More recently he repeatedly got it grossly
wrong — as a barrister, Senator and Irish Times
columnist — about the Judicial Appointments
Commission Bill which the Supreme Court has
In 2009 he tried to negotiate
a return to Fine Gael but by
2011 he was calling for a
new ‘right-of-centre” party
30 February/March 2024 February/March 2024 31
found constitutional. He wrote that it was a
“subversion of the architecture of Bunreacht na
hÉireann and a massive breach of the
constitutional separation of powers between
legislature, executive and judiciary that has
existed in our in Ireland for 100 years”.
Competence
He wasn’t always that competent at
administration either. McDowell’s Department of
Justice bought a farm in north Dublin, at Thornton
Hall — at a premium price — for a proposed
superprison. and several state organisations
already had land closer to the city which might
have been used for the same purpose.
Immigration
He hasn’t been that liberal on immigrants. In
2004, he proposed a citizenship referendum to
end the automatic right to Irish citizenship for
all babies born on the island of Ireland. The
referendum passed with an 80% majority. He
sped up the deportation of failed asylum
seekers, including one case in 2005 where a
student was deported to Nigeria while
preparing for his Leaving Certificate
examinations. After an emotive public outcry,
McDowell allowed his return. The same year he
told the Oireachtas Justice Committee that the
patience of the Irish people would be very
tested if they knew the ‘cock and bull’ stories
being given by people looking for asylum.
He said these included, for example, that
they thought they had arrived in Canada, or
that they had been selected for ritual sacrifice
in their home country. “I would prefer to
interview these people at the airport, but the
UN insists that I go through due procedure”, he
declared.
More recently, responding to the Dublin riots
in November he provocatively and implausibly
asserted: “To call them ‘right wing’ may be
convenient as a tag for being anti-immigrant,
but I am by no means convinced that if any of
them vote, that they would not vote for left-
wing candidates”.
Sinn Féin
Sinn Féin have always been a red rag to
McDowell who is no narrow nationalist. As
long ago as 2005 he was saying that until the
IRA disbanded Sinn Féin could not be involved
in government, North or South. He was always
scathing about the ethics of the IRA and has
also been eective in making the case that it
still exercises some control over Sinn Féin
which he believes is inadequately regulated.
In 2023 he wrote:
“In short, Sinn Féin operates at a level
and with resources that no other party in
this island can match. And because it
operates in more than one jurisdiction, it
is not amenable to our system of
regulation of political donations.
We are told that the IRA is no longer
operational but expert security opinion
believes that it has not been formally
disbanded and that its leadership
remains intact.
That raises many questions. The
proceeds of the Northern Bank robbery
attributed to the activities of IRA after the
1998 Good Friday Agreement remain
largely unaccounted for”.
Northern Ireland
Unlike anyone else except the British
government, McDowell is in favour of It Legacy
Legislation outlawing prosecutions for Troubles
crimes: “The Provos are never going to tell the
truth. MI5 is never going to tell the truth. I really
think they would be better o drawing the
conclusion that the Free State did. We are not
going to be able to seek criminal accountability.
History is inconvenient, sometimes.
”Responding to the Government’s European
Court of Human Rights action, Northern
Ireland Secretary of State Chris Heaton-Harris
emphasised a 2014 declaration by McDowell
that Dublin had decided not to investigate
Troubles cases.
And…in the end
Usually stated to be one of the cleverest men
in politics, McDowell, whose famous mantra
for the PDs was to be “radical or redundant”
seems to have turned reactionary. To be fair
his tactic seems to be to mix one radical
position with two reactionary/redundant
ones. He wouldn’t be caught oside on an
issue as stark (to Irish people at least) as
Israel’s breach of standards of proportionality
in its criminal war on Gaza.
We have read recent Irish Times columns so
you don’t have to.
Referenda
He is against the two referenda. A piece
elsewhere in this magazine shows he is wrong
that the recognition of a woman’s “work within
the home” does not mean that she may not
choose to have such work. The whole thrust of
the provision is regressive or the status of
women. It’s a disgraceful mistake for a liberal.
Mother and Baby Commission
His most regressively partisan outing was in
2021, defending the Mother and Baby Homes
Commission report which failed to believe
evidence of physical abuse and ‘forced
adoptions’ given by mothers and whose chair,
Yvonne Murphy, was married to Adrian
Hardiman, also a one-time PD, for whom
McDowell had been best man.
Planning
Like many barristers, McDowell is a frustrated
planner. He berates the lack of urban planning
but is unconcerned about that most licentious
of development patterns, one-o housing. In
2004, he claimed Roscommon County Council
had treated him “disgracefully” by threatening
to demolish his luxury holiday home. The
Council claims his almost complete home - a
€600,000 split-level house overlooking
Kilglass Lake near Rooskey, Co Roscommon -
did not have valid planning permission because
McDowell sat at the Cabinet
table for a decade while
the country was run – to
disastrous long-term effect
– in the interests of elites
and cartels, including the
legal one he still feeds off’
Duet with John Gormley in Rnelgh’s
Tringle
His most regressively prisn outing ws in
2021, defending the Mother nd Bby Homes
Commission report
32 February/March 2024 February/March 2024 PB
Michael McDowell
the current structure does not comply with the
specifications submitted in the planning
application. The Council’s objections over the
plaster exterior walls on the house were based
on an erroneous assumption by ocials that
the walls were to be timber framed.
If you ever doubted that Michael McDowell
was a policy black hole last year he wrote
“Many people do not want to be herded into
15-minute cities, towns and villages under
green policies. With broadband and improved
septic tank technology, one-o rural housing
makes sense”.
A 2022 article in the Irish Times featured his
view: “Worse still, the planning regulator is
actually requiring local authority members to
de-zone what it considers is excessive zoning
of land for housing...Daft”. But it is not daft, it
is planning.
From time to time he drones on about the
desirability of shifting Dublin’s Docks some of
which is in his former constituency, to facilitate
housing. The PDs famously produced a naïve
policy document touting New York style high-
rise for Dublin.
Environment and
Transportation
Like a lot of Gonzaga boys and lawyers he is
strong on conservation but less enthusiastic
about the environment. McDowell says:
“Reduction of emissions by 51% in 2030 was a
‘challenging’ commitment but few think Ireland
will manage anything like it”. Sceptical of
renewable energy he believes Ireland “will
require gas-generated electricity for the next
30 years, in the absence of nuclear energy”. It’s
as if climate change were a political issue, not
a scientific one.
He is also, in the Seanad, proposing
circumventing EU habitats and Environmental
Impact Assessment Law to allow the community
to buy the Derrybrien windfarm whose
demolition is necessary because it spawned a
devastating mudslide and never had
permission. His unserious Special Measures
in the Public Interest (Derrybrien Wind Farm)
Bill 2023 would ensure that the wind farm at
Derrybrien which, operational, can power
30,000 homes, will not be dismantled and
scrapped.
He likes the car. In 2022 Irish Times readers
will have been scandalised to read: “Any
suggestion that public transport in the form of
buses, taxis, bikes and e-scooters will suce
to sustain the entire transport needs of a vast
number of people is fanciful and unrealistic”.
For this reason, though he has written of his
fondness for trains (he will have had Hornbies
in 1950s Dublin 6 — like his friend John
Fitzgerald), he is less enthusiastic about new
rail — or public transport in general. In 1996 he
said Luas was an “expensive toy train set that
will damage the city rather than improve it and
will make it more ugly than it is, leaving the 90
per cent of those who will not live on the Luas
corridors more frustrated and angry”.
Housing
He is a leading proponent of the misplaced
inflated role of the private sector in housing
delivery in Ireland. And he is pro-landlord. In
August 2022, he wrote an article titled: Sinn
Féin’s housing policy eectively serves notice
to quit on private landlords. It would be a return
to 1946 Rent Restrictions Acts which slowly
expropriated landlords. He was particularly
exercised that “Sinn Féin propose to prohibit
any landlord from terminating a residential
tenancy for the purpose of allowing his or her
family member to occupy the dwelling”. His
zeal on behalf of the interests of landlords
suggests he may be, or have been, one himself.
Newspapers like the Irish Times should require
declarations about vested interests from
writers, for the same reason SIPO does from
politicians.
On the other hand he is correct that a non
justiciable right to housing would be a waste
of time.
Verdict
For such an intelligent and vaunted politican and
commentator, McDowell has lost his ideological
way. Economically liberal no doubt, his social,
cultural and environmental politics have merged
into wishwash, tinged with reactionism.
He was particularly
exercised that “Sinn Féin
propose to prohibit any
landlord from terminating
a residential tenancy for
the purpose of allowing his
or her family member to
occupy the dwelling”
Rectionry on trnsporttion
