The former leader and founder member of the Progressive Democrats, Des O'Malley, is attending his last party national conference this weekend before retiring from politics, writes Eibhir Mulqueen
In a career that has seen the exposure of wrongdoing of many of his adversaries, including Charles Haughey and Ray Burke, he says his biggest regret has been the violent situation that has prevailed for so long in the North.
He would have despaired, he says, if he could have foreseen the thousands of people who would die and the divisions created between the communities in the North.
As a former member of Fianna Fáil, his first ministerial post was in justice in 1970 when he was aged 31, following the sacking of senior ministers in the 1970s arms crisis.
He signed the order for the establishment of the Special Criminal Court in 1972, seen as a temporary measure at the time.
"I went into the Dáil and I made a speech about it where I said that I believed that I could revoke that order in about 12 months time. And I did genuinely believe that that the time, and they are still there."
After 34 years in politics, he says his career has got "tossed around on the waves a lot". It has included six ministerial briefs between 1970 and 1992, when he resigned from the post of minister for industry and commerce in the Fianna Fáil-led coalition.
Most notably, he was a founder member of the Progressive Democrats 16 years ago, which broke the domination of the big three parties - Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Labour.
The party was not formed to have the "populist views" of the two main parties, he says.
"I felt that Ireland's problems of the mid-80s were very, very serious problems. We almost had the IMF [International Monetary Fund] on top of us. That couldn't be solved by policies that populist parties would bring forward. They had to be put forward by somebody who was satisfied to be a minority view, and it proved to be the case, and it worked."
The party also survived his resignation as leader in 1993, but while it can be proud of its record of being the most successful new party since Fine Gael was founded in 1933, its position as fourth-biggest party in the Dáil is threatened by Sinn Féin.
The current leader, Mary Harney, referred to this scenario at the party's 15th anniversary in Limerick in December, 2000, when she said Sinn Féin could hold the balance of power in the formation of a new coalition government.
The recent Irish Times/MRBI poll showed Sinn Féin gaining 8 per cent of first-preference votes, five percentage points greater than the PDs, with a strong possibility that it could win four seats.
Mr O'Malley says that when people reflect on Sinn Féin, they will think hard before voting for a party that "claims to be a normal political party now but which maintains its own private army, which, it reminds us, has not gone away".
"I am not saying that Sinn Féin will get no seats. I think they may get some seats in areas where you will always get a kind of radical vote.
"People will vote for more extreme views but I do not think you will find that happening too widely throughout the country."
At the conference today he will give his speech on the economy. The party's record in government is what it will be standing over when appealing to the electorate although he does note that all the main parties have come together in the centre.
"I think the most important tense in politics is always not the past, or even the present, it is really the future. I think a lot of us, myself included, have not yet made the mental adjustment that is necessary to confront the problems of prosperity as opposed to the problems of vast unemployment and poverty."
He talks of pursing economic policies that will tackle the growing disparities of wealth and social problems now that the State has more resources.
"Now I think we have moved into an era where we do have those resources and we can give much more positive thought to that provided we are not going to revert back to the way we were: that you won't get some ideologue becoming minister for finance who wants to increase taxation for the sake of it and because certain commentators think that this would be a nice thing or a good thing."
He believes criticisms of the recent RTÉ programme on his career were excessive and found that television critics could have "some very sharp points" on their pens.
"When similar types of series were made in Britain, I didn't see any complaint about it, but here it seemed to cause great outrage for whatever reason."
In particular, he has been criticised for aspects of his performance during the Arms Crisis, a late conversion to liberalism after adopting strong anti-contraception stance in the 1970s, and a brief flirtation with Larry Goodman before he questioned the operation of export credit insurance which gave rise to the Beef tribunal.
Following retirement, he will write his memoirs which will be "more like an Impressionist painting rather than a precise architectural graph of what happened".