Cosgrave, William Thomas

Irish revolutionary and politician; president of the executive council (prime minister) of the Irish Free State 1922–32, leader of Cumann na nGaedheal 1923–33, and leader of Fine Gael 1935–44. He was born in Dublin and educated by the Christian Brothers. A founding member of Sinn Fein, he fought in the Easter Rising of 1916 but his death sentence was commuted. He supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921) and oversaw the ruthless crushing of Irregular IRA forces during the Irish Civil War (1922–23), executing far more IRA members than his British predecessors.

Cosgrave was elected to Westminster as a Sinn Fein MP in 1917, and was appointed minister for local government in the first Dáil (then the illegal republican parliament) in 1919. Following the deaths of Collins and Griffith in 1922, he succeeded them as chair of the provisional government and president of the Dáil government respectively, and became prime minister of the Irish Free State. After the civil war the Free State settled down under his leadership to a period of dull and conservative stability. Nevertheless this stability was crucial to the new state's democracy, illustrated by the peaceful transference of power to Cosgrave's old enemies in Fianna Fáil in 1932.