Liam Cosgrave
Former Taoiseach of the Irish Republic who showed great political courage in pioneering a negotiated solution to the Troubles
LIAM COSGRAVE, the former leader of Fine Gael who has died aged 97, served as fifth Taoiseach or prime minister of the Republic of Ireland between 1973 and 1977, at a time when the Irish state faced the real possibility of the northern troubles spilling over the border; his government is best-remembered for its response.
This included the signing of the ill-fated Sunningdale Agreement in December 1973 – the first attempt by the British and Irish governments to end the Troubles in Northern Ireland by forcing Unionists to share power with Nationalists. The Agreement provided for an executive composed of the leaders of both the Nationalist and Unionist traditions, and a cross-border dimension in a new “Council of Ireland” to deal with mutual problems. Both governments accepted there could be no change in the status of Northern Ireland without the support of the majority.
Regarded by British negotiators as an unexciting but effective “committee man” reminiscent of Clement Attlee, Cosgrave demonstrated political courage in putting his name to the deal, but he was later accused by some of helping to cause the downfall of the agreement by pressing for an all-ireland dimension which many Unionists, suspicious of the motives of both governments, saw as a step towards eventual Irish unification. By the end of 1974 the agreement lay in ruins, wrecked by the Ulster power workers’ strike, spiralling violence and the boycott of the assembly by Unionist politicians.
The failure of Sunningdale led to the reimposition of direct rule from London and a resurgence of sectarian violence, yet Cosgrave arguably left a legacy which led, ultimately, to the establishment of Northern Ireland’s current devolved assembly and power-sharing executive. While many Irish republican politicians of the 1970s continued to hold ambivalent views on the “armed struggle”, Cosgrave bequeathed a culture which unequivocally repudiated all forms of violence for political ends and pioneered the principle of a “negotiated settlement” to Northern Ireland’s problems.
Liam Cosgrave was born on April 13 1920 into the Irish Republic’s political aristocracy. His father William (WT) Cosgrave, became President of the Provisional Government following the death of Michael Collins in 1922 and created the Irish Free State, serving as President of its Executive Council until 1932.
WT Cosgrave had broken with his former comrade-in-arms Eamon de Valera over the issue of the Anglo-irish Treaty of 1921, and the state which he established was much more modern and secular than the offensively sectarian version which replaced it under de Valera in 1937. He appointed an enlightened mix of scholars and Anglo-irish to the Senate, and the 1922 Constitution accorded Protestants equal civil rights. Liam Cosgrave remained proud of his father, later observing that one of his achievements was “bringing in the unionists. He wanted to collaborate with the North and, of course, time has proved that policy was the right one.”
Liam Cosgrave attended Castleknock College, Dublin, and studied Law at the King’s Inn. He was called to the Irish bar in 1943, becoming a senior counsel in 1958.
He had joined his father’s party, Fine Gael, aged 17, and in the general election of 1943, aged just 23, he entered the Irish Dail as member for Dublin County. After WT Cosgrave’s retirement, he rose rapidly through party ranks, becoming a parliamentary secretary to the minister for industry and commerce in the 1948 to 1951 coalition government, the first of the brief interruptions of the de Valera and Fianna Fail ascendancy. He served as Minister for External Affairs in the second Inter-party Government (1954-1957) under the Taoiseach, John Costello, and in 1955 he oversaw Ireland’s entry into the United Nations as a fully independent state.
In 1965, when James Dillon retired as Fine Gael leader, Cosgrave easily won the leadership. Five years later his standing was greatly enhanced when, following a tip-off from a member of the Garda Special Branch, he successfully pressed the Fianna Fail leader and Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, to take action against senior ministers (including the future Taoiseach Charles Haughey) who were involved in importing arms for the Provisional IRA.
In 1972, however, Cosgrave’s determination to support the government’s anti-terrorist Offences Against the State (Amendment) Bill in votes in the Dail in the face of opposition from the growing liberal wing in his own party, almost cost him his leadership. At the party’s conference in May that year, Cosgrave, an enthusiastic rider to hounds, referred to his opponents as mongrel foxes: “They are gone to ground, but I’ll dig them out, and the pack will chop them when they get them.” Subsequently a series of bombings in Dublin persuaded his colleagues to withdraw their opposition to the legislation and his leadership was saved.
Within months he had become Taoiseach, leading a National Coalition of Fine Gael and Labour to victory in the 1973 general election and bringing an end to 16 years of rule by Fianna Fail.
Cosgrave’s cabinet, described as the “government of all talents”, embraced all wings of the coalition and included the future Taoiseach and writer Garret Fitzgerald (as Foreign Affairs Minister) and the former UN diplomat and writer Conor Cruise O’brien. A conservative on social matters, Cosgrave balanced the more progressive elements with hardline Christian Democrats such as Richard Burke, Peter Barry and Mark Clinton.
But from the first the coalition was plagued by bad luck. The inflationary effects of the oil crisis of 1973 and high public sector borrowing made harsh tax increases necessary, and rising unemployment led to a trebling of welfare spending. In 1974, after the Supreme Court declared the ban on the importation of contraceptives by married persons to be unconstitutional, the minister for justice Patrick Cooney introduced legislation to bring Irish law into line with the judgment. On a free vote Cosgrave helped the Fianna Fail opposition to defeat his government’s own bill.
The Northern Ireland situation dominated his period in office, and while he maintained good terms with the Ulster premier Brian Faulkner, his relations with Harold Wilson’s Labour government were not so cordial. Cosgrave became increasingly uneasy about contacts between Wilson and the IRA, whose leaders, including Gerry Adams, were flown to London for secret talks which led to a ceasefire. Cosgrave, who had prohibited any contacts with the IRA by Irish officials or ministers, surmised, correctly, that the ceasefire was merely a tactic to end internment.
In fact he demonstrated considerably more resolution in confronting the IRA than the British government, which he regarded as “unrealistic and untrustworthy”. When the IRA kidnapped the Dutch industrialist Tiede Herrema in 1975, Conor Cruise O’brien recorded Cosgrave’s response in cabinet: “We have a demand from these fellows to hand over [Dr Rose] Dugdale or they’ll kill Herrema and all sorts of other people. I take it we refuse? Next item.” Herrema was later freed by the police.
By contrast, when the IRA hunger striker Frank Stagg died in Wakefield prison in 1976, Cosgrave was appalled to learn that the British government was proposing to hand his body over to the IRA in return for an undertaking to confine funeral demonstrations to Ireland. Appalled at the prospect of an IRA parade through Dublin, he got Garret Fitzgerald to phone the British Home Secretary Roy Jenkins to tell him that unless the deal was called off, Cosgrave would call a press conference to “expose this macabre deal between the authorities in Britain and the IRA”. Stagg’s coffin was duly handed to the Irish police at Heathrow and Cosgrave had the plane carrying it diverted from Dublin to Shannon. The burial was private and a lorryload of concrete was poured on to the grave to deter an IRA exhumation.
In his opposition to terrorism Cosgrave was even prepared to take on his own Church, refusing repeated requests by the Papal Nuncio in Dublin, Monsignor Alibrandi, to treat IRA members held in jail as “political prisoners” to help bring an end to the hunger strikes.
When Cardinal Benelli, a high-ranking Vatican official, presented a protest note on the treatment of prisoners to the Irish ambassador to the Vatican, Cosgrave drafted a sharp reply in which he pointed out that the hunger strikes were organised by “murderers who had been responsible for the deaths of over 2,000 Irish people.” He also refused a request by the nuncio to visit inmates in Portlaoise Prison, and when Cardinal Conway, Archbishop of Armagh, told him the hunger strikers were living only on water, he retorted: “Water is too good for them.”
For similar reasons the supposedly ceremonial presidency dogged Cosgrave’s term of office. In late 1973 the Fine Gael presidential candidate Tom O’higgins was defeated by Fianna Fail’s Erskine Childers. When Childers died in November 1974, the agreed replacement was Cearbhall O’ Dalaigh, a former Attorney General of Ireland and Chief Justice, who never had good relations with Cosgrave and turned out to be highly critical of security measures introduced as the Troubles in Northern Ireland began to spill over into the Republic.
These included provisions in Ireland’s Broadcasting Act forbidding the broadcast of the voices of members of Sinn Fein, and the Emergency Powers Bill, which was announced in 1976 following the assassination of the British Ambassador to Ireland, Christopher Ewart-biggs, by the Provisional IRA.
When O’dalaigh announced that he had decided to refer the bill to the Supreme Court to test its constitutionality, Patrick Donegan, a minister with a reputation for outspokenness, publicly condemned the President as a “thundering disgrace” in a speech to senior army officers. Cosgrave’s refusal to accept Donegan’s resignation, and the Supreme Court’s verdict that the bill was indeed constitutional, caused O’dalaigh to resign.
Despite all these problems, as he approached the 1977 election, Cosgrave and his Labour coalition partners were confident of victory. The economy was beginning to show signs of recovery and constituency boundaries had been redrawn in a way that should have favoured the coalition. In the event, Jack Lynch’s “something for everybody” manifesto swept Cosgrave from power.
In the immediate aftermath of defeat, Cosgrave resigned as Fine Gael leader to be replaced by Garret Fitzgerald and in 1981 he retired from politics altogether, bequeathing his seat in the Dail to his son, also called Liam.
After that Cosgrave effectively withdrew from public life. Sadly for him, in later life his name became associated with various corruption allegations involving his son and namesake, who in 2005 pleaded guilty to a charge of failing to disclose a political donation from a lobbyist.
A devout Catholic, Cosgrave was created a Papal Knight of the Grand Cross of Pope Pius IX in 1955 and was a frequent pilgrim to Rome.
He married, in 1952, Vera Osborne, who died last year; he is survived by their two sons and a daughter.
Liam Cosgrave, born April 13 1920, died October 4 2017