Prof Gary Murphy launches new Brian Cowen biography
Why did you choose Brian Cowen as the subject of your latest book?
He invited me to meet him back in 2022, and I told him at that meeting that I thought all Taoisigh deserved a good biography, and I said, “I think I could write a good biography of you.” I'd been interested in him because I write about modern Ireland, and in one way he is the critical figure in modern Ireland in relation to the tumultuous events of 2008 to 2010 – the bank guarantee scheme, the crash, the collapse of Fianna Fáil.
Having managed to secure interest from publishers, you went back to him a few years later. How did you pitch the book to him at that point?
I went back to see him, and told him I would like to write a book about him based on a series of long conversations we would do together, and other work I would do talking to other people, and I got him ultimately to bite. So in one way, he came to me, but I have been fascinated by him as the face of, one might call it, the failure of modern Ireland.
Brian Cowen has had some serious health issues in recent years. How did you find him as an interviewee?
His mind is very sharp, but he does, like anybody, forget things. He’d say, “Well, I can't remember.” In my experience, he was always very well prepared for our meetings. He would have notes, and he'd have an iPad and an iPhone constantly going.
He was Minister for Finance during the Celtic Tiger. Does he regret the mistakes that were made during that time?
He is cognisant of the fact that regulation under his watch, both as Finance Minister and as Taoiseach, was not as stringent as it should be, and that there was a type of buccaneering capitalism let loose, and he has regrets of not reining that in. Now, in his last two budgets in ‘07 and ‘08, he tried to curb some of the excesses, but it was too late by then. But he's not one to assign blame to others. He's not like Trump, for instance, who will say it's everyone's fault but mine. He's more like Harry Truman, ‘the buck stops with me’.
The book describes Brian Cowen as having ‘the worry gene’. How suited was he to leading the government in such troubled times?
When he became Taoiseach, and as times became more difficult, he found governing and leading more difficult, and it all ultimately went pear-shaped as the economy continued to go down. He and Brian Lenihan were fighting with each other, but also trying to fight the forces that they unleashed, in one way, in terms of the reliance on property tax, having to guarantee the banks, and that's a grim tale, really… I do think he found being Taoiseach quite difficult, onerous. He wore the weight of being Taoiseach quite heavily, perhaps more heavily so than others.
He was known as a combative politician, nicknamed by some as ‘BIFFO’. What did he make of that characterisation?
The caricature of him as Biffo; it’s a word he really can't stand, and he thinks it ignorant. I quote in the book from a cable sent by the American embassy saying that he relishes this nickname, but that is categorically wrong. He hates that nickname and treats it with a sort of scorn and contempt. He sees it as urban Ireland looking down on rural Ireland.
There’s a common view that Brian Cowen was Ireland’s worst ever Taoiseach, but what, if anything, did he get right?
So, he's very defensive about the bank guarantee scheme. He's happy to stand over it, but I think mistakes were made in the run-up to it. He's associated with having to bring the Troika into the country. We were basically given this massive loan, but we had to report to the Troika quarterly about what we're doing in terms of our cuts in education, our cuts in health or social welfare, and there's no part of the country which escapes. And then you say, well, what's on the plus side? And it’s very difficult to think of anything. But there can be no doubt that the stringent economic measures his government put in place, austerity as it is often described, laid the foundations for the Fine Gael-Labour government to actually get rid of the Troika a few years later, although Cowen does accept that these measures had serious impacts on the lives of the ordinary people of the state, who he was very proud to represent.
In your conversations, how would you assess his overall mood?
He's more optimistic than perhaps I thought he would be. He has come to terms with the fact that he, in his view, tried his best. He didn't get everything right, but he thinks he has made some contribution to Irish public life, and I would agree with that. He was a TD from 84 to 2011, so he basically spent 27 years in public life. He'd been a minister for much of it and Taoiseach, albeit, I think everyone would accept, not a very successful one.
How do you think he’ll respond to the book?
I told him at the end that there would be things that he wouldn't like, and he said, well, I hope so, because nobody would be interested in a hagiography, and I said that is true. Sometimes I get accused in the media of being too soft on Haughey, and I'm sure people might think the same about this book, but I'm happy to stand over it as a pretty accurate account of one man and the impact he had on the politics and society of the Irish State.