Liam Cosgrave

Liam Cosgrave (born April 13, 1920, Templeogue, County Dublin, Ireland—died October 4, 2017) was an Irish politician who served as taoiseach (prime minister) from February 1973 to July 1977.

His father, William Thomas Cosgrave, was president of the Executive Council and head of the government of the Irish Free State during the first 10 years of its existence (1922–32). Liam, the eldest son, was educated at Castleknock College, Dublin, studied law at King’s Inns, and was called to the Irish bar in 1943. In that same year he entered Dáil Éireann (the lower house of the Oireachtas, the Irish parliament), and he retained his seat until his retirement from politics in 1981.

In 1948, when the first interparty government replaced Eamon de Valera’s Fianna Fáil regime, which had been in power for the previous 16 years, Cosgrave became parliamentary secretary to the taoiseach and to the minister for industry and commerce. It was a short-lived administration, going out of power in 1951 after three years of rule. But in a second interparty government (1954–57), Cosgrave became minister for external affairs and led the first Irish delegation to the United Nations General Assembly in 1956.

Cosgrave succeeded James Dillon as leader of the Fine Gael party in 1965. Eight years later, as leader of a coalition government in which Fine Gael combined forces with the Labour Party, he became taoiseach. Cosgrave and British premier Edward Heath were the main participants in the intergovernmental conference at Sunningdale in December 1973 that gave birth to Northern Ireland’s first (though short-lived) power-sharing executive (1973–74). A devout Roman Catholic, Cosgrave was intensely conservative on social issues and shocked his cabinet colleagues by voting against his own government’s bill on liberalizing the sale of contraceptives in 1974. The National Coalition was defeated in the general election of June 1977, largely on the economic issues of inflation and unemployment.