to Seanad Éireann as a Senator, the upper house of the Oireachtas, representing the Administrative Panel. The 2nd Seanad sat for less than two months, and at the 1938 general election he was elected to the 10th Dáil as a TD for Dublin North-East. Defeated again in the election of 1943, he secured election to the 4th Seanad by the Labour Panel. Leader of Fine Gael After the resignation of W. T. Cosgrave as Leader of Fine Gael in 1944, Mulcahy became party leader while still a member of the Seanad. Thomas F. O'Higgins was parliamentary leader of the party in the Dáil at the time and Leader of the Opposition. Facing his first general election as party leader, Mulcahy drew up a list of 13 young candidates to contest seats for Fine Gael. Of the eight who ran, four were elected. He had successfully cast aside the Cosgrave legacy of antipathy to constituency work, travelling the country on an autocycle and bringing new blood into the party. He was returned again to the 12th Dáil as a TD for Tipperary at the 1944 general election. While Fine Gael's decline had been slowed, its future was still in doubt. Following the 1948 general election—at which, following boundary changes, Mulcahy was elected for Tipperary South, the dominant Fianna Fáil party finished six seats short of a majority. However, it was 37 seats ahead of Fine Gael, and conventional wisdom suggested that Fianna Fáil was the only party that could possibly form a government. Just as negotiations got underway, however, Mulcahy realised that if Fine Gael, the Labour Party, the National Labour Party, Clann na Poblachta and Clann na Talmhan banded together, they would have only one seat fewer than Fianna Fáil—and that if they could get support from seven independents, they would be able to form a government. He played a leading role in persuading the other parties to put aside their differences and join forces to consign the then Taoiseach and Fianna Fáil leader Éamon de Valera, to the opposition benches. Since Fine Gael was by far the largest party in the prospective coalition, Mulcahy initially seemed set to become Taoiseach in a coalition government. However, he was not acceptable to Clann na Poblachta's leader, Seán MacBride. Many Irish republicans had never forgiven Mulcahy for his role in the Civil War executions carried out under the Cosgrave government in the