However negatively Brian Cowen is regarded south of the border – and it does take some years for politicians' reputations to settle – Northern Ireland has good reason to offer its good wishes to the departing taoiseach.
He has been a good friend to the province and, like Bertie Ahern before him, he showed it the patience of Job. He devoted disproportionate time to helping sort out wrangles over recondite issues such as the devolution of policing and even funding. During the last of the Celtic tiger years, Cowen tried to share the south's good fortune with the north, doing his best to push finance jobs into Belfast's Titanic Quarter.
Cowen came from the republican wing of Fianna Fáil and could have been forgiven for falling out with unionists during his tenure as minister for foreign affairs. After their first meeting, the Rev Ian Paisley went on the attack, making a tirade of childish but studied personal insults about Cowen's appearance the centrepiece of a rally in 2003 to launch his party's Assembly election campaign.
"Away with him, indeed, and if he wants to use his lips to better effect, he should do it somewhere else and go to people of like physical looks," the DUP leader concluded. His crude attack was intended to wound and humiliate. At the time, Paul Bell, the landlord of Cowen's local in Tullamore, said a reference made by Paisley to Cowen's mother had been particularly hurtful: "The lip remarks alone were bad enough, but bringing his mother into it was not on."
However, Cowen managed to show some style in his retort, reminding Paisley that "politics is not a beauty contest" and somehow resisting the obvious jibe that, if it were, neither of them would have won any elections. Instead of reacting personally, he put it in the context of the serious political business to be done in the peace process. "I think we have gone beyond the failed politics of insults and have a substantive agenda to address," he said.
People who know Cowen like him. He is warm and bonds easily. I remember finding him entertaining and great company, with a fund of stories, when I ran into him at a Fianna Fáil fundraiser in a Dublin hotel where I was staying. As I recall, he claimed to have once produced a hurley to settle an industrial dispute and sang The Town I Loved so Well.
However, those who didn't know Cowen tended to cut him a lot less slack than they would have Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Ahern or Charles Haughey. If Ahern had sounded hung over, as Cowen did in an earlymorning RTE radio interview last September, it might not have created such a fuss. Cowen was ridiculed and forced to apologise, as the incident went viral. The YouTube video of Jay Leno calling him a drunken moron who might have been mistaken for a bartender, illustrated with unflattering pictures of Cowen laughing, got more than 247,000 hits. Alan Shortt parodied him on the Late Late Show. The taoiseach just couldn't get out from under it.
It is undeniable that the recession occurred on Cowen's watch and that he made mistakes for which he can't escape responsibility. However, just like Paisley, many critics were prepared to stick the boot in all the harder because, as his Biffo nickname had it, he looked and sometimes acted like a Big Ignorant F***** From Offaly.
He may well have got the same sort of abuse in school and thought that it was past him once he became a poll-topping TD and senior minister. The intense and hostile personal scrutiny – not to mention the level of ridicule – that he endured as the Irish economy went belly-up may account for the fact that, towards the end, he became a sort of recluse, not reaching out to journalists with briefings or interviews, perhaps for fear that he would only end up getting insulted.
Politics is a notoriously rough trade, and politicians who scramble all over each other as they ascend the greasy pole can't afford the sensitivities of poets. All the same, Cowen, like Gordon Brown, the former British leader, got it tougher than most, and it was partly because of his public appearance and manner.
In the north, though, he didn't really put a foot wrong. Back in April 2008, when he was heir-apparent to the leadership of a seemingly invincible Fianna Fáil, Cowen appeared with Peter Robinson to announce the planned creation of 5,000 high-end finance-sector jobs from firms based in Dublin to subsidiaries in Belfast. The two finance ministers, as they then were, planned to create an unbeatable package combining the south's 12.5% corporation tax with the north's lower office rents to expand both economies.
They called each other "Brian" and "Peter", making it an important symbolic moment that helped to underpin powersharing between the DUP and Sinn Féin. It helped to make north/south co-operation seem like a good idea to unionists, instead of a bone of contention that poisoned relations with other parties.
Cowen also allayed unionist fears during a St Patrick's Day briefing in the White House last year. "Is there ever going to be a united Ireland?" he was asked by Wolf Blitzer of CNN. "Not without the consent of the people of Northern Ireland," came the reply, in which Cowen stressed that only a minority in the province wanted change. Of course, it was a statement of fact. Under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, the border can be removed only after simultaneous referendums north and south. Yet it must have been tempting, in front of an American audience, to say something aspirational about the two parts of Ireland coming together gradually.
In a move that could be questioned by the next Irish government, Cowen also committed the republic to extensive spending in Northern Ireland. He earmarked €580m for roads through the north linking Dublin to Donegal, €120.7m on peace projects and €70.7m on interregional funding, all to be spent in the period to 2013.
Another good move he made on becoming Fianna Fáil leader was to halt plans to merge with the SDLP or to expand Fianna Fáil into the north. Both the Aherns – Bertie and Dermot – had floated that idea. People in the north were allowed to join Fianna Fáil, and a couple of party branches were opened. A Sinn Féin MLA even switched to Fianna Fáil when he fell out with his party. It looked feasible, and the lure was that it would provide Fianna Fáil with a chance to take on Sinn Féin in its northern heartland. Cowen, alone, seemed to sense that it could instead prove a boon to Sinn Féin, by overstretching Fianna Fáil and potentially splitting the SDLP.
Few realised it at the time, but it would have been an even greater disaster for Fianna Fáil if it had been heading into northern Assembly and council elections next May, after taking a drubbing in the Dáil contest later this month. For that small mercy at least, Fianna Fáil supporters in the north can thank Cowen.
