Liam Cosgrave

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date of birth = Tuesday, 13 April, 1920|
place of birth = Dublin, Ireland|
date of death = |
place of death= |
party  = Fine Gael |
spouse = |
profession = Lawyer|

|}} Liam Cosgrave (Irish name Liam Mac Cosgair) (born 13 April, 1920), served as the fifth Taoiseach of the Republic of Ireland between 1973 and 1977. The son of W.T. Cosgrave (who served as the first President of the Executive Council from 1922 to 1932), Liam Cosgrave entered Irish politics, becoming a TD in Dáil Éireann in 1944, when his father retired.

He retained his seat until his own retirement in 1981. Cosgrave served as Minister for External Affairs from 1954 until 1957. During his term as Minister, Ireland joined the United Nations.

1 Early life
2 Minister at last
3 Opposition
4 Fine Gael Leader
5 Taoiseach
6 Overview
7 Cabinet
8 Political career

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Early life

From an early age Liam Cosgrave displayed a keen interest in politics, discussing the topic with his father as a teenager before eventually joining Fine Gael at the age of 17, speaking at his first public meeting the same year. He was educated at Castleknock College. To the surprise of his family, Liam decided to seek election to the Dail in 1943 and was duly elected as a TD at the age of 23, briefly sitting in parliament alongside his father W.T. Cosgrave who had founded the State in the 1920s. Cosgrave rapidly rose through the ranks of Fine Gael, becoming a parliamentary secretary when the party returned to power in 1948.

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Minister at last

The first coalition Government collapsed in 1951. However in 1954 a second inter-party Government was formed. On this occasion Liam Cosgrave was given a cabinet position. As Minister for External Affairs Cosgrave took part in trade discussions and chaired the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe in 1955. He also successfully presided over Ireland's admittance to the United Nations, defining Irish foreign policy for decades in his first address to the General Assembly in 1956. These were important achievements for an Ireland of the time that was just finding its feet on the world stage after years of isolation after the Second World War.

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Opposition

With Fine Gael back in opposition during the 1960s, an internal struggle for the soul of the party was beginning. A large body of members called on Fine Gael to move decisively to the left. A set of eight principles known as the Just Society was put forward to the party leadership. The principles called for higher state spending in Health and Social Welfare on top of a greater state role in the economy. Despite his conservative credentials, Cosgrave adopted a positive attitude to the Just Society document. Despite its radical plan, Fine Gael remained in opposition.

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Fine Gael Leader

In 1965, when James Dillon retired as Fine Gael leader after the 1965 election loss, Liam Cosgrave, as a senior party figure and son of the first parliamentary leader of Fine Gael, easily won the leadership. Throughout his leadership, Cosgrave was seen as dour, conservative but utterly trustworthy and honourable. He played a key role in the Arms Crisis, when, as leader of the opposition, he pressured then Fianna Fáil leader and Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, to take action against senior ministers who were involved in importing arms intended for the Provisional IRA.

Cosgrave's determination to support government anti-terrorist legislation in votes in the Dáil, in the face of outright opposition from his party, almost cost him his leadership. The growing liberal wing in Fine Gael was opposing the Government's stringent laws on civil liberty grounds. Cosgrave, following in his father's footsteps, put the security of the State and its institutions first.

Risking his leadership Cosgrave was determined to vote for the Bill. However a series of Dublin bombings, which were heard in Leinster House, the home of the Republic's parliament just before the vote, led Fine Gael's liberal TDs to change their viewpoint and vote for the Bill.

Cosgrave's leadership was saved and his decisions apparently vindicated, although some believe that the Ulster Volunteer Force had set out to deliberately influence the vote by bombing Dublin on that day, knowing the brunt of the legislation would fall on the IRA. Cosgrave emerged from these events as a man of honour and integrity. Labour decided to ditch its anti-coalition stance and embrace Cosgrave as a possible Taoiseach. Pre-election pact talks began between the two parties and within months, he had again emulated his father by becoming Taoiseach.

Image:Liamcosgrave.jpg

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Taoiseach

Cosgrave led a National Coalition of Fine Gael and Labour to victory in the 1973 General Election. It was the first non-Fianna Fáil government since the Second Inter-Party Government was elected in 1954. Cosgrave was determined not to alienate certain wings of his party in choosing his cabinet. The cabinet was described as being the "government of all talents", including such luminaries as future taoiseach and writer Garret FitzGerald, former United Nations diplomat, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Justin Keating and others.

The National Coalition had a string of bad luck. It started with the world energy crisis, with caused inflationary problems. It suffered its first electoral defeat, when its odds-on favourite in the June 1973 presidential election, Tom O'Higgins, was unexpectedly defeated by the Fianna Fáil candidate, Erskine Hamilton Childers, who became President of Ireland.

The presidency dogged the National Coalition. President Childers died suddenly in November 1974. The agreed replacement, Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh, though a former Irish Attorney-General (1946-48; 1951-53) and Chief Justice (1963-1973), was monumentally politically inexperienced and it showed. He needed guidance from the politically experienced Cosgrave. Unfortunately Cosgrave was someone who did not express his feelings openly (he only informed his wife that he planned to resign on the morning he submitted it). Previously, presidents had been briefed by taoisigh (pronounced, 'thee-she', plural of taoiseach). While the frequency under the previous Taoiseach had declined as President de Valera's health declined in old age, Liam Cosgrave briefed Presidents Childers and Ó Dálaigh on average once every six months.

Left unguided, the inexperienced Ó Dálaigh's relationship with the National Coalition deteriorated. When, in the aftermath of the assassination of the British Ambassador to Ireland, Sir Christopher Ewart Biggs, the President correctly referred a number of key anti-terrorist Bills to the Supreme Court to test their constitutionality, Paddy Donegan, an outspoken minister with a reputation for saying the wrong thing and who it turned out had a drink problem and had taken some drink that day, lashed the President as a "thundering disgrace" in a speech to senior army officers. (Some reports in later books claimed that the term used was "thundering bollocks and fucking disgrace", a version the President told a dinner party subsequently which he evidently believed was the correct one. However, the only journalist who was present at Donegan's speech insisted that the term Donegan used was "thundering disgrace").

Donegan, an honourable man, twice offered his resignation, as well as sending a fulsome apology to the President. However, in the biggest misjudgment of his career, Cosgrave twice refused the resignation, and in so doing, effectively besmirched the reputation of the President. The President, not so much angered by the outburst as the further comment, that the "army must stand behind the state", which the President interpreted as being a suggestion that he, the Commander-in-Chief of the Irish Army, didn't stand behind the state, an astonishing claim to make in front of Irish Army officers who had been commissioned by the President of Ireland.

When Cosgrave failed to fire Donnegan, Ó Dálaigh resigned the presidency. He was replaced by the Fianna Fáil candidate, Patrick Hillery. The whole affair, and the National Coalition's treatment of an honourable if politically naïve man, severely damaged the government's reputation and tarnished Cosgrave's place in history.

The Cosgrave government's tough anti-terrorist laws alienated the public, as did its tough austerity measures (Finance Minister Richie Ryan was nicknamed 'Richie Ruin' on a satirical TV programme). In 1977, the National Coalition was heavily defeated, with Fianna Fáil winning an unprecedented massive parliamentary majority through its infamous giveaway manifesto which would plunge the State into economic crisis during the late 1970s and much of the 1980s. In the immediate aftermath, Liam Cosgrave resigned as Fine Gael leader. He was replaced by his former Foreign Minister, Garret FitzGerald. Cosgrave did not contest the 1981 general election.

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Overview

Between them, the two Cosgraves, W. T. and Liam, served in Dáil Éireann from 1918 to 1981. Both men headed governments; Leadership of the Irish Free State fell onto W.T's shoulders after the assassination of Michael Collins. W. T. was a founder of the state while his son Liam devoted his life to serving it. Liam's son Liam T. Cosgrave is also an Irish politician who was accused before the Mahon Tribunal of accepting illegal payments from property developers in return for voting to rezone property in Dublin: he resigned from the Fine Gael party when this became known, thereby effectively ending his political career and the Cosgrave political dynasty.

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