As the first leader of the Free State, WT Cosgrave presided over a brutal execution regime which saw the death of 81 anti-Treaty prisoners during the Civil War.
He justified the executions in a notorious interview in February 1923 in which he stated that “irregulars”, as he called anti-Treaty forces, were a minority who could not be allowed to dictate terms to the majority.
“I am not going to hesitate if the country is to live, and if we have to exterminate 10,000 republicans, the three million of our people is greater than this 10,000,” he said.
Yet, he expressed private regret for the executions in an unsent letter to a former supporter of his.
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“Regarding executions, I regret them as much as anyone else if not more so,” he wrote to a priest in January 1923.
“And I further regret that there may have to be more if what you call ‘civil war’ on the people of the country does not cease.”
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The priest in question was Fr Raphael Ayres, a Dominican priest based in Tralee, Co Kerry, who was a well-known republican.
He sent an angry letter to Cosgrave in December 1922, a month when the newly established Free State government executed four prisoners in Mountjoy Jail without trial.
Fr Ayres wrote to Cosgrave saying that he was a native of Kilkenny where Cosgrave was first elected as a Sinn Féin MP in 1917 and after he was elected a TD for the same constituency.
He had supported him in those elections, but would not support him anymore. “I used all the influence I had to secure your return as TD for Kilkenny. I now wish to enter my strongest possible protest against the executions which have taken place since you became president [president of the Executive Council, effectively the taoiseach],” he stated.
“My protest is founded on human instinct and Christian teaching. In future I shall use whatever influence I have to oppose the return, as deputy for Kilkenny, of any person who has identified himself with these unnatural acts. Would I trouble you for a note of acknowledgment.”
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Cosgrave responded to the letter on New Year’s Day 1923. Along with expressing regret about the executions, he offered a belligerent defence of the government’s position.
“If you were in Kilkenny at the last election and heard me speak there – unless you are a child in politics – you could have drawn no other conclusion for what I said, but that armed opposition to a duty elected Irish government would be put down.”
The letter is also revealing in how Cosgrave saw the Civil War. “I may say that to call this a ‘Civil War’ is a libel on civil war,” he wrote. Cosgrave saw the Civil War not as a battle between two equal forces, but as an armed insurrection by a minority against the government.
Significantly the letter was never sent and the word “cancelled” is handwritten across it which is why it has lain undiscovered until now in the files of the Department of the Taoiseach.
The letter was discovered by historian Owen O’Shea, the author of No Middle Path: The Civil War in Kerry.
“I think it is a significant expression of private regret on the part of WT who was so vocal publicly in support of the executions policy,” he said.
“It is even more significant, perhaps, that the letter was never actually sent back to Fr Ayres.”
