W. T. Cosgrave
W. T. Cosgrave was the Dublin publican's son who took over the government of the Irish Free State in August 1922 when Griffith died and Collins was shot within ten days of each other, won the civil war with executions his opponents never forgave, governed for ten years, and in 1932 handed power to the man he had beaten, which was the first time in the new state's history that anyone had and the reason it is a democracy. He was born in 1880 over the family pub in James's Street, was a Sinn Féin city councillor from 1909, and fought at the South Dublin Union in Easter Week 1916 under Ceannt; he was sentenced to death and reprieved, and was elected to Westminster from Reading gaol in 1917. In the underground Dáil of 1919 he was minister for local government, the part of the counter-state that actually worked, and he voted for the Treaty in 1922 because the alternative was the war Britain had promised. When Collins was killed at Béal na Bláth on 22 August he was the senior man left; he became chairman of the provisional government and in December the first President of the Executive Council under the constitution that made the Free State a dominion. The government's answer to the republican guerrilla war was the Public Safety Act and seventy-seven executions, including Rory O'Connor, who had been best man at a minister's wedding, shot as a reprisal for a deputy's murder; his own house was burned and his father-in-law's; the fighting stopped in May 1923. The decade after was the making of a state by cautious men: the unarmed Garda, the courts, the Shannon hydroelectric scheme, the currency, entry into the League, the Statute of Westminster negotiated with the other dominions, and a budget that cut the old-age pension by a shilling, which was remembered. He fought the boundary commission and lost, and the army mutiny of 1924 and won. De Valera's party came into the Dáil in 1927 and beat him in February 1932, and Cosgrave handed over the same week, with some of his ministers wondering whether the army would. He led the opposition until 1944 and died in November 1965; his son Liam was Taoiseach eight years later.
- Lived: 1880 CE – 1965 CE
- Nationality: Irish
- Roles: head_of_government, politician
