Describing Mary Harney as the "most spectacularly successful employment minister in western Europe", McDowell celebrated her as "the person who brought Ireland from a country of mass unemployment to huge employment. Nobody in Europe, no employment minister, can match her achievements, and in relation to health, nobody can match the scale of the reform programme that she is piloting through."

I understand that when political leaders die or resign . . . even the leaders of minority parties like the Progressive Democrats . . . it is the custom for people who would normally have crossed the street to avoid them to suddenly feel impelled to pay warm tribute, to search for some talent, skill or quality in their former foe and then to exaggerate it out of all proportion.

It's a decent enough tendency, I suppose, although it can often leave the person paying tribute open to accusations of hypocrisy.

One hesitates to attribute such a base motive to McDowell.

Really, one does. More likely, his comments about Harney's success as a minister were the opening shots in his leadership campaign, designed specifically to present the PDs as having a far greater influence on Irish life than is actually the case. The coming weeks, if there is to be a leadership contest, will present the Progressive Democrats with an ideal chance to talk to many more people than the 4% of the population who, according to today's Sunday Tribune/IMS Millward Brown poll, will vote for them in the next general election.

In short, Harney's resignation, and the continuing coverage of same, will allow the PDs to present themselves, in the face of huge public apathy and distaste, as somehow relevant, influential and successful.

Expect to hear lots more guff, therefore, about the great things that the PDs have done for Ireland.

If Harney was the greatest employment minister in Irish history, then the people are remarkably ungrateful about it. Today's poll shows the PDs to be almost a statistically insignifcant rabble, depending on its few personalities to garner it headlines. The PDs seem to have worked out this a little while back too, which would explain their quest to find personality candidates to run in the next election, from DJ Carey, who had the very good sense not to get involved, and Colm O'Gorman, who must now be wondering what on earth he's let himself in for.

The PD claim to have been responsible for the Celtic Badger . . . as outlined by its paid spin doctors and those who do that work for free in the media . . . is based on a contention that its commitment to a low-tax economy kick-started the economic boom. It has become almost a truism of Irish political discourse, the only disagreement being over whether Charlie McCreevy was a blank canvas onto which the PDs painted its fiscal desires or whether he was that way inclined anyway.

There are other views, however, about why the boom started, and why it is continuing now, and the Progressive Democrats don't feature in any of them. The most recent one that has come to my attention was proposed in a conference in Limerick in 2003 by David E Bloom and David Canning from the School of Public Health at Harvard University in the United States. It appears to have gone unreported in the Irish media at the time and has only come up again now because, in a recent piece on the Irish economic boom, the New Yorkermagazine made extensive use of it.

This argument suggests (and apologies for the length of this next bit) that the most important factor in the creation of the boom may have been a singular demographic fact. "In 1979, " the New Yorker article said, "restrictions on contraception that had been in place since Ireland's founding were lifted, and the birth rate began to fall. In 1970, the average Irish woman had 3.9 children. By the 1990s, that number was less than two. As a result, when the Irish children born in the 1960s hit the workforce, there weren't a lot of children in the generation just behind them. Ireland was suddenly free of the enormous social cost of supporting and educating and caring for a large dependent population. It was like a family of four in which, all of a sudden, the elder child is old enough to take care of her little brother and the mother can rejoin the workforce.

Overnight, that family doubles its number of breadwinners and becomes much better off."

The New Yorker article continued: "In Ireland during the Sixties, when contraception was illegal, there were 10 people who were too young or too old to work for every 14 people in a position to earn a paycheck. That mean that the country was spending a large percentage of its resources on caring for the young and the old. Last year, Ireland's dependency ratio hit an alltime low: for every 10 dependents, it had 22 people of working age.

That change coincides precisely with the country's extraordinary economic surge."

The Harvard article is available in full on the internet and you can make up your own mind what you think of it. But it does propose a powerful argument that the PDs (or Fianna Fail, for that matter) had hardly anything to do with the boom, a subversive notion which, if it were to catch on, would render the party of McDowell and Harney irrelevant.

Already, people seem to be catching on. Today's poll suggests that a significant majority of Irish people do not feel wealthier after almost 10 years of PD/Fianna Fail government. A majority too believes that such benefits as have accrued have been skewed towards people on higher incomes. For more and more people, the Progressive Democrats no longer matter.

Neither, therefore, does the identity of their new leader.

ddoyle@tribune. ie