The Irish media could give Stalin lessons on airbrushing. In all the coverage of the collapse of communism in 1989, there was not one mention of its only measurable impact on Irish politics -- in the long run it wiped out the Workers' Party.

The Workers' Party has had poor press. But for 30 years the party attracted the most able people in Ireland. Facing the general election of June 1989, however, with anger mounting at crumbling communist regimes, the party should have been destroyed by the red scare tactics of its opponents.

Instead, thanks to a last minute injection of socially democratic ideas from Eamon Smullen's economic affairs department -- which vaccinated it against any such attack -- the Workers' Party rose to new heights, winning seven seats. In Dublin it beat Labour into second place, winning six seats in the capital city and putting the 'Student Princes' -- which included Pat Rabbitte, Eamon Gilmore and Eric Byrne -- into the Dail for the first time.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the Workers' Party was poised to pass out the Labour Party. But by early 1990 it had thrown away its chance by first suppressing my pamphlet, The Necessity of Social Democracy, and then disciplining Eamon Smullen for publishing it, causing the first of two terminal splits.

The back story begins in 1988, with a paper I presented to the Belfast summer school of the Workers' Party. I told them the socialist project was finished. I told them the Workers' Party should make a sharp move towards social democracy. I told them to link up with Fine Gael rather than the Labour Party. Back in Dublin I began to develop these ideas into what would become The Necessity of Social Democracy and braced myself for a backlash.

But the new president of the Workers' Party, Proinsias De Rossa, could also hear the sound of collapsing walls. He decided to give my ideas a good trial. At the ardfheis of April 1989 he got stuck into the two sacred cows of socialism.

De Rossa first shocked the Garland Old Guard, who were hostile to events in the Eastern Bloc, by describing the Russian upheavals as "a great movement of socialist renewal and regeneration". He then shocked the Student Princes, who were also ambivalent, by slicing at the the sacred cow of state ownership.

"The people of this country do not at this time want public ownership of the means of production."

De Rossa's distancing of the Workers' Party from dictatorial communism came in the nick of time. One month later, on June 4, 1989, the Chinese Communist old guard gunned down students in Tiananmen Square. The Irish Press spoke admiringly of De Rossa's "prescience" in protecting the party from a red scare 11 days before the general election of June 15, 1989. He had the grace to be grateful for my good advice.

The new social-democratic departure paid off spectacularly at the polls. On top of the seven seats, De Rossa won a European seat with a sharp campaign to which I contributed a black and white poster called 'A Breath of Fresh Air', which is still worth a second look.

But while the Student Princes had been willing to benefit electorally from the new departure, they now tried to turn the clock back even as the Berlin Wall was coming down, cynically combining with the Old Guard to choke off Smullen's move towards social democracy.

At the ardfheis of 1990, these ostriches forced De Rossa to repudiate his "social-democratic" speech of 1989 and make a traditional "socialism is not dead" speech. Meantime, they sat for the whole of 1989 on my pamphlet, The Necessity of Social Democracy, even though its social-democratic ideas had got them elected the previous year!

Eamon Smullen finally got sick of the scheming to stick to old-style socialism and published The Necessity of Social Democracy in early 1990. All hell broke loose. The Old Guard and the Student Princes started a purge of the Smullen group. This led to the first of two splits which finished the Workers' Party as a serious force.

As The Necessity of Social Democracy is not generally available, let me review some of its reflections on socialism. First, I tried to figure out what had gone wrong with such a noble idea as socialism. Before pointing to its philosophical and moral flaws, I remarked on how the suffering of Russia in the Second World War stood in the way of reform.

"In 1946 [socialism] stamped out of the Soviet Union wearing the rigid mask of Stalin, speaking a zombie jargon, brutalised by war -- and was given a hero's welcome in the West and imposed on the Warsaw Pact countries as the model for all systems."

But I went on to write that the fundamental flaw was in the socialist idea itself. "What's wrong with socialism? Ask the workers. They wonder why, if everybody gets the same, anybody should work harder. They wonder how we will manage without a market. They wonder how we plan to manage without the energy of entrepreneurs."

As far as I could see socialism had no future. "Socialism as we know it is dead." But was there anything worth saving? Yes. "Socialist values, but not socialism, can rise from the ashes as a democratic political idea . . . That idea is called social democracy."

Accordingly I said that we former socialists should embrace social democracy and untie ourselves from any utopian notions. "Let me make a suggestion about the word socialism. Walk away from it. Start again. But this time let's not be infallible. Let's just do our best this time."

These mild views created a violent reaction. Eamon Smullen was subjected to two days of diatribes, "disciplined" and driven from the Workers' Party -- the name was his -- which he had transformed from a narrow nationalist sect into a successful progressive workers' party.

At the time, some myopic historians said the Workers' Party would survive the loss of people like Smullen and those of us who left with him. Fat chance. No party can suppress people with fresh ideas, drive out old idealists and pamper political opportunists without doing itself fatal damage. Within two years the Workers' Party was a hollow shell.

Twenty years on, those who behaved badly should stop brazening it out. Had they published the Necessity of Social Democracy in 1990, Ireland would now have a powerful non-nationalist party of social democracy. But they blew it, they know they blew it, and they should admit they blew it.

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Tony Ryan of Waterford, who died last week, was one of my oldest friends. We soldiered together in An Buion Gaelach, the Irish- speaking platoon of the FCA. My happiest memories are of his comic soliloquys, under canvas in Cuil Aodha or in the stone barracks on Spike Island.

Ar dheis De go raibh a anam croga.

- Eoghan Harris

Sunday Independent