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Looking at Fine Gael from inside and out Independent.ie 27/12/2020 Mary O Rourke
It s harvest time, isn t it, for readers who want to learn more about Fine Gael. This autumn we had two books dealing with this topic: Shane Ross s In Bed with the Blueshirts and Saving the State by Stephen Collins and Ciara Meehan.
So apart from the subject matter, what have these books in common? Firstly, they share outrageous titles. Nobody in Fine Gael wants to call themselves a Blueshirt , so Ross s provocative title is startling.
The Collins/Meehan book also seeks to grab attention with an arresting title. It covers a lot of ground, as evidenced by the subtitle: Fine Gael from Collins to Varadkar. To my mind, there was one occasion when the party, under the leadership of WT Cosgrave in 1932. did save the nation. In that election, Fianna Fáil had won the greater number of seats and, having dismissed the oath of allegiance as a meaningless formula, it entered the Dáil and