The third man
Monday, February 28th, 2011My feature on John A Costello from Weekend magazine in last Saturday’s Irish Independent
As counting begins this morning after yesterday’s vote in the general election, all the indications are that Fine Gael will be returned in some capacity to form a new government in the 31st Dail.
As it happens next week also marks 63 years since Fine Gael formed this country’s first coalition government, one that was headed by a man who, for a variety of complicated reasons, seems to have been displaced or even forgotten by history.
John Aloysius Costello, the third man to lead independent Ireland, was the head of two inter-party governments from 1948-1951, and 1954-1957, which together make him the country’s longest-serving Fine Gael Taoiseach thus far. In office, he somehow held together an unwieldy group of parties in a crucial test of Ireland’s democratic plurality, took Ireland out of the Commonwealth to declare a Republic, and became embroiled in a career-defining row over healthcare reform.
Yet while Taoisigh like Eamon De Valera, Sean Lemass and Jack Lynch continue to cast a long shadow over Irish historical study, Costello remains perhaps the most elusive figure to ever hold the office. The question is why? Who was Costello as a man and leader, and in what light is his contribution to modern Irish politics now viewed?
Historian and RTE political correspondent David McCullagh has attempted to answer some of those questions in his new biography of Costello. Its title – The Reluctant Taoiseach – suggests one reason as to why John A. Costello remains something of a mystery to readers of Irish political history: nobody, including Costello, ever thought he’d become Taoiseach, and then, when he was offered the position, he hesitated before accepting it.
“Costello was essentially a very modest man, and didn’t like a fuss made of himself,” McCullagh explains. “You could see that in his family’s refusal to have a state funeral when he died in 1976. They knew that he wouldn’t have been interested in that. He didn’t assume a high profile of himself, which is maybe why he doesn’t have a high profile among historians.”
There are other factors involved in Costello’s relative obscurity. “The victors tend to write the history, so I think it’s a function of the fact that Fianna Fail have been in power more often than not, and therefore tend to get the lion’s share of the attention,” McCullagh says.
“I’d also say that in as much as people remember Costello, they remember him for things that are not entirely to his credit: the declaration of the Republic, the Mother and Child controversy, and his second government in the 1950s which was in power at a time of extreme economic crisis and high emigration.”
That Costello rose to the very top in Irish politics is remarkable in itself. Unlike other key figures in post-Independence politics, Costello wasn’t a veteran of Ireland’s iconic republican struggles like the 1916 Rising, the War of Independence, and the Civil War.
In fact, on the day of the Easter Rising Costello was playing golf, and later complained about being stopped at a checkpoint on his way home later that day. “He never had any pretence about his politics,” McCullagh says. “Costello’s line was, ‘I haven’t died for Ireland yet and I don’t intend to’.
Costello was born on Dublin’s northside in 1891 into a comfortable family of committed Parnellites and Home Rule/John Redmond advocates. He studied law in UCD and the King’s Inn, and spent the years of the Irish independence struggle throwing himself into work as a new barrister in Clare and Dublin. He married a teacher named Ida O’Malley in 1919, and had five children, the eldest of whom, Wilfie, was born with a mild mental disability.
Costello’s entry into national politics came through his apprenticeship to Hugh Kennedy, who was to become the first Attorney General to the Irish Free State government led by Cumann na nGaedheal. Costello assisted Kennedy in his work, before himself becoming AG in 1926 at the age of 35, a position in which his profile grew enormously.
In 1933, Costello won a seat for Cumann na nGaedheal, which later that year merged with the controversial Blueshirts to officially form Fine Gael. The party spent the next 15 years in opposition to De Valera’s ruling Fianna Fail. Costello himself called those opposition years “hard, arid, arduous work under conditions of no hope”, and he maintained his beloved career as a barrister at the same time.
By the time the 1948 election came round, voters had a severe case of Fianna Fail fatigue. The way the numbers stacked up after the election meant that all the other parties in the Dail would have to band together in order to stop Fianna Fail forming a new government.
To Sean MacBride, leader of the new Clann na Poblachta party, the Fine Gael leader, Richard Mulcahy, wasn’t an acceptable candidate for Taoiseach (a hostility dating back to the civil war). The well-regarded Costello emerged as the compromise candidate, despite his own initial reluctance to take the post (he expressed fears to his son Declan – who would himself later become a TD and Attorney General – that he wouldn’t be up for the job).
On February 18th, much to Fianna Fail’s fury, John A. Costello was elected Taoiseach of an inter-party government made up of Fine Gael, Labour, National Labour, Clann na Poblachta, and Clann na Talmhan, with the support of Independents.
“I think he was a thoroughly decent guy, and he was an effective chairman, rather than a chief,” says historian Diarmaid Ferriter. “He knew that he couldn’t wield power in the same way as De Valera, and that he had to be pretty flexible.”
Timing and luck are everything in politics, and these factors came into play, for good and for bad, during Costello’s two tenures as Taoiseach. Personality had its role too. Months into his first term, while on a state visit to Canada, Costello announced that Ireland was leaving the Commonwealth and that the 26 counties would become known as the Republic of Ireland.
The (disputed) story goes that Costello – who famously had something of a short fuse – impulsively made the decision in response to a diplomatic error during an after-dinner toast. Whatever Costello’s motivations, Ireland officially became a Republic on Easter Monday 1949, a move that helped Fine Gael move away from the public perception of being a pro-British party.
Of course, the defining event of that first government was the ‘Mother and Child’ scheme, where Costello’s Health Minister, Dr Noel Browne – who had helped to greatly reduce the rates of TB in the country – tried to introduce free maternity care for all mothers, and free healthcare for all children up to 16, regardless of income.
The Irish Medical Association and the Catholic hierarchy, led by the powerful Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, ferociously attacked the scheme, leading to Browne’s eventual resignation from the government.
Since then, a perception has set in that Costello caved in to the bishops, even though, as McCullagh details in his book, the truth is more complicated, and Costello’s motives more sophisticated than that. Still, Browne’s stature only grew in the subsequent years, arguably at Costello’s expense.
“The influence of Noel Browne’s autobiography, Against the Tide, is very significant,” says Gabriel Doherty, who lectures in the history department of University College Cork. “It’s one of the few books published about that period, and it was extremely popular when it came out in the 1980s. Browne’s vitriolic depiction of Costello as a leader has coloured general public perceptions of the man.”
On a personal and private level, Costello was known as a devout Catholic, and as a fiercely committed family man. Residents of south Dublin would often see him walking the family dachshund, while hobbies, apart from law, included golf, and reading detective thrillers.
Costello was also a chain smoker, though, like all politicians, he claimed not to inhale. He was also known to be a dapper dresser, once praised by the British Lord Chancellor no less for his style.
Fine Gael lost power to DeValera in 1951, but returned to office after a snap election in 1954, leading another inter-party government for the next three years. This second administration, however, has been dubbed by one historian as “the worst government in the history of the State” (though surely that’s a title that’s recently come up for grabs again).
It was also a very difficult time for Costello personally: his wife Ida died from acute heart failure in 1956 shortly after he returned from a triumphant US visit. By all accounts Costello was shattered by her death and never really recovered.
“The economy in the 1950s was in perpetual crisis, largely due to policies being pursed by the government,” says Gabriel Doherty. “The results of the 1956 census were absolutely devastating as they seemed to indicate the population could be set in a permanently downward spiral. Young people were voting with their feet by emigrating in huge numbers, which was a huge condemnation of what the government was doing.”
Diarmaid Ferriter, and indeed David McCullagh, views that second administration in a somewhat kinder light. “That government tends to be just associated with disastrous public finances, but there was a lot of experimentation going on regarding the possibility of re-orienting economic policy,” says Ferriter. “However, those plans were stymied by economic circumstances.”
The failure, or at the very least the slowness, to respond to that economic crisis seems to have tarred Costello’s legacy, but as Gabriel Doherty says: “Like Brian Cowen at the moment, when you’re fighting fires everywhere, it’s very difficult to keep your eye on a legacy.
“But Costello has achievements from that period. You could argue that Ireland’s admission to the United Nations in 1955 was very significant on a symbolic level, and it was under Costello that we got the first moves towards dismantling the worst excesses of the censorship regime.”
Costello himself appeared to grasp how his reputation would fade in future years. Upon his retirement from politics in 1969, Costello called himself a “small fry” compared to others, and that “possibly I’ll get about two lines in that same history if I’m referred to at all.”
“I think it was important for Irish democracy that there was an alternative to just DeValera and Fianna Fail continuing in office forever,” concludes David McCullagh. “By presenting that alternative, and showing that coalitions could work, Costello really set the template for a lot of governments that followed here, including ones that eventually involved Fianna Fail.”
*The Reluctant Taoiseach: A Biography of John A. Costello by David McCullagh is published by Gill & Macmillan
