SEÁN LEMASS would have viewed the crisis that Ireland faces as one primarily of solidarity and national purpose, Taoiseach Brian Cowen has said.
Mr Cowen, who was launching a biography of one of his Fianna Fáil predecessors as taoiseach, also said Lemass would have welcomed the public debate about the handling of the State’s fiscal difficulties, including the publication of the McCarthy report on public sector cuts and the report of the Commission on Taxation.
The new book, Judging Lemass, was written by UCD political scientist Prof Tom Garvin and was launched at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin yesterday.
In a half-hour speech that assessed the legacy of Lemass, who was leader of Fianna Fáil and taoiseach between 1959 and 1966, Mr Cowen recalled the Irish Timeseditorial upon his death in 1971 which described his as a "supreme pragmatist".
“He was in politics quite simply to get things done. He was unimpressed by celebrity. He did not need public life for an adrenaline fix,” said Mr Cowen.
The Taoiseach said Lemass’s legacy included a huge commitment to increasing participation in education and for executing the shift away from self-sufficiency to an economic model that would encourage foreign investment and trade.
“Lemass had been the architect of protectionist policies but he had the vision and the intellectual ability to recognise that such policies no longer served our national purpose in a new emerging era of free trade agreements,” he said.
Prof Garvin’s book made it clear, he said, that Lemass remained proud of his patriotic stance but deeply regretted that hostilities had proved necessary.
Mr Cowen said he believed that Lemasss would have seen the pragmatic necessity of the economic approach now being adopted.