Garret FitzGerald
Garret FitzGerald was an economist and a journalist whose father had been a minister in the first Free State government and whose mother was a Belfast Presbyterian, was Taoiseach twice in the 1980s against Haughey, lost the referendums he called and won the treaty he wanted, and signed with Margaret Thatcher the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 that gave Dublin a say in the North for the first time. He was born in Dublin in 1926, the son of Desmond FitzGerald, who had been in the GPO and was minister for external affairs. He worked for Aer Lingus on timetables, lectured in economics at University College Dublin, wrote for the Irish Times and the Economist, and was elected for Fine Gael in 1969 as the leader of its social democratic wing. As minister for foreign affairs from 1973 he chaired the Community's council in 1975, and he took the party's leadership from Liam Cosgrave after the defeat of 1977 and made it a party of the professional classes. He became Taoiseach in June 1981 at the head of a coalition with Labour that lasted eight months and fell on a budget that put VAT on children's shoes, and again in December 1982 for four years of the worst public finances in the state's history, which he did not cure. What he wanted was a constitutional crusade to make the Republic a place Northern Protestants could accept. The referendum on divorce in 1986 was lost two to one, and the one on abortion in 1983, which he had opposed being held, wrote the prohibition into the constitution. The New Ireland Forum of 1983 and 1984 set out the nationalist case in terms London could read, and Thatcher rejected all three of its options in a sentence. A year later, at Hillsborough in November 1985, she signed the agreement that gave the Irish government a consultative role in Northern Ireland through a standing conference, which the Unionists struck against for a year and which every later settlement was built on. He resigned after the election of 1987, and went back to writing a weekly column. He was chancellor of the National University, and the most trusted man in the country by the polls, and died in May 2011, the week the Queen visited.
- Lived: 1926 CE – 2011 CE
- Nationality: Irish
- Roles: taoiseach, politician, economist
