Book review: Confident, congenial Cowen was a victim of bad timing

Brian Cowen was elected taoiseach in 2008, but his timing ensured his tenure at the top would be a struggle and he would forever be associated with the trying to right a listing ship of state rather than making a significant mark on history

This well written biography is a refreshing lens through which to view the decades when politics was going through huge change where Brian Cowen had a front seat view for most of it. File picture: Barry Cregg / Sportsfile

• Brian Cowen: Anatomy Of A Taoiseach
• Gary Murphy
• eriu, €21.99

Timing was a problem for Brian Cowen, in both his sporting and political careers. 

At 21, he was drafted into the Offaly senior football panel. This was in 1981 and there was something in the air. 

The county manager Eugene McGee had, according to Gary Murphy in this highly engaging biography, an “almost messianic belief in his own ability”.

By the time the championship came round the following year, Cowen had been dropped, his intercounty career over before it really took off. 

If he knew then what was about to unfold perhaps he would have ensured he stayed put. 

That year, Offaly beat Kerry in a dramatic final to deny the Kingdom five in a row while Cowen was sitting in the stands. 

“They haven’t won one since,” Murphy writes.

So it went at the foothills of Cowen’s adulthood. He was still a young man when elected taoiseach in 2008. 

He came to power by acclamation within his party such was his stature among colleagues. Great things were understandably expected. 

Yet his timing ensured that his tenure at the top would be a struggle and he would forever be associated with the trying to right a listing ship of state rather than making a significant mark on history.

As he attended at Áras an Uachtaráin for President Mary McAleese to dissolve the 30th Dáil in 2011, and bring down the curtain on his own parliamentary career, “the president offered the taoiseach a small smile, and he reciprocated”, Murphy writes. 

But they were smiles of resignation, not of the hope and excitement of 1,000 days earlier.

It was supposed to be so different. Cowen was the great white hope for the Soldiers of Destiny and it’s easy to see why. He was in some ways a man who possessed a refined form of the party’s DNA.

Cut him and he would bleed old Fianna Fáil, the representative of the working man (and woman), a constant eye out for those most in need, a keen awareness of his own voters and their priorities, belief in generating wealth through business and iron clad tribalism. 

All wrapped in a simple form of human decency that is not widespread in politics among those who aspire for greatness. What could possibly go wrong?

Gary Murphy’s previous biography of a taoiseach detailed the life and times of Charlie Haughey. 

The source of much of that material came from Haughey’s personal archive which had been donated to DCU where Murphy is professor of politics. 

The result was a doorstopper of a book that managed to engage throughout.

This is a different beast. The author outlines how it came about with an invitation to visit Cowen in his Tullamore home where he was recuperating from a stroke. 

Murphy was interested in sifting through Cowen’s life and eventually his subject consented to a series of in-depth interviews with the only proviso that the author be fair, a matter he left to trust.

Cowen exuded confidence but never arrogance

He glided through boarding school and UCD, exuding confidence but never arrogance. Life lay ahead like a wide unexplored prairie, with maybe the prospect of politics shimmering on the horizon, but not front and centre.

And then tragedy struck when his father Ber, the local TD, died suddenly in January 1984. Brian was the chosen successor and had the backing of his father’s colleagues in Leinster House.

His ability and congeniality marked him out for bigger things. He survived the various splits over Haughey and subsequently Albert Reynolds’ brief tenure. Then it was onto high office under Bertie Ahern.

Though the first seven years in an Ahern cabinet he displayed competence, confidence, and an ability to get things done. 

First stop was “Angola” as he namechecked the Department of Health. At the time the African country was known for its wide fields of landmines.

Foreign Affairs was next on the list and he excelled there also. In retrospect, that was as good as it got for this scion of the party. 

He replaced Charlie McCreevy in finance in 2004 when Ahern came to the conclusion that McCreevy was becoming a liability.

There is a school of thought that Ahern considered Cowen a more malleable minister for finance at a time when the party was sinking in popularity and would have been expected to hike up spending.

Runaway spending right up to the 2007 general election

The subject of this biography does not accept that he oversaw runaway spending right up to the 2007 general election.

He does point out all the pressures that applied — not dissimilar to today — to the incumbent government to spend at a time of plenty. 

And bar a few economists, everybody was drinking the soft landing Kool Aid. Yet one suspects the long view of history will indict him for his stewardship during this period.

The baton change from Ahern to Cowen occurred at the former’s home as tribunal woes were smothering Ahern. 

Cowen is adamant he didn’t push and his version of this is credible. Ahern was a political realist. He knew the game was up.

The account of the bank bail-out and the subsequent approach to the Troika provide riveting passages for a seminal time in Irish history. 

Cowen doesn’t spare the bankers' conduct and rightly so. He is, however, reticent on the details of the deterioration of his relationship with his minister for finance, Brian Lenihan.

The perspective in this book from the time goes some way to rebalancing perceptions that Lenihan was the sane and sensible voice at the time, battling with a more politically minded Cowen. 

The Offaly man is not one to put the boot in but as he pointed out to Murphy, he wants his version of events on the record.

Question marks remain over some of his recollections, not least the infamous interview on Morning Ireland at a Fianna Fáil think-in in 2010. 

He is adamant he wasn’t drunk and retains animus towards Simon Coveney for issuing a tweet suggesting he may have been. 

His own version of the night before is laid out here and people can make of it what they will.

The remainder of his tenure as taoiseach was not pretty as he struggled against the past, the Troika, and a dogeared national economy. 

His final days did little to enhance his reputation. 

After others thought he should go, he simply reshuffled his cabinet as if he was mid-term looking for an injection of energy and ideas, rather than struggling through end days.

“Nearly everyone in Fianna Fáil thought it a madcap scheme of almost Nero-esque hubris from a taoiseach who had lost all grip on reality.”

This well written biography is a refreshing lens through which to view the decades when politics was going through huge change where Brian Cowen had a front seat view for most of it. 

He was an unlucky general. Yet the impression lingers in these pages that he has compartmentalised regrets and tries to focus on his positive contribution, which informs a hitherto neglected aspect of his legacy.

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