Michael Laffan’ Judging W. T. Cosgrave, the third book in the Royal Irish Academy’s acclaimed ‘Judging’ series, is an illustrated, political biography of independent Ireland’s first head of government. Unlike previous subjects, Éamon de Valera and Seán Lemass, W. T. Cosgrave has been a somewhat neglected figure in both the historiography of twentieth-century Ireland and popular memory more generally. According to the author, Cosgrave ‘remained for decades one of the forgotten figures of Irish history’ despite having presided over the foundation of a resilient democracy that survived the convulsions of the inter-war period. Although he served almost ten years as the Free State’s first president of the Executive Council, memory of Cosgrave has faded with more charismatic figures such as de Valera and Michael Collins dominating the historiography. Even Fine Gael, the party that Cosgrave helped to establish in 1933, has a tendency to look towards the lost leaders, Collins and Arthur Griffith, and not the man who was the pro-Treaty parliamentary leader from 1922 to 1944.

Before the publication of this book, Cosgrave had, in contrast to the plethora of works devoted to de Valera, Collins and his own deputy leader Kevin O’Higgins, been the subject of one short biography by Anthony Jordan and a study by Stephen Collins in which he was assessed alongside his son Liam, taoiseach 1973–77. Therefore, this biography fills a significant gap in the historiography of twentieth-century Ireland in which Cosgrave, alone among the state’s first five heads of government, had not yet been the focus of a major study. This had been regrettable given Cosgrave’s centrality in both the revolutionary period and the foundation of the state. Laffan was able to access the uncatalogued Cosgrave papers, and uses these to shed new light on aspects of both his early years and subsequent career in public life. What emerges is a vivid portrait of a committed democrat who led the nascent Free State from the devastation of a brutal Civil War in 1922 to the relative ‘normalcy’ of the 1932 general election and the subsequent transfer of power to the very people his forces had defeated a decade earlier.

After the deaths of the pro-Treaty leaders Griffith and Collins in August 1922, Cosgrave was ‘the obvious choice’ to assume the leadership (p. 116). His experience of pre-Easter 1916 politics as a reforming member of Dublin Corporation – where he showed concern for the welfare of the city’s poorest inhabitants – would prove invaluable (p. 34). As Collins’s successor at the head of the provisional government during a time of fratricidal conflict, Cosgrave was thrust into what would prove the greatest challenge of his long political career. While his anti-Treatyite adversaries may have believed that Cosgrave and his colleagues had betrayed republican principles, as Laffan points out in chapter three, the Free State leader had his own impressive résumé in separatist politics. A founding member of both Sinn Féin and the Irish Volunteers, Cosgrave was involved in both the Howth gun-running of July 1914 and the Easter Rising of 1916 where he saw action at the South Dublin Union. Like de Valera, Cosgrave had his death sentence commuted to life imprisonment before going on to win the Kilkenny by-election for Sinn Féin on his release in 1917. This chapter demonstrates Cosgrave’s evolving political style during the revolutionary period. As the Dáil’s minister for Local Government, Cosgrave railed against localism, strove for administrative efficiency and insisted that posts should be filled by the best-qualified candidates. These traits would characterise the governments he led in peacetime, 1922–32.

Laffan uses Cosgrave’s own papers to reveal that his subject, like many other nationalists, harboured unrealistic hopes that Woodrow Wilson’s influence in European affairs could work to Ireland’s advantage (p. 61). Similarly, the author’s use of this resource sheds new light on Cosgrave’s time ‘on the run’ in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday in November 1920. Arguably, his deft touch saved the Anglo–Irish Treaty in December 1921 when he persuaded de Valera to give the delegation a chance to explain their reasons for signing and then placed his vote with theirs at the crucial cabinet meeting on 8 December. In Laffan’s account of the Civil War, Cosgrave is depicted as a ruthless and uncompromising figure who oversaw the harsh measures deemed necessary to bring about a swift victory for the pro-Treaty side. Adopting the dictum ‘terror meets terror’, Cosgrave stood over his government’s executions policy, displaying little ‘sentimentality or softness’ as republican morale was shaken by the Free State’s stern resolve to defeat them (p. 122).

In peacetime, Cosgrave’s instincts favoured caution over innovation and the Cumann na nGaedheal governments that he led for just under a decade were characterised by a paternalistic conservatism in both the social and economic spheres. Yet the Cosgrave administration also oversaw a land-purchase programme that cost upwards of £30m and the ambitious Shannon hydro-electric scheme. Laffan gives nuanced consideration to each of these aspects of Cumann na nGaedheal’s period of governance and the fact that on explicitly Catholic social mores, Cosgrave had to contend with a de Valera intent on out-bidding him (p. 263).

While primarily a political biography, there are occasions when the intersection of the personal with the political forces the biographer to deal with the bouts of ill-health that dogged Cosgrave for much of his life. Despite being confined to his sick bed during the army crisis Cosgrave remained firmly in control while in subsequent years, illnesses would force him to miss cabinet meetings (p. 194). In 1930, the head of government spent months away from his desk, missing seventeen out of eighteen successive cabinet meetings. When Cosgrave relinquished power in 1932 little did he realise that he would never again occupy the government benches in the Dáil. Twelve frustrating years in opposition followed before he retired from public life in 1944. In retirement Cosgrave shunned the limelight, cut his links with party politics and drifted into the shadows where he has largely remained. This meticulously researched biography succeeds in rescuing W. T. Cosgrave from the margins of twentieth-century Irish history and places him firmly at the heart of the historiography. Judging W. T. Cosgrave constitutes a major contribution to the historical understanding of independent Ireland’s first head of government and the democratic state that he helped to establish and nurture whether in government or opposition.