I started this project in part because I’m ridiculously ignorant on the politics of my own country. Seriously, I can tell you who the current House Minority Leader in the United States is and can name around half of the six million Republican presidential candidates but for the love of God don’t ask me who my local TD is. And my knowledge of the Taoisigh was spotty at best. Liam Cosgrave is one that I knew next to nothing about going in and I gotta say, having read up on him?

Not a fan.

Cosgrave was the son of none other than W.T. Cosgrave, our first Taoiseach.

He was elected to the Dáil in the forties during his father’s long period as leader of the opposition before being appointed Minister for External Affairs (great name, innit?) under John Costello during which time he finally got Ireland into the UN where the USSR had been vetoing our membership for around a decade.

In 1965 Cosgrave ran for leadership of Fine Gael and won it in a walk, as both the heir of the party’s first parliamentary leader and a pretty accomplished politician in his own right. Cosgrave  soon began pissing away that goodwill as he seemed to have a funny idea about what the leader of the opposition is supposed to do. Cosgrave hated militant republicans the way God hates the Oxford comma and when Jack Lynch’s government brought in some fairly draconian anti-terrorism legislation Cosgrave backed the government to the hilt, to the horror of the more liberal elements of his own party. By the time the fiftieth anniversary of the State had rolled around many of these liberals were looking to oust him from the leadership position. Cosgrave addressed their concerns calmly and reasonably in an address at Fine Gael’s Ard Fheis (party conference) saying “… some of these commentators and critics are now like mongrel foxes; they are gone to ground but I’ll dig them out, and the pack will chop them when they get them”.

…

Well, this dead horse ain’t gonna beat itself. I would almost almost be willing to give Cowen a pass. I mean, he came into office in mid 2008, the recession started around September when he was probably still getting his correspondence sent to his old address. It’s not his fault, right? I mean, most of the bad decisions that led to Ireland’s rather spectacular fall from economic grace were made long before he took office, right?

Calling Brian Cowen the worst Taoiseach is probably not going to be that controversial (he said, sweet naïve fool that he was) because the sheer scale of his failures simply dwarf those of his predecessors. Cowen was not a crook, and he wasn’t a liar. He was something far more dangerous; an ordinary bloke in WAY over his head.