Former Irish prime minister Liam Cosgrave died 4 October 2017. He was 97.

The former Fine Gael leader was the son of W. T. Cosgrave, who in the 1920s led the first government of the 26-county Irish Free State. Liam Cosgrave was taoiseach from 1973 to 1977.

• “He always believed in peaceful co-operation as the only way of achieving a genuine union between the people on this island, and in the 1970s he celebrated that this country had embarked, in his own words, ‘on a new career of progress and development in the context of Europe’ ” current Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said in an official statement.
• Cosgrave visited U.S. President Gerald Ford at St. Patrick’s Day during the American bicentennial year of 1976, as detailed in this 2016 post from our archive.

Liam Cosgrave, left, with his father in 1957.