William Thomas Cosgrave

William Thomas Cosgrave (born June 5, 1880, Dublin, Ire.—died Nov. 16, 1965, Dublin) was an Irish statesman, who was the first president of the Executive Council (prime minister; 1922–32) of the Irish Free State.

At an early age, Cosgrave was attracted to the Irish nationalist party Sinn Féin. He became a member of the Dublin Corporation in 1909 and was subsequently reelected to represent Sinn Féin interests. He joined the Irish Volunteers in 1913, and, when the group split in 1914 upon the outbreak of World War I, Cosgrave sided with a radical Sinn Féin minority against the constitutional nationalists led by John Redmond, who supported the British war effort.

Cosgrave took part in the Easter Rising (1916) and was afterward interned by the British for a short time. In 1917 he was elected to Parliament for the city of Kilkenny. In the sweeping election victory of Sinn Féin in 1918, he became a member of the first Dáil Éireann (Irish Assembly). He was made minister for local government in the first republican ministry, and during the Anglo-Irish War (1919–21) his task was to organize the refusal of local bodies to cooperate with the British in Dublin.

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Cosgrave was a supporter of the 1921 treaty settlement with Great Britain, and he became minister of local government in Ireland’s provisional government of 1922. Cosgrave replaced Michael Collins as chairman of the provisional government when the latter became commander in chief of the army in July 1922. Cosgrave also replaced Arthur Griffith as president of the Dáil after Griffith’s sudden death on Aug. 12, 1922. As the first president (from December 1922) of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State, Cosgrave—who had helped found the political party Cumann na nGaedheal (“Party of the Irish”) in April 1923 and became its leader—represented Ireland at the Imperial Conference in October 1923. A month earlier he had been welcomed as Ireland’s first spokesman at the assembly of the League of Nations.

Cosgrave’s greatest achievement was to establish stable democratic government in Ireland after the civil war of 1922–23. In the Dáil there was no serious opposition, since the party headed by Eamon de Valera, which refused to take the oath prescribed in the treaty, abstained from attendance. But neither Cosgrave nor his ministry enjoyed much popularity. Order required drastic measures, and taxation was heavy and sharply collected. Cosgrave seemed sure of a long tenure only because there was no alternative in sight.

In July 1927, shortly after a general election, the assassination of Kevin O’Higgins, the vice president, produced a crisis. The Executive Council introduced a Public Safety Act, which legislated severely against political associations of an unconstitutional character, and introduced a bill declaring that no candidature for the Dáil should be accepted unless the candidate declared willingness to take a seat in the Dáil and to take the oath of allegiance. The result of this measure was that de Valera and his party decided to attend sessions in the Dáil, and, since this greatly altered the parliamentary situation, Cosgrave obtained leave to dissolve the assembly and hold a general election. The election in September 1927 left his party numerically the largest in the Dáil but without an overall majority. He continued in office until de Valera’s victory at the general election of 1932. Cumann na nGaedheal joined with two smaller opposition parties in September 1933 to form a new party headed by Cosgrave, Fine Gael (“Irish Race”), which became Ireland’s main opposition party. In 1944 Cosgrave resigned from the leadership of Fine Gael.