Well leaving aside the issue of whether the SP helped give the impression that the ULA was more of a party project than they really thought it should be, I think the wreckage that is the ULA pretty much undermines any argument about how useful it could be as an alliance.
The reality is that even in alliance terms – if that is to mean anything other than being an electoral badge of convenience – the ULA has also failed.
The SP & SWP have never given it the priority which would allow it to do what Fergus outlines. The ULA badge has sometimes been used in campaigning situations but anyone on the Irish left who has attended demonstrations over the past two years will struggle to think of many, if any, occasions when the ULA, as the ULA, has manifest itself as a major force.
Certainly it has not helped to achieve any coherence of the left.
But if the SP & SWP had really given the ULA more of a priority then the party question would have inevitably come back on to the table. It would have been seen more as a separate organisation and people being attracted to it would have done so with the expectation that it would be some kind of real organisation which had a democratic internal life.
That is exactly what happened after the election and why there was the spurt of growth with the individual members joining – because of exactly that expectation.
The schema that it would be possible to hold together an alliance structure that would contain the SP & SWP (& WUAG) while hundreds and perhaps thousands of individual members joined (who knows what the SP considered to be enough social weight to begin the process of transformation into a party) but while those individual members had no democratic right to decide policy because of the veto was absurd and could never work.
The two choices facing the ULA were always to enter into the path of transformation into a party or to fall back into being, at most, a badge of electoral convenience.
Yes there were many risks with beginning the process of transformation into a party but there was also the possibility of success. As compared to the certainty of the disaster, that we are now seeing play out before our eyes, if the alliance schema was maintained.