I am not quite sure what Stephen Collins means by the title of his book. What is the Cosgrave legacy? Twenty years after Liam Cosgrave went out of office, in what must have been the greatest act of, political misjudgment in Irish political history, the era seems ash dead as the dodo. He himself, resigned from the Fine Gael leadership in a way that maximised the party's internal difficulties, and almost all the ambitious crowd of ministers around him dropped from public sight within months.
Ah yes, W.T. laid the foundation of our democracy in the aftermath of the civil war with a group of ministers as talented as those in the ironically titled Ministry of All the Talents led by his son. But Stephen Collins's account - largely a clever synthesis of published and unpublished material, including quotes from former ministers who never heard of the constitutional ban on cabinet revelations - raises the intriguing question of whether Liam was too conscious, in the very different circumstances of the 1970s, of his duty to follow in his father's footsteps, to the extent that he failed to see the need to justify his actions and those of his government.
We will never know, of course, exactly what impelled him. He has not collaborated in the preparation of this book, and apart from some confidences to Ursula Halligan for a UCD thesis, has given few obiter dicta. As Taoiseach, he played his cards close to his chest, but it is clear from the enthusiastic praise lavished on him by Labour contemporaries that the cohesiveness of the coalition came to dominate every other strategic consideration.
He had reason for this, since the joint campaign by Fine Gael and Labour in 1973, and in particular the unlikely sight of Cosgrave and the Labour leader, Brendan Corish, striding the land in tandem, changed the political landscape and brought a unique sense of genuine coalition to reality - as opposed to post-election marriages of convenience. Cosgrave and Corish shared an innate conservatism which helped, and Cosgrave allowed his ministers considerable latitude in running their departments, which sublimated policy differences.
Yet anyone who studies Cosgrave's own behaviour in voting against the Contraception Bill in 1974, placing many members of his party in a genuine dilemma - in particular that honourable man.
John Kelly, who misjudged Cosgrave's intentions and persuaded several TDs to vote for the Bill on the ground that this was what the Taoiseach was going to do - must wonder at his detachment from reality. Like Dev, he used equivocation and ambiguity as a political tool.
Where this led him is abundantly clear in the way he called the June 1977 general election, disastrously misjudging the mood of the country. He could have waited a few more months to allow the upswing in the economy to reap a harvest of votes among the electorate. But he didn't. Reversing the normal tactic of prudence in these matters, he dissolved the Dail and then ordered an opinion poll. This showed that the Coalition was staring disaster in the face, prompting Garret FitzGerald to remark, "Could we undissolve the Dail?" Fianna Fail, offering an unprincipled and short-sighted election manifesto, ended up with the largest ever Dail majority.
Cosgrave, who was entirely responsible for the decision to hold an early election since the government was deeply divided on the question, was not alone in being misled on the popular mood. The Irish Times downplayed the likelihood of a massive Fianna Fail victory after its opinion poll showed the party streets ahead, apparently zooming off the credibility scale. For The Irish Times such a mistake was embarrassing for Cosgrave and his Ministers it was fatal.
The episode does a lot to put the Cosgrave achievement into context. Just as the O Dalaigh/Donegan affair, when Cosgrave backed a drunken Minister against a highly respected President doing his duty as he saw it, showed the inflexibility of his loyalty to Cabinet colleagues, even at the risk of damaging a national institution, so his casualness towards the re-election of the government inevitably undermined the principles which it had attempted to enforce.
How different history might have been if the Cosgrave coalition had managed to bring the country with it in 1977. But its outrageous handling of the Heavy Gang reports persuaded the electorate that it was not prepared to pay the democratic price for defending democracy.
