Former taoiseach Liam Cosgrave, now in his 90s and using a walking stick, yesterday stood in the GPO, gazing upon a photograph of his smiling father.
His father, WT Cosgrave, had fought in the Rising at the South Dublin Union. In 1929 he had stood outside the GPO to officially open the building after it had been freshly restored after the damage suffered in The Rising.
“WT was head of the government at the time and there was a lot of publicity about the opening,” Cosgrave said. “He was photographed in the papers holding a big key to the GPO for the opening ceremony.
“But it transpired that the key wouldn’t fit any of the locks in the place. The key opened nothing. It was all for show. My father got a laugh out of that,” said Cosgrave, who will be 96 in three weeks.
The son is proud of the role played by the father, who died in 1965.
"He was in the 4th Battalion along with his brother Philip and his stepbrother Frank 'Gobban' Burke, under the command of Eamonn Ceannt," Cosgrave told The Irish Times.
“When they took up their positions in the Union, my father said they were in the worst possible place, and he advised that they should occupy the Nurses’ Home, which they did.”
Stronger position
The move meant the Volunteers were better placed to fend off British attacks, since the soldiers could not move out of their positions in Mount Brown without coming under fire.
Tragedy, however, struck quickly. Gobban was shot dead on the first day, aged just 19. Ever afterwards, WT blamed himself for bringing his young stepbrother into the action.
Liam Cosgrave said his father’s knowledge of the area was important in helping the Union garrison hold out until the last day of the Rising: “They handled it well for non-military people.”
Sentenced to die after the Rising was crushed, the two brothers were reprieved: “But they had to wait 36 hours before they were told they would not have to face the firing squad. That wasn’t easy.”
WT knew just one of the signatories of the Proclamation, Thomas McDonagh, but he never met Patrick Pearse.
“In those days,” Cosgrave said, “people got around on foot or on a bicycle, and many of them didn’t even have bikes. So a lot of them would only have known the other members of their own battalion.”
Philip Cosgrave was quiet but steady, his nephew said.
“A few years later he was stopped by a British soldier who wanted to search him. He said: ‘I’m getting fed up with this. I’ve been searched three times today,’ so the soldier let him pass. But he actually had a gun on him.”
Public mood
Cosgrave’s father learned early that the public’s mood can change quickly. During his years before 1914. when WT was a member of Dublin Corporation, Sinn Féin had 10 or 12 seats. Then, John Redmond secured the passage of the Home Rule Bill. Redmond’s popularity soared.
“Support for Sinn Féin collapsed,” Cosgrave said, “and they were left with just three seats. Then after the Rising and the executions, the mood changed again.”
Family legend records how a senior British officer, Sir Francis Fletcher-Vane, rode up to the Cosgrave family pub on James’ Street a few days afterwards to compliment WT on his conduct as a rebel.
“Of course, my father wasn’t in the pub at the time as he was interned with the other prisoners, Cosgrave said. “But it seems that Fletcher-Vane was impressed by the way a non-military man had carried out the defence” of the Union.
Cosgrave said that Fletcher-Vane emerged honourably from the Rising after he protested against attempts to cover up the murder of the pacifist Francis Sheehy-Skeffington by Capt JC Bowen-Colhurst.
