Brian Lenihan (1959 - 2011)

By Vincent Murphy

Brian Lenihan was one of his generation's most talented politicians - an extremely affable man on a personal level - and one who fought pancreatic cancer bravely, even at a time he occupied the most high pressure job in the country.

His name will always be linked to two of the most critical decisions ever made by an Irish Finance Minister - the decision to introduce a blanket guarantee on all of the debts of Irish banks in September 2008, and the signing of a rescue deal with the IMF/EU/ECB in November 2010.

Knowing that he was seriously ill, and now in opposition after almost three years as finance minister, he recently gave an interview about the bailout in an attempt, one assumes, to help frame his legacy.

"I believed I had fought the good fight and taken every measure possible to delay such an eventuality, and now Hell was at the gates," he said in an extremely frank conversation with Irish Times economics editor Dan O'Brien in an interview for the BBC.

He spoke about how he felt he had been bounced into a deal by the European Central Bank earlier than he believed was necessary.

And he recalled how low he felt on the week it happened.

"I've a very vivid memory of going to Brussels on the final Monday to sign the agreement and being on my own at the airport and looking at the snow gradually thawing and thinking to myself: this is terrible. No Irish Minister has ever had to do this before."

It's a poignant image.

History will no doubt have much to say about Brian Lenihan's true legacy.

An accurate description may only be possible when the IMF/EU/ECB bailout is no longer in place and Ireland has its economic independence back.

There will always be debate over who knew what, when, how much and what if.

But despite presiding over some of the harshest budgets in history, and being at the wheel when the Irish economy came unstuck, he remained popular with the Irish public.

He was the only TD elected for Fianna Fail in Dublin in the 2011 general election - a remarkable achievement that says much about his political pedigree.

Brian Joseph Lenihan was born in Dublin in May 1959 into one of Ireland's foremost political dynasties.

His father, also named Brian, was elected to the Dail in 1961 and followed into the House by his grandfather in 1965 - the first and only time in history to date where a parent following a child into the Irish parliament.

Brian Snr went on to hold several cabinet positions including Justice, Foreign Affairs, and Tanaiste.

He famously lost the 1990 presidential election, during which his catchphrase "on mature recollection" entered the Irish political lexicon.

Serving alongside Brian Snr in later years was his sister, Mary O'Rourke, who held three cabinet positions and has become one of Ireland's most-loved political commentators.

Brian Jnr was educated at Belvedere College in Dublin, and at Trinity College where he studied law, winning a first class honors degree.

He won a scholarship to Cambridge, from he also graduated with first class honors, and was called to the Bar in 1984.

He worked as a barrister for several years and also lectured part-time in Trinity.

He had been involved with Fianna Fail locally since he was a teenager, helping to canvass for his father in many elections.

In 1996, following the death of his father, Brian Jnr won the resulting by-election in Dublin West.

In the general election in 1997, he retained the seat, and won it in every election since then.

His brother Conor became the latest member of the Lenihan clan to be elected to the Dail in the same election.

The same year, he became a senior counsel and also married Patricia Ryan, who later became a circuit court judge. They would have two children.

Although he was tipped for a junior minister after the 1997 election, the then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern appointed him instead to head a new Constitutional Review Committee.

Again after the 2002 election, in which he topped the poll in his constituency, he was widely tipped for a cabinet post, but had to settle for a junior ministry, with responsibility for children.

It was commented widely that he was "not liked" by Bertie Ahern, but after topping the poll once again in Dublin West in 2007, his stature became too difficult to ignore.

Ahern appointed him to the post of Minister for Justice - 44 years after his father had held the same position, another political first in Ireland.

His stint at the Department was brief.

When Bertie Ahern was forced to resign in May 2008 amid controversy over his personal finances at the Mahon Tribunal, the new Fianna Fail leader Brian Cowen surprised many by promoting Brian Lenihan to replace him at Finance.

Before long, Mr Lenihan was realizing that the plum job was a poisoned chalice of sorts.

He told a construction industry conference that he had "the misfortune to become Minister for Finance a few weeks ago as the building boom was coming to a shuddering end".

But the true scale of the misfortune was still not clear to the new minister, as the country soon slid into recession, and a projected deficit of €3bn was within months looking more like €7bn.

Worse still, the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the US and the subsequent credit crunch on global financial markets had left Irish banks looking extremely exposed.

There were real fears that the banking system in Ireland could collapse.

At a crisis meeting on September 29th, 2008, with senior figures from all of the Irish banks, Lenihan and his cabinet colleagues decided to take a gamble.

They gave a State guarantee for all deposits and almost all debts of Irish banks, with a total liability of more than €440 billion.

Lenihan believed that putting the country's sovereign name behind the debts, would be enough to stave off an emerging panic in the markets about Irish banks and prevent a run.

He said the guarantee was "the cheapest bailout in the world so far" because he believed it would never need to be called on.

But he was proved wrong, and the decision proved disastrous by effectively shifting the burden of these bank debts onto taxpayers.

What was initially believed to be a liquidity crisis soon revealed itself to be a solvency issue, as the massive scale of losses in Irish banks due to the property boom became apparent.

The relatively new finance minister, although widely praised for getting a quick grasp on the extremely complicated issues quickly, found himself battling on two fronts.

The bank guarantee had not worked, bank losses were revealing themselves to be enormous, and banks were still in trouble.

Meanwhile, the exchequer deficit was massive, making the cost of government borrowing ever more expensive on the markets too.

Having linked bank debt to sovereign debt, the markets were making little distinction between bank and government debt.

To tackling the ongoing bank problem, he would set up NAMA, an agency which would purchase the distressed loans from the banks at a discount, in the hope that they could be resold for a profit at a later date.

In the meantime, the measure would clean up the bank's balance sheets and offer the prospect of them raising their much needed capital from the private markets rather than government.

To tackle the deficit, he would introduce a series of austere budgets.

In his first budget, Lenihan increased taxes, levied Civil Service pensions and controversially put a ceiling on income for medical card entitlements for over-70s.

The measure led to street protests from pensioners, and the government quickly backtracked.

The controversy showed that the Irish public was still not fully aware of the scale of the crisis that the country faced, and the government soon realized it was important to bring the public up to speed with the escalating crisis.

Brian Lenihan was a key performer in this regard, regularly going on TV and radio, to outline the problems and how he believed they should be dealt with.

He introduced an emergency budget in April 2009, and then later that year as he announced the Budget for 2010 - the harshest in decades - he declared that Ireland "had turned a corner".

Unfortunately that was not the case, and fate was to deal him an even fiercer blow in his personal life.

In December 2009, there was shock when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

There was some controversy as TV3 broke the news over Christmas without the minister's approval.

But early in the New Year he confirmed it was true, but that he intended to stay on as Minister for Finance, with his doctor's approval.

During 2010, he delivered the annual Michael Collins memorial address at Beal na Blath, a traditionally Fine Gael event, and the first FF minister to ever do so.

It was a measure of the high regard in which he was held, despite differences over his economic policy.

And as the year went on, it was clear that the economic crisis was not going away, but getting worse by the month.

As tax revenues fell due to higher unemployment, and with no economic growth, the Irish deficit was not reducing.

Despite the transfer of loans worth €70bn to NAMA, there remained major international concerns over the size of debts in Irish banks.

By October Mr Lenihan was denying that Ireland would need to turn to the IMF for help, but the cost of government borrowing rose above 8% - unsustainably high.

The next month, Mr Lenihan led negotiations with the IMF, EU and ECB on a rescue package for Ireland worth €85 billion, in return for an interest rate of 5.5% and the promise of a range of additional austerity measures over the coming years.

The humiliating handover of economic sovereignty to the troika of IMF/EU/ECB which Mr Lenihan had fought for years to stave off had become a reality.

In January 2011, after Brian Cowen's resignation, Brian Lenihan challenged for the leadership of Fianna Fail, but was defeated by Michael Martin.

Despite his illness, he stood for re-election again in Dublin West, was returned by voters.

Since then he was been the deputy leader of Fianna Fail, as well as continuing to be the party's spokesman on finance.

But his health deteriorated significantly in recent weeks.

Following his death on Friday, there has been an outpouring of respect for Brian Lenihan, and in some cases, a revision of the harsh judgment he has received from analysts in the past few months.

Even those who disagreed with his decision to guarantee the banks in September 2008, acknowledge he may have been operating on "bad information" at the time.

We don't know if he knew the full scale of the banks' exposure to losses when he issued the guarantee.

But as the recent BBC interview indicated, he still believed it had been the right decision and he prevented the collapse of any Irish bank during his time as Finance Minister, albeit at some cost.

Regardless of the merits, or otherwise, of any of his individual decisions, Brian Lenihan was without doubt a man of integrity, an extremely effective communicator, and a politician with remarkable dedication to public service even in the face of the most serious illness.