seamus dubhghaill

Promoting Irish Culture and History from Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

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Birth of Gabriel Byrne, Actor, Director & Producer

gabriel-james-byrne

Gabriel James Byrne, internationally acclaimed actor, film director, film producer, writer, cultural ambassador and audiobook narrator, is born in Dublin on May 12, 1950.

Byrne is the first of six children. His father is a cooper and his mother a hospital worker. He is raised Catholic and educated by the Irish Christian Brothers. He spends five years of his childhood in a seminary training to be a Catholic priest. He later says, “I spent five years in the seminary, and I suppose it was assumed that you had a vocation. I have realized subsequently that I didn’t have one at all. I don’t believe in God. But I did believe at the time in this notion that you were being called.” He attends University College Dublin (UCD), where he studies archeology and linguistics, and becomes proficient in the Irish language. He plays football in Dublin with the Stella Maris Football Club.

Byrne works in archeology after he leaves UCD but maintains his love of his language, writing Draíocht (Magic), the first drama in Irish on Ireland’s national Irish television station, TG4, in 1996.

He discovers his acting ability as a young adult. Before that he works at several occupations which include being an archaeologist, a cook, a bullfighter, and a Spanish schoolteacher. He begins acting when he is 29 years old. He begins on stage at the Focus Theatre and the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, later joining the Royal Court Theatre and the Royal National Theatre in London.

Byrne comes to prominence on the final season of the Irish television show The Riordans, later starring in the spin-off series, Bracken. He makes his film début in 1981 as Lord Uther Pendragon in John Boorman‘s King Arthur epic, Excalibur.

Byrne does not visit the United States until he is 37 years old. In 1988, he married actress Ellen Barkin with whom he has two children. The couple separates amicably in 1993 and divorce in 1999.

In November 2004, Byrne is appointed a UNICEF Ireland Ambassador. In 2007 he is presented with the first of the newly created Volta awards at the 5th Jameson Dublin International Film Festival for his lifetime achievement in acting. He also receives the Honorary Patronage of the University Philosophical Society, of Trinity College Dublin on February 20, 2007. He is awarded an honorary degree in late 2007 by the National University of Ireland, Galway, in recognition of his “outstanding contribution to Irish and international film.”

Byrne is featured as therapist Dr. Paul Weston in the critically acclaimed HBO series In Treatment (2008). In his return to theater in 2008, Byrne appears as King Arthur in Alan Lerner and Frederick Loewe‘s Camelot with the New York Philharmonic which is featured in a PBS broadcast in the Live From Lincoln Center series in May of 2008.

Byrne currently resides in Manhattan, New York.

(From IMDb Mini Biography by Bernie Corrigan)


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Birth of Peter Sutherland, Barrister & Politician

File source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Peter-Sutherland-2011.jpg

Peter Denis Sutherland, businessman, barrister and politician, is born in Foxrock, Dublin on April 25, 1946. He is a barrister by profession and a Senior Counsel of the Bar Council of Ireland. He is known for serving in a variety of international organisations, political and business roles.

Sutherland is educated at Gonzaga College, Ranelagh, Dublin. He is of partial Scottish ancestry. He graduates in Civil Law at University College Dublin and practices at the Irish Bar between 1969 and 1980. He marries Maruja Sutherland, a Spaniard, in 1974.

Sutherland makes his entry into politics when he is appointed Attorney General of Ireland in June 1981. He resigns in March 1982 only to take the post again between December 1982 and December 1984.

Sutherland is appointed to the European Commission in 1985. He is Chairman of the Committee that produces The Sutherland Report on the completion of the Internal Market of the European Economic Community (EEC), commissioned by the European Commission and presented to the European Council at its Edinburgh meeting in 1992.

Sutherland serves as United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General for International Migration from January 2006 until March 2017. He is responsible for the creation of the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD). He also serves as President of the International Catholic Migration Commission, as well as member of the Migration Advisory Board of the International Organisation for Migration.

In 1993, Sutherland becomes Director-General of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, now the World Trade Organization. He serves as Chairman of Allied Irish Banks (AIB) from 1989 to 1993 and as Chairman of Goldman Sachs from 1995 to 2015.

In September 2016, Sutherland suffers a heart attack while on his way to Mass at a Catholic Church in London. Six months later, he resigns from his post as United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General for International Migration because of poor health. After a long illness, he dies at St. James’s Hospital in Dublin on January 7, 2018, of complications from an infection, at the age of 71. He is buried in Kilternan Cemetery Park in Dublin.

Peter Sutherland received numerous awards including European Person of the Year Award (1988).

(Pictured: Peter D. Sutherland, Chairman, Goldman Sachs International, United Kingdom; Member of the Foundation Board of the World Economic Forum, speaks during the session ‘China’s Impact on Global Trade and Growth’ at the Annual Meeting 2011 of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 27, 2011. Copyright by World Economic Forum swiss-image.ch/Photo by Michael Wuertenberg)


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Birth of Denis Devlin, Poet & Diplomat

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Denis Devlin, poet, translator, and career diplomat, is born in Greenock, Scotland of Irish parents on April 15, 1908. Along with Samuel Beckett and Brian Coffey, he is one of the generation of Irish modernist poets to emerge at the end of the 1920s.

Devlin and his family return to live in Dublin in 1918. He studies at Belvedere College and, from 1926, as a seminarian for the Roman Catholic priesthood at Clonliffe College. As part of his studies he attends a degree course in modern languages at University College Dublin (UCD), where he meets and befriends Brian Coffey. Together they publish a joint collection, Poems, in 1930.

In 1927, Devlin abandons the priesthood and leaves Clonliffe. He graduates with his BA from UCD in 1930 and spends that summer on the Blasket Islands to improve his spoken Irish. Between 1930 and 1933, he studies literature at the University of Munich and the Sorbonne in Paris, meeting, amongst others, Beckett and Thomas MacGreevy. He then returns to UCD to complete his MA thesis on Michel de Montaigne.

Devlin joins the Irish Diplomatic Service in 1935 and spends a number of years in Rome, New York and Washington, D.C.. During this time he meets the French poet Saint-John Perse, and the Americans Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren. He goes on to publish a translation of Exile and Other Poems by Saint-John Perse, and Tate and Warren edit his posthumous Selected Poems.

Since his death on August 21, 1959, there have been two Collected Poems published; the first in 1964 is edited by Coffey and the second in 1989 by J.C.C. Mays.

Devlin’s personal papers are held in University College Dublin Archives. His niece goes on to become writer Denyse Woods.


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Passage of the Special Powers Act 1922

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The Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act (Northern Ireland) 1922, often referred to simply as the Special Powers Act, is passed by the Parliament of Northern Ireland on April 7, 1922, shortly after the establishment of Northern Ireland, and in the context of violent conflict over the issue of the partition of Ireland. Its sweeping powers make it highly controversial, and it is seen by much of the Northern Irish nationalist community as a tool of Ulster unionist oppression. The Act is eventually repealed by the Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Act 1973, following the abolition of Northern Ireland’s parliament and the imposition of direct rule by the British government.

At the start of the twentieth century, the people of Ireland are divided into two mutually hostile factions. Nationalists, the much larger group, are mostly Roman Catholic, identify primarily as Irish, and want some form of Irish home rule or independence from Britain. Unionists, the smaller group, concentrates primarily in the province of Ulster, are mostly Protestant, identify primarily as British (although many see themselves as Irish and British), and are committed to remaining within the United Kingdom.

Partition is formally established with the Government of Ireland Act 1920. This also establishes the Parliament of Northern Ireland, which comes into being the following year. Partition is followed by high levels of inter-communal violence, especially in Belfast. The Irish Republican Army (IRA), although it spends most of these years fighting in the Irish Civil War, aims to use armed force to end partition and compel the United Kingdom to withdraw sovereignty from Northern Ireland.

The Act is presented as being necessary to re-establish peace and law and order in Northern Ireland and enables the government to “take all such steps and issue all such orders as may be necessary for preserving the peace and maintaining order,” although it is specified that the ordinary course of law should be interfered with as little as possible. Because it is presented as emergency legislation, the Act is initially current only for one year and has to be renewed annually. In 1928, however, it is renewed for five years and when this period expires in 1933 the Act is made permanent.

Despite rhetoric accompanying the Act which asserts that it is for the purpose of restoring public order, its provisions continue to be used for the entire period of the Northern Irish parliament’s existence. Because the Ulster Unionist Party is the only party ever to form a government in this parliament, the Act is used “almost exclusively on the minority population.” Initially, regulations under the Act are used mostly to curb immediate violence and disorder. One of the most controversial of these is internment without trial.

After the troubles of the early 1920s dies down, the provision for internment is not used until the IRA’s Border Campaign of the 1950s, in which several hundred republicans are interned. Following the outbreak of The Troubles in 1968, many within the Protestant community call for the reintroduction of internment. This occurs in 1971 and authorises internment of those suspected to be involved in terrorism. Although there are loyalist as well as republican terrorists at this time, of the 1,981 men interned, only 107 are loyalists. Due to inadequate intelligence-gathering, many of the interned republicans are members of the Official Irish Republican Army rather than the recently formed Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), which is much more heavily involved in terrorist activity at the time.

Internment ends in 1975 but is credited with increasing support and sympathy for the PIRA amongst the Catholic community and outside of Northern Ireland. It helps to create political tensions which culminate in the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike and the death of MP Bobby Sands. Imprisonment under anti-terrorism laws specific to Northern Ireland continue until the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, but these laws require the right to a fair trial be respected.


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Birth of St. Clair Mulholland, Union Army Colonel

File source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:St_Clair_Mulholland.jpg

St. Clair Augustine Mulholland, colonel in the Union Army in the American Civil War and Medal of Honor winner, is born in Lisburn, County Antrim on April 1, 1839.

Mulholland emigrates to Philadelphia with his parents while a boy. His youthful tastes incline him to military affairs, and he becomes active in the ranks of the militia. At the outbreak of the Civil War, he is commissioned lieutenant colonel of the 116th Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment, which is attached to Thomas Francis Meagher‘s Irish Brigade. When the regiment‘s size is reduced to a battalion, he accepts a reduction in rank to major.

Mulholland is wounded during the famous charge of the Irish Brigade up Marye’s Heights at the Battle of Fredericksburg on December 13, 1862. At the Battle of Chancellorsville on May 3 and 4, 1863, he leads his regiment and distinguishes himself by saving the guns of the 5th Maine Battery that had been abandoned to the enemy. For this he is complimented in general orders and later receives the Medal of Honor from the United States Congress. In this campaign he is given the command of the picket line by Major General Winfield Scott Hancock and covers the retreat of the Army of the Potomac across the Rappahannock River.

Although Mulholland later claims that at the Battle of Gettysburg on July 2, 1863, he personally took command of the 140th Pennsylvania Infantry and led it into action, this fact is mentioned in neither his own official report of the battle, nor that of the lieutenant colonel commanding the 140th. When the 116th is returned to full strength in early 1864, he is promoted to colonel. He is wounded a second time at the Battle of the Wilderness on May 5, 1864. At the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, he is wounded a third time but remains in the hospital only ten days. Resuming his command, he is dangerously wounded again at the Battle of Totopotomoy Creek. He recovers rapidly and commands his brigade in all the actions around the Siege of Petersburg, particularly distinguishing himself by storming a fort on the Boydton Plank Road. He is mustered out of the volunteer service on June 3, 1865.

On May 4, 1866, President Andrew Johnson nominates Mulholland for the brevet grade of brigadier general of volunteers to rank from March 13, 1865, for his conduct at the Battle of the Wilderness and the U.S. Senate confirms the appointment on May 18, 1866. On January 13, 1869, President Johnson nominates Mulholland for appointment to the brevet grade of major general of volunteers, to rank from March 13, 1865, for his actions on the Boydton Plank Road and the Senate confirms the appointment on February 16, 1869. The brevet is issued February 20, 1869. It is the last brevet of major general issued for service during the Civil War.

Returning to civilian life after the war, Mulholland is appointed Chief of Police in Philadelphia in 1868 and signalizes his administration by the good order in which he keeps both the force and the city. President Grover Cleveland appoints him United States Pension Agent, in which office he is continued by Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. He is considered an authority on the science of penology and also devotes much of his leisure time to art studies, and as a lecturer and writer on the Civil War and its records. He compiles a history of the 116th Regiment, and another of those to whom Congress voted the Medal of Honor. In the Catholic affairs of Philadelphia, he is always active and a leader among the best-known laymen.

St. Clair Augustin Mulholland dies on February 17, 1910, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is buried at Old Cathedral Cemetery, Philadelphia.


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Birth of Arthur Griffith, Founder of Sinn Féin

arthur-griffith

Arthur Joseph Griffith, writer, newspaper editor and politician who founded the political party Sinn Féin, is born in Dublin on March 31, 1871. He leads the Irish delegation at the negotiations that produce the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty and serves as President of Dáil Éireann from January 1922 until his death in August 1922.

Griffith, a Roman Catholic, is educated by the Irish Christian Brothers. He works for a time as a printer before joining the Gaelic League, which is aimed at promoting the restoration of the Irish language.

After a short spell in South Africa, Griffith founds and edits the Irish nationalist newspaper The United Irishman in 1899. In 1904, he writes The Resurrection of Hungary: A Parallel for Ireland, which advocates the withdrawal of Irish members from the Parliament of the United Kingdom and the setting up of the institutions of government at home, a policy that becomes known as Sinn Féin (ourselves). On November 28, 1905, he presents “The Sinn Féin Policy” at the first annual Convention of the National Council. The occasion is marked as the founding date of the Sinn Féin party. Although the organization is still small at the time, Griffith takes over as president of Sinn Féin in 1911.

Griffith is arrested following the Easter Rising of 1916, despite not having taken any part in it. On his release, he works to build up Sinn Féin, which wins a string of by-election victories. At the party’s Ardfheis (annual convention) in October 1917, Sinn Féin becomes an unambiguously republican party, and Griffith resigns the presidency in favour of the 1916 leader Éamon de Valera, becoming vice-president instead. Griffith is elected as a member of parliament (MP) in June 1918, and is re-elected in the 1918 general election, when Sinn Féin wins a huge electoral victory over the Irish Parliamentary Party and refusing to take their seats at Westminster, set up their own constituent assembly, Dáil Éireann.

In the Dáil, Griffith serves as Minister for Home Affairs from 1919 to 1921, and Minister for Foreign Affairs from 1921 to 1922. In September 1921, he is appointed chairman of the Irish delegation to negotiate a treaty with the British government. After months of negotiations, he and the other four delegates sign the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which creates the Irish Free State, but not as a republic. This leads to a split in the Dáil. After the Treaty is narrowly approved by the Dáil, de Valera resigns as president and Griffith is elected in his place. The split leads to the Irish Civil War.

Griffith enters St. Vincent’s Nursing Home, Leeson Street, Dublin, during the first week of August 1922, following an acute attack of tonsillitis. He is confined to his room by his doctors, who had observed signs of what they thought might be a subarachnoid hemorrhage. It is difficult to keep him quiet and he resumes his daily work in the government building. When about to leave for his office shortly before 10:00 AM on August 12, 1922, he pauses to retie his shoelace and falls down unconscious. He regains consciousness but collapses again with blood coming from his mouth. Three doctors render assistance, but to no avail. Father John Lee of the Marist Fathers administers extreme unction, and Griffith expires as the priest recites the concluding prayer. The cause of death, cerebral hemorrhage, is also reported as being due to heart failure. He dies at the age of 51, ten days before Michael Collins‘ assassination in County Cork and two months after the outbreak of the Irish Civil War. He is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery four days later.


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Ian Paisley’s Retirement from the Power-Sharing Assembly

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On March 23, 2011, Ian Paisley calls for a new era of sharing and reconciliation in an emotional farewell at his final sitting of the power-sharing Assembly he helped to create at Stormont. Dr. Paisley continues his political career in the House of Lords.

Protestant and Catholic leaders in Northern Ireland‘s unity government celebrate their first full four-year term in power and lauded Paisley, the unlikely peacemaker who made it possible, on his effective retirement day.

Paisley, a stern anti-Catholic evangelist who spent decades rallying pro-British Protestants against compromise, stuns the world in 2007 by agreeing to forge a coalition alongside senior Irish Republican Army (IRA) veterans. Their polar-opposite combination governs Northern Ireland with surprising harmony for the four years leading up to his retirement.

The Northern Ireland Assembly that elects the administration is dissolved on March 14, 2011, in preparation for a May 5 election in the British territory. The 84-year-old Paisley makes his last debate in an elected chamber on March 6, 2011, noting that this local government is not ending in chaos and acrimony, as 1999-2002 attempts at power-sharing repeatedly had done.

At this point, Paisley has already stepped down as a member of the British and European parliaments and as leader of the Democratic Unionists, a party of hard-line Protestant protesters that he founded in 1970 and watched grow over the previous decade into the most popular in Northern Ireland.

Those lauding him include Peter Robinson, who succeeded him in 2008 as leader of both the government and the Democratic Unionists and Sinn Féin‘s Martin McGuinness, the senior Catholic politician who spends decades as a commander of Paisley’s archenemy, the IRA.

The IRA kills nearly 1,800 people in a failed 1970-1997 effort to force Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom. Northern Ireland remains part of the United Kingdom when the overwhelmingly Catholic rest of Ireland gains its independence in 1922. The outlawed IRA formally renounces violence and disarms in 2005, clearing the way for its allied Sinn Féin party to recognize the legal authority of Northern Ireland and its police.

Still, few observers expected Paisley to agree to a pact so quickly after the IRA-Sinn Féin peace moves or to get along so warmly with McGuinness during their year in partnership.

McGuinness, whose organization once considered Paisley a prime target for assassination, addressing his remarks to the stooped, silver-haired Paisley across the chamber, notes that Ulster wits had christened the two of them “the Chuckle Brothers.” He adds, “And I would like to think that we showed leadership. I think my relationship with him will undoubtedly go down in the history books.”

(From: “Northern Ireland power-sharing marks 1st full term,” the Associated Press and CTV News, March 23, 2011)


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Death of William R. Grace, Irish American Politician

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William Russell Grace, Irish American politician, the first Roman Catholic mayor of New York City, and the founder of W. R. Grace and Company, dies in New York City on March 21, 1904.

Grace is born on May 10, 1832, in Ireland in Riverstown near the Cove of Cork to James Grace and Eleanor May Russell (née Ellen) while the family is away from home. He is raised on Grace property at Ballylinan in Queens County, now County Laois, near the town of Athy. He is a member of a prominent and well-to-do family. In 1846, he sails for New York against the wishes of his father and works as a printer’s devil and a shoemaker’s helper before returning to Ireland in 1848.

His nephew, Cecil Grace, attempts a crossing of the English Channel in December 1910 in an airplane, flying from Dover to Calais. However, in coming back he becomes disoriented and over Dover flies northeast over the Goodwin Sands toward the North Sea and is lost.

Grace and his father travel to Callao, Peru, in 1851, seeking to establish an Irish agricultural community. While his father returns home, William remains and begins work with the firm of John Bryce and Co., as a ship chandler. In 1854, the company is renamed Bryce, Grace & Company, in 1865, to Grace Brothers & Co., and ultimately to W. R. Grace and Company.

On September 11, 1859, Grace is married to Lillius Gilchrist, the daughter of George W. Gilchrist, a prominent ship builder of Thomaston, Maine, and Mary Jane (née Smalley) Gilchrest. Together, they have eleven children.

Opposing the famous Tammany Hall, Grace is elected as the first Irish American Catholic mayor of New York City in 1880. He conducts a reform administration attacking police scandals, patronage and organized vice, reduces the tax rate, and breaks up the Louisiana State Lottery Company. Defeated in the following election, he is re-elected in 1884 on an Independent ticket but loses again at the following election. During his second term, he receives the Statue of Liberty as a gift from France.

Grace is a renowned philanthropist and humanitarian, at one point contributing a quarter of the aid delivered to Ireland aboard the steamship Constellation during the Irish Famine of 1879. In 1897, he and his brother, Michael, found the Grace Institute for the education of women, especially immigrants.

William R. Grace dies on March 21, 1904, at his residence, 31 East 79th Street, in New York City. His funeral is held at St. Francis Xavier Church on West 16th Street, and he is buried at the Holy Cross Cemetery in Brooklyn. At the time of his death his estate is valued at $25,000,000.


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Birth of Actor Patrick Joseph McGoohan

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Patrick Joseph McGoohan, American-born actor who is raised in Ireland and Great Britain, is born in Astoria, Queens, New York on March 19, 1928. He establishes an extensive stage and film career.

McGoohan is the son of Rose (Fitzpatrick) and Thomas McGoohan, who are living in the United States after emigrating from Ireland to seek work. He is brought up as a Catholic. Shortly after he is born, his parents move back to Mullaghmore, County Leitrim. Seven years later they emigrate to Sheffield, England.

McGoohan attends St. Vincent’s School and De La Salle College in Sheffield. During World War II, he is evacuated to Loughborough, Leicestershire. There he attends Ratcliffe College, where he excels in mathematics and boxing. He leaves school at the age of 16 and returns to Sheffield, where he works as a chicken farmer, a bank clerk, and a lorry driver before getting a job as a stage manager at Sheffield Repertory Theatre. When one of the actors becomes ill, McGoohan is substituted for him, launching his acting career.

McGoohan is most closely identified with two 1960s British television series, Danger Man and The Prisoner. The espionage drama Danger Man, which runs in the United States as Secret Agent, runs for 86 episodes during 1960–1961 and 1964–1967. The cult hit The Prisoner runs for 17 episodes in 1967–1968.

In Danger Man McGoohan puts a new spin on the secret agent formula by refusing to allow his character, John Drake, to carry a gun or indulge in sexual dalliances. The show’s success makes him Britain’s highest-paid TV actor.

McGoohan is one of several actors considered for the role of James Bond in Dr. No. While McGoohan turns down the role on moral grounds, the success of the Bond films is generally cited as the reason for Danger Man being revived in 1964. He is later considered for the Bond role in Live and Let Die but again turns it down.

The success of Danger Man provides McGoohan the leverage he needs to produce The Prisoner, an allegorical Kafkaesque series in which he portrays Number Six, an unnamed agent, thought by many to represent Drake, who angrily resigns and is then held captive in a superficially banal place called The Village, where the mysterious unseen Number One, the ever-changing Number Two, and others try to overcome the fiercely individualistic Number Six’s escape attempts and pry information from him.

McGoohan’s later works include the short-lived medical mystery series Rafferty (1977), such films as Ice Station Zebra (1968), Escape from Alcatraz (1979), and Braveheart (1995), the Broadway spy drama Pack of Lies (1985), and a record four guest-villain appearances on the American detective series Columbo, two of which earned him Emmy Awards. He also directs and writes several episodes of The Prisoner and Columbo. One of his last roles is as Number Six in a 2000 episode of the animated TV comedy The Simpsons.

Patrick McGoohan dies on January 13, 2009, at Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, California, following a brief illness. His body is cremated.


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Liam Cosgrave Elected Taoiseach of Ireland

liam-cosgrave

Liam Cosgrave is elected the sixth Taoiseach of Ireland on March 14, 1973. He serves in the position from March 1973 to July 1977.

Cosgrave is born on April 13, 1920, in Castleknock, County Dublin. His father, William Thomas Cosgrave, was the first 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). The eldest son, he is educated at Synge Street CBS, Castleknock College, Dublin, studies law at King’s Inns and is called to the Irish bar in 1943. In that same year he enters Dáil Éireann (the lower house of the Oireachtas, the Irish parliament), and he retains his seat until his retirement from politics in 1981.

In 1948, when the first inter-party government replaces Éamon de Valera’s Fianna Fáil regime, which had been in power for the previous 16 years, Cosgrave becomes parliamentary secretary to the Taoiseach and to the Minister for Industry and Commerce. It is a short-lived administration, going out of power in 1951 after three years of rule. But in a second inter-party government (1954–57), he becomes Minister for External Affairs and leads the first Irish delegation to the United Nations General Assembly in 1956.

Cosgrave succeeds James Dillon as leader of the Fine Gael party in 1965. Eight years later, as leader of a coalition government in which Fine Gael combines forces with the Labour Party, he becomes Taoiseach. He and British Prime Minister Edward Heath are the main participants in the intergovernmental conference at Sunningdale in December 1973 that gives birth to Northern Ireland’s first, though short-lived, power-sharing executive (1973–74).

A devout Roman Catholic, Cosgrave is intensely conservative on social issues and shocks his cabinet colleagues by voting against his own government’s bill on liberalizing the sale of contraceptives in 1974. The National Coalition is defeated in the general election of June 1977, largely on the economic issues of inflation and unemployment.

In 1981, Cosgrave retires as Dáil Deputy for Dún Laoghaire to be replaced by his son, Liam T. Cosgrave. He reduces his involvement in public life, but he makes occasional appearances and speeches. In October 2010 he attends the launch of The Reluctant Taoiseach, a book about former Taoiseach John A. Costello written by David McCullagh. He also appears in public for the Centenary of the Easter Rising in 2016, watching from a car as the military parade marches through Dublin. On May 8, 2016, in a joint appearance with the grandsons of Éamonn Ceannt and Cathal Brugha, he unveils a plaque commemorating the 1916 Rising at St. James’s Hospital, the former site of the South Dublin Union.

Liam Cosgrave dies on October 4, 2017, at the age of 97 of natural causes. He had been at Tallaght Hospital for several months prior to his death there. His funeral is held on October 7, 2017, after which he is interred alongside his father at Inchicore‘s Goldenbridge Cemetery.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar says “Liam Cosgrave was someone who devoted his life to public service; a grateful country thanks and honours him for that and for always putting the nation first. Throughout his life he worked to protect and defend the democratic institutions of our State and showed great courage and determination in doing so. He always believed in peaceful co-operation as the only way of achieving a genuine union between the people on this island, and in the 1970s he celebrated that this country had embarked, in his own words, ‘on a new career of progress and development in the context of Europe’. I had the honour on a few occasions to meet and be in the presence of Liam Cosgrave, and I was always struck by his commanding presence and great humility, which in him were complementary characteristics.”