In the recent revisionist project which has attempted to rehabilitate the reputation of Charles J Haughey, writes Kevin Myers, little has been made of his truly great contribution to Irish history: the creation of the PDs.
Without Haughey's particular brand of leadership, Des O'Malley would not have been forced out of the Fianna Fáil party, and would not have been given the chance to create a political party from scratch.
Only great events create political parties, and this is one reason to acclaim the significance of the Haughey leadership: he was, in that sense, the greatest leader of Fianna Fáil since its foundation. A party which had come intact through fire and rain, which had executed former colleagues and confined others naked in cells on bread and water diets, which had embraced both economic isolationism on the one hand, and then free trade with the British on the other, shattered upon the rock of the Haughey leadership.
It has been conveniently forgotten in the re-evaluations of the Haughey era that his leadership owed its origins to those who planned the Mullaghmore murders of the Mountbatten boating party, and thereby achieved an almost unique distinction in the melancholy annals of republican terrorism.
They violated three taboos that govern the conduct of war. The first taboo protects civilians from deliberate warlike acts; the second, the profounder taboo, protects the old; and the third, and the most terrible of all, protects the young. The IRA violated all of these taboos at Mullaghmore - and with little evidence subsequently that the electorate of Sligo disapproved of such violations.
Mullaghmore coincided with the Narrow Water atrocity, in which 18 British soldiers were murdered. If you want an insight into the diseased institutional morality that governed this State at the time, let us recall: evidence which could have led to the conviction of the Narrow Waters murderers was removed from Dundalk Garda Station and destroyed, and the Special Criminal Court released one of the Mullaghmore killers, even though he had inculpated himself in statements to gardaí.
Moreover, the deranged nationalist ethos of the time actually preferred that terrorists be allowed to benefit from minor points of law and the petty detail of national sovereignty, as Jack Lynch was soon to discover.
When it was discovered that he had agreed that the British be allowed overflight facilities in pursuit on terrorists in Border areas, Fianna Fáil rose in anger as it had never done over the Mullaghmore or Narrow Water atrocities (or any other of countless murders done in the name of Ireland). One heave, and Haughey came to power.
Even then, Des O'Malley would not have left Fianna Fáil, but he was forced out on grounds that seem incomprehensible today. Haughey, in an atavistic reversion to 1930s language, had declared that it was Fianna Fáil policy that Ireland was to be a unitary state: However, Des O'Malley had said the new Ireland must be pluralistic in its embrace, and Haughey used this difference to expel him from the party. And by doing so, he revealed the huge schism which was emerging within Irish life between the emerging, post-Civil War secularists, and those who carried the conflict of 1916-1922 in their political DNA.
It was not easy. The PDs were avowedly free-enterprise, and it is difficult to recall now the extraordinary power of statism over the bien-pensant liberal Ireland of the time. Academics, television producers, lawyers and journalists in Dublin 6, the Ranelagh right-ons, sneered at the PDs in a way they never did at Sinn Féin or at the Workers' Party.
Yet outside those precious circles. there was a restless stirring across the country for a new morality, one which was republican, but in an American way, and in more than one sense. This morality demanded that the State must guard its own authority: it must protect the rule of secular law and it must ensure that that the market is free and open. This was the revolutionary philosophic trinity that lay at the heart of the PDs.
And it was this trinity that Charles Haughey was forced to come to terms with in a coalition government. It was the best thing that could have happened to him, because it liberated his own free-market instincts, which had hitherto been imprisoned by the constraints of tribal and populist consensualism within Fianna Fáil. This consensus was predicated on the vision of a kindly government not merely supervising the economy at every turn, but actually owning large sections of it.
Indeed, this notion of government as economic governess was so deep-rooted within the cultures of both Civil War parties as well as Labour that, unaided, it could not be eradicated. Only a new party, with no historical baggage, could embrace laissez-faire economics. Thus was created the rogue gene of ideological free enterprise, one which rapidly crossed party lines, finally conferring immunity against the hereditary and crippling disease of statism.
Aided by the PDs' certainties, Charles Haughey - the most capable and dynamic individual ever to grace Irish politics, as well as being the most corrupt and immoral - was able to lay the foundations of the modern Irish economy. The language of the PDs has since transformed the political vocabulary of Irish politics. All political parties, apart from the lunatics of Sinn Féin, essentially believe in low-taxation, free-market economics.
More than the PDs were born 20 years ago. So too was the piscín that grew into modern Ireland.