Rhett Butler walked out that door, leaving Scarlett O'Hara clinging to the lintel. Scarlett's legendary response demonstrates how the ability to compartmentalise is what makes any decent romantic heroine great. "Tomorrow is another day," she said, and got on with the task in hand.
Mary Harney's mould-breaking political life has some parallels to Scarlett's story. Like Scarlett, she believes in enterprise, self-directedness and hard work. Her exceptional survival instincts and can-do beliefs single her out among male and female politicians. She has taken the small crumbs of the Progressive Democrat vote and turned them into real political gold, just as Scarlett turned the drawing-room curtains into a dress fit for a queen.
Tough as she is, Harney remains in one matter an unreconstructed romantic. The object of her romance is the Irish family. Whatever the evidence, her economic policies assume a family culture strong and enduring enough to deliver the ambitious economic edifice that she is in politics to achieve. Meanwhile, her social policies seem set to undermine it.
There's long been a fracture between PD fiscal policy and its social concerns. That gap has never been bridged, and has led to some surprising comments by individual PD members, who could not understand how their self-styled "liberal" social values were sometimes widely misunderstood.
The Tanaiste also experienced misunderstanding. Chastened by the electorate's negative response to her infamous 1997 remarks about teenage mothers, she took great care at the 1999 PD conference to flesh out a philosophy of family that pushed all the right buttons about fairness and equality. "We have to ask ourselves hard questions about our policies towards children," she admonished delegates. "Are we really focused on their interests?"
The answer, it unfortunately seems, is a qualified No. Harney has wholeheartedly supported worthwhile initiatives by her Fianna Fail colleagues in Health, Education and Justice, targeted at those most in need. But at the same time, and in inverse proportion to her party's electoral mandate, she has opposed other measures needed to deliver a fully-rounded childcare strategy, without articulating a viable alternative.
It is an open secret that the pillars in the Partnership talks were unable to reach consensus on an overall childcare package. That is not surprising, given their very different constituent bases. IBEC is mandated to hold commercial factors foremost. The trade unions have not fully computed the implications of serving growing numbers of female members, and have at any rate lost ground as representative bodies, because their increase in members has not matched increases in the working population. Everyone is running to keep up with the pace of change.
However, the delay in delivering affordable childcare is not down to their lack of consensus alone. Harney's ambivalence about a rights-based approach to childcare means that her problems with the overall package are the main stumbling block in Cabinet. It is to her that the childcare debate must now be addressed.
The Tanaiste's difficulties in readying herself to deal with the issue may be due to her parallel delay in resolving her party's economic/social fracture. Given that its effect is to endorse a Scarlett O'Hara management ethos that puts off until tomorrow what really needs to be resolved today, the thinking is wholly at odds with traditional PD self-image.
If Mary Harney wanted to resolve the childcare impasse, it would happen as fast as her war on smog. Instead, the matter remains as cloudy as the heaviest winter day. Harney's lack of sure-footedness on family matters showed at the same conference when she responded to claims that parents needed tax concessions, and fast. "We could put hundreds of millions of pounds into special tax breaks for families with children," she assured us. But she didn't.
Harney argued that direct tax breaks for families were unfair to the unemployed and to those outside the tax net. At the same time, she was busy promoting an Ireland where you could get tax concessions for breeding horses, making microchips, investing in holiday homes, and much else. This implied that every foal born in Ireland to a registered breeder could begin life in a more positive tax environment than human babies did.
Harney is no doubt sincere about her concern for children, and has demonstrated her commitment to them on neater issues. But because the deeply-based fracture is threatening her overall political strategy, she finds it impossible to address the question of affordable childcare from a rights perspective rather than from an economic one.
She can easily understand how childcare provision may be developed as a business network, and will support tax concessions for providers in that context. She cannot so easily imagine a world where individual parents and families receive the same entitlements, in the form of tax breaks and universal parent payments that benefit the children she wants to put first.
When it comes to family, the Tanaiste seems to assume the least done is the best mended. Her seniority in Cabinet means that her words count. No doubt against her preference, stereotypes about her gender may encourage the view that she knows what she is talking about. Yet her assertions so far are as unreconstructed as the unguarded comments on women and children that spewed out during the first Budget debate.
It's time to ask why. Why does the party of probity not probe its own lack of cohesion on family matters? Why should the entrepreneurial skills of self-directedness and enterprise demonstrated daily by parents not be rewarded as firmly as they are when displayed by the business sector?
We know Harney is smart, and we like her for it. Thankfully, the Tanaiste never stoops to the kind of silly twittering Scarlett used to mask her strong intelligence. But in the classic tradition of the romantic heroine, Harney longs for something she cannot have - a perfect world where children play happily while their parents build the economy.