William T. Cosgrave

Irish politician

• Born: June 6, 1880
• Birthplace: Dublin, Ireland
• Died: November 16, 1965
• Place of death: Dublin, Ireland

At a crucial period in Irish history Cosgrave’s even-handed administration of the Irish Free State government achieved victory in a civil war, while preserving democratic institutions and making possible the future achievements of the Republic of Eire.

Early Life

William T. Cosgrave (KAWZ-grayv) was educated in local Christian Brothers schools. He entered the grocery trade at an early age, but he shared an interest in local and national government with his father, Thomas Cosgrave, who was at one time a town councillor and a poor-law guardian. Cosgrave was committed to Irish independence; in 1905 he attended the first convention of Sinn Féin (the Irish revolutionary group), and in 1909 he was elected to the Dublin Corporation as an alderman. He distinguished himself in financial affairs and became chair of the corporation’s finance committee in 1916.

In 1913, Cosgrave joined the Irish Volunteers, and when that organization split the following year over the issue of Irish support of the Allies against Germany, he was with the minority that rejected the leadership of John Redmond. In the Easter Rebellion of 1916 he fought with Eamon Ceannt’s battalion in the defense of the South Dublin Union. The death sentence for his role in the insurrection was commuted to penal servitude for life, and he was interned in Wales.

When the Irish prisoners were released in June, 1917, in the general amnesty that followed the David Lloyd George government’s call for a convention to write a constitution for Ireland, Cosgrave returned to Ireland and was elected to the House of Commons in a by-election as a member for Kilkenny, but he refused to take his seat. He participated in the Sinn Féin convention of October, 1917, which called for complete independence from Great Britain. When the new Irish constitution was announced in April, 1918, Lloyd George, desperate for new troops for the western front, introduced a bill to apply conscription to Ireland, and Cosgrave was arrested and charged fraudulently, along with seventy other Irish leaders, with conspiring with German agents. In the general election of December, 1918, he was again elected by Kilkenny, even though he was in prison in England.

Life’s Work

Cosgrave returned to Ireland in March, 1919, in a second general amnesty and took his seat in the Dáil Éireann, the Irish house of representatives, which was composed of the Sinn Féiners who had been elected to the House of Commons. Eamon de Valera, president of the Dáil, appointed Cosgrave minister for local government in this illegal parliament, and he began a quarter century of service to his country as cabinet officer, government leader, and opposition leader.

Cosgrave’s first task as minister for local government was to persuade local government bodies to repudiate British authorities in Dublin and to declare their allegiance to the Dáil. By late 1920, this had largely been accomplished, and almost all these bodies were under the supervision of Cosgrave’s ministry.

Meanwhile the Lloyd George government had passed yet another home-rule bill, calling for the partition of Ireland and separate parliaments for Ulster and southern Ireland. When elections to the southern parliament were held in May, 1921, Cosgrave was again elected by Kilkenny in Sinn Féin’s almost total victory. As a member of the cabinet, he recommended acceptance of the treaty of December, 1921, which called for partition of Ireland, a possible later redefinition of the boundary, and Irish membership in the British Commonwealth. De Valera’s rejection of the treaty and his resignation as president of the Dáil led eventually to the conflict in which Cosgrave emerged as the dominant figure in the Irish government.

The treaty called for the creation of a provisional government to write a new constitution, and Cosgrave served in this government while retaining his post in the Dáil government, which was now led by Arthur Griffith. When Griffith died in August, 1922, and his successor, Michael Collins, was killed in an ambush ten days later, the leadership of both governments fell inevitably to Cosgrave, though at that time he was largely unknown to the general public. As chair of the provisional government, president of the Dáil, and minister of finance, he was always prepared to accept responsibility, but his greatest skills were in his leadership of a team of diverse talents and in his ability to resolve conflicts among its members. In this role he fought what had become a civil war with antitreaty forces, which included Irish Republican Army (IRA) radicals and de Valera’s wing of Sinn Féin. Though the army loyal to the government had captured the antitreaty strongholds in Cork and Kerry, acts of terrorism were being committed against the government, and raiding by both Protestants and Roman Catholics on the Ulster border was an almost daily occurrence. In October, 1922, Cosgrave introduced a special powers act that gave the government extreme authority to destroy the IRA. When a Dáil member was assassinated in December, four IRA hostages, one of them the popular Rory O’Connor, were executed in reprisal.

With the formal establishment of the Irish Free State in December, 1922, Cosgrave pressed on to end the civil war, though not without personal cost. (In January, 1923, an arsonist burned his home to the ground.) When de Valera’s rebel government ordered the IRA to suspend activities against the Irish Free State and announced a willingness to negotiate with it, Cosgrave demanded the rebels’ surrender, saying in the Dáil that he would not “hesitate if . . . we have to exterminate 10,000 republicans [because] the 3 millions of our people is bigger than this 10,000.” In May, 1923, de Valera offered to surrender on condition that he and his colleagues would not have to take an oath of allegiance to the Irish Free State. Cosgrave again refused, insisting that political issues could be decided only by a majority of the voters, and challenged de Valera to a contest at the polls.

By August, 1923, Cosgrave’s government held twelve thousand political prisoners; four thousand had been killed on both sides, including more executions by the protreaty forces than the British had perpetrated in the entire period from Easter, 1916, to the truce of 1921. Nevertheless, in that month’s election, Cosgrave’s party, Cumann na nGaedheal (League of the Gaels), founded the previous spring, won almost 60 percent of the popular vote, a victory suggesting that the people generally wanted peace badly enough to support Cosgrave’s draconian measures.

With the end of the civil war, Cosgrave sought to reduce the Irish Free State’s army by two-thirds and to demobilize 60 percent of its officers. This led to a crisis in March, 1924, when he received an ultimatum from a faction in the army demanding suspension of demobilization and implying a willingness to mutiny. Realizing that the nation’s political structure was too fragile to permit a full-scale condemnation of those whose sacrifices had made the Irish Free State possible, Cosgrave treated the crisis as a policy dispute within his own cabinet, received the resignation of two ministers, acted as his own minister of defense, and persuaded the mutineers to back down.

This crisis was followed by another over the boundary with Ulster. By the terms of the 1921 treaty, a commission was to decide the final boundary. When the commission’s report in November, 1925, recommended an exchange of territory to adhere more closely to the actual division of Catholics and Protestants in the two territories, public opinion in the south was outraged, even though the result would have been a net gain both in territory and population for the Irish Free State. Cosgrave, understanding his own people’s unwillingness to surrender hard-won gains and realizing that the commission’s recommendations probably could not be implemented without bloodshed, negotiated an agreement with the governments of Great Britain and Ulster that accepted the existing boundary in exchange for a release of the Irish Free State from financial requirements of the 1921 treaty, including the Irish Free State’s share of the British national debt.

In international affairs Cosgrave sought both recognition of the Irish Free State by the League of Nations, which was granted in 1923, and all of the benefits of dominion status within the British Commonwealth, which he achieved at the Dominion Conference the same year.

In economic matters, his government was conservative and generally favored free trade. Its greatest economic achievement was the hydroelectric development of the Shannon River, which by 1929 had more than tripled the Irish Free State’s production of electric power. Unfortunately, during the worldwide depression after 1929, unemployment increased and exports fell sharply. As a result, Cosgrave’s party lost the general election of 1932, and de Valera came to power. Ironically, Cosgrave’s 1927 bill requiring that no candidacy for the Dáil could be accepted unless the candidate declared himself willing to accept office and take an oath of allegiance to the Irish Free State had the effect of bringing de Valera and his colleagues into the Dáil.

In 1933, Cosgrave helped to unite his party with two others to form Fine Gael (the United Ireland Party), though he was forced to step down as party leader. In 1935, he was elected unanimously to the party leadership, and he continued to lead the party in the Dáil until his retirement from politics in 1944.

During World War II, Cosgrave supported de Valera’s policy of neutrality but insisted that it required a heavy buildup of military strength. In the 1943 general election his party suffered a disastrous defeat, and the following year, convinced that his party had fulfilled its historical role during his own administration, he retired. He served on the Irish Racing Board for many years, and died, widely respected for his good sense and moral courage, on November 16, 1965, in Dublin.

Significance

Cosgrave was a fundamentally conservative man whose greatest contribution to Ireland was in heading a government that, in a country torn by violence and divided by civil war, preserved the forms of democracy by the use of military force without permitting the creation of a permanent police state. Though neither an ambitious nor a magnetic personality, he possessed the great leader’s skills of delegating authority wisely and managing to get the conflicting talents in his government to work together. He created an efficient and effective civil service and an unarmed national police force, revitalized the court system, and reorganized local government all of this during a civil war. A devout Catholic, honored by the Vatican with one of its highest decorations, he was adamantly opposed to religious bigotry and sectarian conflict and was determined to make the Protestant minority a vital part of Irish society and government. His government achieved compliance with the 1921 treaty, used military force to end a civil war, established the nation’s credit, achieved national sovereignty for the Irish Free State in the League of Nations and the British Commonwealth, and harnessed the Shannon River. The later achievements of de Valera, in repudiating the British connection and creating the Republic of Eire, were possible only because of the firm democratic foundation built by Cosgrave.

Bibliography

Coogan, Timothy Patrick. Ireland Since the Rising. 1961. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976. A detailed and balanced history of Ireland during the four decades following the Easter Rebellion.

Curran, Joseph M. The Birth of the Irish Free State, 1921-1923. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1980. A thorough examination of Cosgrave’s career, especially of the time he emerged as the leader of the Irish Free State government.

Jordan, Anthony J. W. T. Cosgrave, 1880-1965: Founder of Modern Ireland. Dublin: Westport Books, 2006. A biography focusing on Cosgrave’s presidency.

Laffan, Michael. The Resurrection of Ireland: The Sinn Féin Party, 1916-1923. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Recounts the party’s creation after the Easter Rebellion and its subsequent rise to political power. Includes information about Cosgrave.

Lawlor, Sheila. Britain and Ireland, 1914-1923. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1983. Though the title suggests an emphasis on Anglo-Irish relations, this book provides considerable detail on the workings of Cosgrave’s government during the civil war.

Macardle, Dorothy. The Irish Republic. 1937. New ed. Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1999. A strongly pro-Republican account, rich in detail, though it should be used with caution because of its bias on behalf of de Valera.

O’Sullivan, Donal. The Irish Free State and Its Senate. 1940. Reprint. New York: Arno Press, 1972. Though the emphasis of this study is on the upper house of the Dáil, it contains copious detail on the workings of the Irish government during Cosgrave’s administration.

Prager, Jeffrey. Building Democracy in Ireland. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. A balanced account of problems encountered by the Cosgrave government, with in-depth examinations of the army mutiny and the boundary crisis.

Younger, Calton. Ireland’s Civil War. 1968. New ed. London: Fontana/Collins, 1979. A detailed history of the civil war that Cosgrave confronted in 1922 and of the measures he took to end the strife.