Military Service Pensions for Veterans of the Irish Revolution,1916–1923

I

The Irish military service pensions differed substantially from most other military pensions in that they were awarded for service in a conflict of relatively short duration, rather than on grounds of conflict-related disability or injury, or to dependants of combat fatalities. Contemporary pensions for campaigns of a similar length, such as those paid in Britain after the First World War mentioned above, were reserved for such categories, as were those from later twentieth-century conflicts such as the Spanish Civil War. ⁴ United States military pensions have traditionally been governed by the principle that ‘the government is under moral obligation to provide for the aid and relief of those who have been disabled in its military service and for the support of widows and dependent relatives of the slain’. There are some examples of purely service-related pensions in the United States, though these were usually qualified by the need to establish ‘indigence, inability to perform manual labor, the attainment of a certain age, or the existence of disease or disability not of service origin’. ⁵ The nature of the Irish pensions in rewarding short service was commented upon during the passage of the first pensions bill in the Dáil (lower house of the Irish Parliament) by an independent TD (Teachta Dála, member of parliament) and former professional soldier, Major Bryan Cooper: ‘there has never been any case made … for giving troops pensions merely for two or three years’ service, unless they were disabled by either wounds or sickness’. ⁶

Beginning in 1924, 18,186 military service pensions were awarded to Irish revolutionary veterans, which were still costing the Irish exchequer over £500,000 per annum in 1960. ⁷ They were part of a larger pension code making provision for revolutionary veterans and their dependants, which left the new state with a considerable financial liability for nearly fifty years. A separate body of Army Pensions Acts catered for wounded soldiers, dealing primarily with the national army. The first of these was passed in 1923 and the most recent in 1980. Often referred to as wound pensions, they differed in nature and scope from the military service pensions. The first Army Pensions Act of 1923, dealing with wounds received during the Civil War, applied to ‘Every officer and every soldier who is discharged from the forces as medically unfit for further service’ as a result of a disablement that happened after 1 April 1922’. ⁸ There was also a provision to allow the minister for defence to award these pensions to members of the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army who were wounded in the course of their duties before 1 April 1922. ⁹ Therefore, while the military service pensions were service-based, provision was made for those wounded during the revolution under the separate code of army pension legislation. The degree of disablement appears to have been similar to British war pensions: for example, the loss of two or more limbs was considered to be a disablement of 100 per cent, and the loss of two fingers on either hand constituted a 20 per cent disablement in both cases. ¹⁰

Unlike the military service pensions, the army pensions legislation provided extra pensions for married men and allowances to the dependants of deceased servicemen. ¹¹ The military service pensions were initially payable only to the recipient, and there was no provision for its continued payment to his wife or children after his death. This situation was only changed in 1971 when the Fianna Fáil government extended pension eligibility to the widows of military service and Connaught Rangers pensioners (see below) on condition that they had not remarried. ¹² Further provisions for revolutionaries and their dependants were made in subsequent Army Pensions Acts. In 1937 annual allowances were provided for the immediate families of the signatories of the 1916 proclamation, with widows receiving £500, sons and daughters £250 up to the age of 25, and sisters £100 for their lifetimes. ¹³ In 1943 means-tested special allowances were introduced for veterans of Easter Week who were in poor economic circumstances. ¹⁴ Grants and loans were also advanced by the government to needy veterans through a Dáil Special Fund administered by the president’s department. ¹⁵ A similar fund, called the Baldoyle Red Cross Fund, was set up in 1924 by independent senator J.J. Parkinson, and provided £617, the proceeds of a horse-racing meeting at Baldoyle, to ‘be used for the assistance of wounded soldiers’, although in practice it was merged with the Dáil Special Fund. ¹⁶

Pensions were also awarded to judges of the Dáil Supreme Court following its winding-up in 1925 and former members of the Connaught Rangers Regiment of the British Army which had mutinied in India in 1920. Civil list pensions were awarded to the widows of Arthur Griffith and Terence MacSwiney to alleviate their financial distress. ¹⁷ In addition the Irish state undertook to pay the pensions of dismissed or resigned members of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), and under Article 10 of the Anglo-Irish Treaty was obliged to compensate former civil servants who resigned rather than serve the new state or transfer to Northern Ireland. ¹⁸

During the revolutionary years a number of voluntary organizations had sprung up to provide relief for the families of men imprisoned or killed during the period, such as the Irish National Aid Association and Prisoners’ Dependants’ Fund. ¹⁹ Wealthy Irish-Americans also raised funds through the Irish White Cross to help the families of volunteers and people whose property was damaged or destroyed during the fighting. ²⁰ Subsequently, the British and Irish Free State governments also provided compensation for criminal injuries resulting from actions during the revolution. In 1922 the Compensation (Ireland) Commission was established to deal with claims for damage to property by both revolutionaries and Crown forces, and by 1926 it had paid out over £7 million. The Irish Free State government also provided limited compensation for criminal injury sustained during the Civil War under the Damage to Property (Compensation) Act 1923, and southern Irish loyalists who had opted to leave the Free State received a further £2 million from the British government under the Irish Grants Committee. ²¹

The late Peter Hart has described the Irish revolution as one of the best documented. ²² This situation is set to improve over the coming years leading up to the centenary of these events with the impending release of the files relating to the successful applications for military service pensions. ²³ This collection will not merely widen the scope of our knowledge of Ireland’s campaign for independence; it will also be a significant source for examining the way in which the Irish state dealt with veterans of the revolutionary period in the succeeding decades. To coincide with this release, this article examines the introduction and awarding of these pensions, with particular focus on the Pensions Acts of 1924 and 1934.

II

The Irish government’s explanation for introducing service-based pensions was that they were compensatory rather than remunerative. The revolutionary generation consisted largely of young men in their late teens and early twenties who in other circumstances would have been starting careers, settling down in their personal lives, or pursuing studies towards a profession, all of which was interrupted by their involvement in revolutionary activity. By 1924 the government felt that those who had made this sacrifice to achieve independence, and defend the new state in the Civil War, deserved compensation for the loss of earning potential at this important point in their lives.

However, a close examination of the parliamentary debate on the introduction of the first Military Service Pensions Act in 1924 reveals a political motivation for both the legislation itself and the service-based nature of the pensions. The former minister for defence Richard Mulcahy raised the question of why this legislation had appeared, arguing that it had never been contemplated by the revolutionaries themselves, and reminding the President of the Executive Council (Prime Minister) W.T. Cosgrave, that, while serving as minister for finance in 1923, he had looked ‘askance’ at a ‘modest proposal’ to provide financial assistance for some revolutionary veterans. According to Mulcahy, at that stage in early 1923, ‘the considerations that have prompted the putting forward of a Bill in this form had not arisen’. ²⁴

Although Mulcahy failed to elaborate on what these circumstances were, he was undoubtedly referring to the recent army mutiny. Four months prior to the introduction of the bill, the Free State government had faced down a threatened mutiny by senior army officers, most of them high-ranking pre-Truce Irish Republican Army (IRA) members, who were dissatisfied at the nature and speed of demobilization and reorganization of the national army to place it on a peacetime footing following the end of the Civil War in 1923, by which time its personnel numbered 52,000 soldiers and 3000 officers. Plans to reduce these figures to 30,000 and 1300 respectively by 1924 entailed considerable redundancy and downgrading of ranks within the officer corps, and led to internal dissension from a group calling themselves the Irish Republican Army Organisation. These former apostles of Michael Collins felt that the plans for restructuring the army diluted republican sentiment and favoured former British army officers over former Irish Volunteers (IRA) in the new national army. They issued an ultimatum to the government in March 1924, demanding the suspension of the restructuring plan. This resulted in the arrest of the mutiny’s leaders and the resignations of the minister for defence, Richard Mulcahy, who spearheaded the restructuring plan, and the minister for industry and commerce, Joseph McGrath, who was in sympathy with the mutineers. Efforts to reach an accommodation between the mutineers and the government continued throughout 1924, with the government alternating between conciliation and its initial hard-line attitude, which eventually prevailed through the influence of the minister for justice, Kevin O’Higgins. ²⁵

In introducing the pensions bill, Cosgrave hoped it would lead ‘towards a better atmosphere’ and be conducive to ‘more friendly relations between those of them who have left the Army and those who are still in it’. ²⁶ At a later stage in the debate he conceded that placating the army was the principal motivation for the bill:

Our responsibility, as far as this measure is concerned, was originally intended to meet only those who were demobilised or who had resigned from the National Army, and who had given service in it … the real idea of this Bill was to provide compensation for those who had looked forward, by reason of their former services, to the Army as a profession, who had banked on that and who were disappointed in so banking. ²⁷

An amendment proposed by Mulcahy ensured that the rank for the purpose of pension would be based on the rank held by the applicant at the time of his discharge from the Defence Forces or that held on 1 February 1924, whichever was higher; this guaranteed that those reduced in rank as a result of the reorganization would receive a pension commensurate with the highest rank they had held. ²⁸

Therefore, the introduction of the first Military Service Pensions Act in 1924 was a part of the Cumann na nGaedheal government’s response to its mishandling of army demobilization and the resultant army mutiny, and an effort to placate and ensure the loyalty of pro-Treaty soldiers within the national army. As serving soldiers could not receive their pensions until they left the army, it might also have been hoped that the lure of financial compensation would voluntarily purge the army of its less loyal elements, particularly as the initial closing date for applications was 31 December 1925. ²⁹

III

For the purposes of the 1924 act the organizations listed for eligibility were the Irish Volunteers (pre-Truce IRA), including the Volunteer Executive and GHQ staff; Irish Citizen Army; Fianna Éireann; ³⁰ Hibernian Rifles; ³¹ National Forces (of the Provisional Government ³² ); and the Free State Defence Forces. The various intelligence services, including the Criminal Investigation Department, Protective Corps, and Citizens’ Defence Force, were also covered. ³³ The anti-Treaty IRA were excluded. In this regard the Irish government acted no differently from other victors in awarding pensions following civil wars. In the United States, federal military pensions were awarded only to Union veterans. While former Confederates were gradually restored to the federal pension roles in respect of conflicts other than the Civil War, it was not until 1958 that Congress approved federal military pensions for Confederate veterans specifically for the Civil War, by which time only two veterans and approximately 1000 widows benefited. ³⁴ Similarly in Spain, pensions for the war wounded of the Civil War were reserved for Nationalists until after Franco’s death; a 1976 decree extended pensions to disabled republicans, though not to their dependants. ³⁵

Reserving pensions for the winners in the Irish Civil War was reinforced by the stipulation that applicants had to have served in the national army during the Civil War as well as in the pre-Truce IRA; this prerequisite excluded many pro-Treaty supporters, including Civil War neutrals and those who served the state in a civil rather than a military capacity during 1922–3. ³⁶ The explanation given by Cosgrave was that, as the intention of this bill was compensatory, such men were not being discriminated against and in fact had gained an advantage over their colleagues who joined the army by ‘getting in … on the ground floor with regard to any such civil occupations that might be going’. ³⁷

Women were not specifically excluded from the bill, but by virtue of the fact that Cumann na mBan (the women’s auxiliary of the IRA) was not included they were effectively debarred. Only one woman was potentially eligible: Dr Brigid Lyons, an army doctor commissioned in 1922 and demobilized in 1924, was the only woman to serve in the Defence Forces, outside the Army Nursing Corps, until 1980. While there were some queries about her eligibility, the attorney general, John A. Costello, found that her commission was valid ‘and lawfully granted’ and the term ‘person’ in the Military Service Pensions Act included women. She was also deemed to have been ‘employed on military service in Oglaigh na hEireann [Irish Volunteers]’ as an intelligence officer and, therefore, she also met the criterion of pre-Truce service in the forces covered by the 1924 act. ³⁸ She was the only woman to receive a pension under the 1924 act.

Applications were made initially to the minister for defence for a Certificate of Military Service. These were examined by a three-member Board of Assessors that advised the minister whether or not the applicant’s service was sufficient to warrant the award of such a certificate. Service had to be continuous, but breaks of service due to internment, imprisonment, and deportation were accounted for. ³⁹ Following the award of a certificate, a pension was granted on a sliding scale depending on both the rank held and the amount of time served in the various forces, with a special weighting given to those who had served in Easter Week (see Table 1). The maximum number of pension years that could be awarded was 14, entitling the recipient to an annual pension of £350. This grade A pension was given only to the most prominent revolutionaries, and appears to have represented a small proportion of all the pensions paid: in 1943 0.32 per cent of pensions awarded under the 1934 act were at the highest grade, whereas 73.65 per cent were being paid at the lowest grade, E. ⁴⁰ Many recipients of grade A pensions were also in government employment, including ministers, and part or all of their pensions was suspended under the terms of a public service abatement, whereby the pensions of those in receipt of other remuneration from the state were reduced on a pro-rata basis. The minimum pension paid was slightly over £2 per annum. ⁴¹

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Years of service towards pension awarded for different phases of the revolution under the Military Service Pensions Acts 1924 and 1934.

Period	Years of service towards pension
	1924 act	1934 act
1 April 1916 – 31 March 1917	5
Week beginning 23 April 1916		4
1–22 April 1916 and 30 April 1916 – 31 March 1917		1
1 April 1917 – 31 March 1918	0.5	0.5
1 April 1918 – 31 March 1919	0.5	0.5
1 April 1919 – 31 March 1920	1	1
1 April 1920 – 31 March 1921	2	2
1 April 1921 – 11 July 1921	1	1
12 July 1921 – 30 June 1922	1	1
1 July 1922 – 31 March 1923	2	2
1 April 1923 – 30 September 1923	1	1

Source: Military Service Pensions Act 1924, first schedule; Military Service Pensions Act 1934, second schedule.

Payment of a pension would commence from either 1 October 1924 or the date of the recipient’s discharge from the Defence Forces. Unsuccessful applicants had a right of appeal to the minister, who could refer the case back to the Board of Assessors ‘on the ground that evidence not available prior to the making of their report had since become available’. The board could then amend its original report if this additional evidence proved sufficient to warrant it. ⁴² Initially the award of a Certificate of Military Service was deemed separate from that of a pension and, while a pension usually followed, it was not deemed inevitable upon the award of a certificate. However, this was changed in 1934 following a Supreme Court decision that a pension must be awarded after the grant of a certificate. ⁴³

The government’s first duty under the act was to appoint a Board of Assessors to adjudicate claims. One member, who usually served as chairman, had to be either a judge or a barrister with 10 years’ experience. Initially it was suggested that the two non- judicial posts be given to the two ministerial casualties of the army mutiny, Mulcahy and McGrath. ⁴⁴ This was most likely an effort to retain the loyalty of two of the most disgruntled yet powerful figures on the pro-Treaty side. These appointments were never made; it is unclear if they were ever offered the posts, but if they were it is unlikely that they would have accepted in view of their acrimonious relationship with the government.

When the board was finally appointed it consisted of District Justice Cyril Beattie as chairman, Eamonn Duggan, and Fionán Lynch, with Gearóid O’Sullivan as secretary. ⁴⁵ The composition of the board was partisan: both Duggan and Lynch held ministerial and junior ministerial posts during the 1920s, while O’Sullivan was a former TD and adjutant general of the national army whose military career was ended by the strong line he took against the army mutineers. The board sat for four years until October 1928, during which period it received 21,147 applications for claims totalling £2,250,000. Of these, 7610 were rejected as ineligible on initial examination, while 13,537 were deemed eligible for consideration. ⁴⁶

Applications had to be made on a prescribed form issued by the Department of Defence, in which the applicant gave details of his service during a number of different periods defined in the act. After an initial determination of whether an application qualified under the act or not, eligible applicants were asked to furnish the names of three referees, preferably army officers or members of the Oireachtas (Irish Parliament) or Gardaí (police), who could provide evidence in support of their claim. The evidence of these referees was a decisive factor in determining the success of applications, so considerable attention was paid to ensuring the collection of sufficient evidence and upon the reliability of the witnesses. ⁴⁷

Having satisfied itself as to the extent of an applicant’s service, the board then had to decide his rank, as this was also a determining factor in the amount of pension awarded. The underground nature of the IRA and the chaos that surrounded the establishment of the national army in the summer of 1922 made this a difficult task. Official records for both the pre-Truce IRA and the early days of the new army were often non-existent and the equivalent army ranks for members of the ancillary forces were difficult to decide, and hindered by the lack of clarity on this specific issue in the legislation. Record-keeping in the Department of Defence during 1922 was poor, and the need to prove both national army as well as pre-Truce IRA service made the board wary of men who claimed army service in 1922 that could not be documentarily verified. A further difficulty was experienced in verifying the service of volunteers who had operated outside Ireland, ‘on ships trading between Great Britain, America etc. and Ireland, or as members of the Volunteers in England and Scotland’; this most likely referred to gun-runners and couriers. When the evidence from the applicant’s form and that of his referees had been assessed, the applicant was then called to an oral interview with the Board of Assessors. This detailed process shed considerably more light on the 13,000 applications that were initially considered eligible, and 72 per cent of these were subsequently found not to have given sufficient service to warrant the award of a certificate. ⁴⁸

Undoubtedly the biggest problem encountered in making a decision on applications was the absence of a definition of ‘active service’, a failing in the original act of 1924 that was not rectified in any of the subsequent legislation and that remained one of the greatest difficulties with the system throughout its existence. This can be traced back to the service-based nature of these pensions: granting pensions to dependants of fatalities was more straightforward and medical certification could be used as evidence for disability pensions, neither of which circumstances applied in the case of Irish military service pensions.

The first line of the 1924 act defined the ‘Military Service’ aspect of the statute’s title as ‘active service in any rank’ in the eligible forces. Richard Mulcahy warned that ‘If “active service” is not defined in connection with this Bill, then I do not know where the Minister for Finance may find himself some day.’ Cosgrave was vague in his reassurance to Mulcahy, an indication that the government had not thought out this aspect of the bill properly: ‘That particular definition, I suppose, will be prescribed … and I expect it will take a military description. But at any rate it is not intended that there should be any soft pensions.’ Pressed further by Labour Party leader Thomas Johnson as to whether the regulations that would follow the bill would provide a definition, the president gave the equally non-committal response that he would ‘look into that’. ⁴⁹ In the event, none of the subsequent regulations, statutory instruments, or amending acts ever provided a satisfactory definition of this crucial phrase. In 1924 the attorney general opined that the use of the term ‘active service’ in the bill was not analogous to ‘on active service’, but should be read as ‘actively engaged on military service’. ⁵⁰ A definition of ‘on active service’ existed in the 1923 Army Pensions Act, and applied to any officer or soldier who ‘is attached to or forms part of a force which is engaged in operations against the enemy or is engaged in military operations in a place wholly or partly occupied by the enemy’. ⁵¹ As this applied to a professional standing army of a state it was presumably not considered appropriate in the case of a volunteer guerrilla army such as the revolutionary IRA.

Fianna Fáil tightened the definition to a certain extent when it introduced a major overhaul of the pensions in 1934: ‘A person shall for the purposes of this Act be deemed to have been serving in the Forces while such person was rendering active service in any of the bodies which constitute the Forces.’ ⁵² Yet, the phrase ‘rendering active service’ remained vague and produced many myths about what it translated into in terms of volunteer actions, with some believing that involvement in ‘one major engagement and general service’ was the yardstick by which applicants were judged. ⁵³ Volunteers from more active areas argued that they were held to a higher standard; according to Fine Gael TD and former flying column commander Seán MacEoin:

In Meath and Leitrim one engagement will immediately render an applicant eligible for a military service pension. In Longford it takes two or three, on the grounds that there were so many engagements you should have been engaged in all of them if you were active … The same applies to Cork, Clare and Limerick. The people in those areas have to have more engagements than one. That is a certainty, and the engagements must be major ones. ⁵⁴

The minister for defence, Oscar Traynor, rejected the ‘major engagement’ theory, stating that cases were judged on the applicant’s ability to prove ‘continuous general volunteer service’. ⁵⁵ Nevertheless, the failure to provide a suitable definition inevitably allowed such ideas to gain general acceptance.

In 1955 the Department of Defence produced a definition that applied to any person who ‘participated in an engagement against enemy forces, such participation being in the immediate area of operations and as an integral part of the operating force’, although this did not apply to Cumann na mBan or Fianna Éireann. They also had to have served in the most intense phases of the War of Independence between April 1920 and July 1921, and undertaken duties that included attacking the enemy, obstructing communications, acquiring and transporting arms and ammunition, guarding prisoners, attending training camps and battalion or brigade meetings, carrying despatches, providing first aid, and assisting volunteers on the run. ⁵⁶

IV

After Fianna Fáil entered the Dáil in 1927, allegations were made about political bias in the award of pensions on the basis of the close ties between the government and the Board of Assessors. The party’s defence spokesman, Frank Aiken, asserted that his party had no confidence in a board that contained ‘two men who were simply toadies of the Government, men who would do anything they were told, and who had been known to do whatever they were told by the prime movers in the Government before’. In his opinion decisions on pensions depended on the applicant’s loyalty to the governing party: ‘I believe that the Board will be influenced by considerations as to whether or not a man would in future give political service to the Cumann na nGaedheal Party.’ ⁵⁷ Seán Lemass dubbed the administration ‘a government of pensioners by pensioners for pensioners’, and wondered why such a large number of people resident in Meath were in receipt of pensions, considering that county’s modest role in the War of Independence. ⁵⁸ Dr Con Ward, TD for Monaghan, openly accused the government of using the pensions ‘for the purposes of political graft’. ⁵⁹ He alleged that the government used pensions to win votes in Monaghan in the 1927 general elections, in particular to secure the re-election of the minister for finance, Ernest Blythe. ⁶⁰

The government’s efforts to rebut such allegations were not helped by the level of secrecy that surrounded the award of pensions. The most blatant and controversial of such actions was the passing of legislation in 1930 to preclude the comptroller and auditor general (CAG) from having access to the documents upon which the decisions to award pensions were based. Under Article 62 of the Irish Free State constitution, the CAG was empowered to ‘“control all disbursements” of public moneys’. ⁶¹ On this basis, in January 1926 the CAG, George McGrath, requested from the Department of Defence ‘the original applications for service pensions paid during the financial year ended 31^st March 1925’, to which he received the blanket refusal that ‘The Board [of Assessors] cannot agree to forward the documents mentioned.’ ⁶² All he received was ‘a printed document upon which is stated the man’s rank and service … but why a man is given a rank or why it was decided that he had a certain number of years’ service the Audit Office has no means of checking’. ⁶³ The dispute must be seen in the wider context of McGrath’s strenuous efforts to make the army accountable for its spending, an achievement which took up most of his first decade in office. ⁶⁴ The Dáil Public Accounts Committee supported the action of the Department of Defence. It was not felt desirable to make the nature of the information contained in the documents publicly available, applicants and witnesses had been given assurances about the confidentiality of their testimony, and only the Board of Assessors possessed the specialist knowledge to make decisions on the nature of pre-Truce service, so its findings should not be open to review. ⁶⁵ The committee also recommended that immediate steps be taken to clarify the CAG’s role in auditing the pensions. ⁶⁶

In formulating such legislation the government had to be cautious not to infringe the constitutional powers of the CAG, so the Board of Assessors was deemed a quasi- judicial tribunal of the Oireachtas, the findings of which were binding on the CAG. ⁶⁷ The resulting Military Service Pensions Act of 1930 repealed part of the 1924 act, which had stated that the findings of the Board of Assessors were ‘final and conclusive and binding upon the applicant’, and replaced it with a stronger wording that the board’s findings would henceforth ‘be final and conclusive and binding on all persons and tribunals whatsoever’. ⁶⁸ Introducing the bill in the Dáil, Ernest Blythe argued that it was merely clarifying what was envisaged under the 1924 act – that ‘it was never intended that the Comptroller and Auditor-General should examine the evidence on which the awards of the Board of Assessors were based’. He supported the opinion of the Public Accounts Committee on the need for confidentiality and maintained that the CAG was not competent to examine the evidence presented to the expert Board of Assessors. ⁶⁹

Both Fianna Fáil and Labour defended the right of the CAG to examine the original applications. ⁷⁰ Numerous speakers interpreted the bill as an attack on his constitutional powers, a removal of accountability over the expenditure of substantial public funds, and even an attack of the Dáil and the Public Accounts Committee. ⁷¹ Frank Aiken accused the government of creating a new principle that removed the CAG’s powers to examine the accounts of a government department, and others worried that this would create a precedent where the accounts of other departments might in future be similarly closed to scrutiny. ⁷² Labour looked in vain for evidence that would support Blythe’s argument that it had never been intended to furnish the CAG with the documents in question, argued that the CAG was the best judge of his own powers, and cited the examples of similar state pensions of which he had oversight, such as those of resigned and dismissed RIC officers. ⁷³ The controversial new proposal merely reinforced Fianna Fáil’s suspicions about the lack of clarity surrounding awards, the possibility that pensions were awarded to ineligible applicants, and the belief that pensions were used to reward government supporters. ⁷⁴

V

On a number of occasions Fianna Fáil expressed its intention to abolish the pensions. In 1928 the parliamentary party adopted a resolution to this effect, and Con Ward subsequently informed the Dáil that: ‘We hope in the near future to be in a position to repeal that Act, because we do not stand for giving pensions to able-bodied men.’ ⁷⁵ Similar views were expressed at its annual conferences. ⁷⁶ Soon after assuming office in 1932, Fianna Fáil appointed a cabinet subcommittee to examine ‘the findings of the Board of Assessors in regard to the period of service and rank awarded to each pensioner in receipt of a Military Service Pension’, and to determine if any veterans had secured employment ‘on account of service’. ⁷⁷ If the aim of this investigation was to uncover corruption in the award of pensions to fulfil Fianna Fáil’s promise to abolish them, this was soon lost sight of, and a year later the committee informed the cabinet that it had reinterpreted its remit and intended instead to report on ‘the question of pensions for pre-Truce IRA men’. ⁷⁸ Having castigated Cumann na nGaedheal for using the pensions as a form of jobs for the boys and alleged all manner of corruption in the administration of the system, Fianna Fáil had now decided to extend the benefits to its supporters, rather than abolish the system in its entirety. Opposition remained within the parliamentary party, with 10 members opposing the decision. ⁷⁹

Fianna Fáil appears initially to have been serious about its intention to abolish the pensions. William Davin, who was Labour’s chief whip at the time, later claimed that he and others ‘were approached shortly after the election of the Government in 1932 and informed that it was the early intention of the Government to repeal the Act of 1924’. Labour, which supported the minority Fianna Fáil government until the 1933 general election, was adamantly opposed to repealing a pension act, considering it to be ‘quite contrary to the procedure of any democratic parliament’. Davin believed that this, along with similar views from the Fianna Fáil National Executive, convinced the government to change its mind and extend the pensions to its own supporters instead. ⁸⁰

There was clearly strong support among Fianna Fáil backbenchers for the extension of pension eligibility to the anti-Treaty IRA. In March 1933 a delegation of ex-IRA from Dublin, led by Fianna Fáil TD Harry Colley, met party leader Eamon de Valera to argue the case for ‘making provision for those who fought in the IRA from 1916 to 1923’. ⁸¹ A strong case was also put by existing pensioners who argued that the financial security promised by the 1924 act had encouraged many men to resign from the army; to withdraw suddenly this crucial part of their income after 10 years could lead to considerable financial difficulty. They highlighted the more favourable position of former civil servants who had refused to serve the new state and were in receipt of generous pensions ‘costing the country nearly twice as much as the men who fought for Ireland’. A comparison was also made with RIC men who had resigned during the troubles and for whom the new government wished to make better provision: ‘it is difficult to believe the far greater claims of the ex-IRA men will be ignored’. ⁸²

One of Fianna Fáil’s problems with the pensions was the fact that they were paid to able-bodied men. The new bill that it sought to introduce in 1934 initially tried to reform the system so that such pensions would apply only to disabled men, like the army pensions, but this was resisted by the Department of Finance because the estimated cost of the plan was too high, as it was planned to cover non-service-related disabilities and hospitalization and include payments for dependants. The Department of Defence appears to have been trying to merge the military service and army pensions codes. ⁸³ In February 1934 a draft bill was produced that extended pensions to those who had served in the anti-Treaty IRA. A significant change from the 1924 act was the replacement of the Board of Assessors with a referee, who would be assisted by a four-person Advisory Committee comprising two former volunteers and two civil servants.

A proposal to allow the CAG to ‘have access to all documents in connection with both pensions already granted and those to be granted under this Bill’ was struck out, which represented another U-turn by Fianna Fáil from the policy it had adopted until then. ⁸⁴ This exclusion was a victory for Aiken over his colleague in Finance Seán MacEntee, who wanted the CAG to have such powers. ⁸⁵ Thomas Johnson failed to have an amendment to the same effect adopted in the Senate; it was rejected by Aiken on the grounds that ‘the Comptroller and Auditor General should not be set up as a trial judge to re-try all the cases that will go before the referee and the board of assessors’. The exact same argument was made by Cumann na nGaedheal when passing the 1930 act, and rejected at the time by Aiken. ⁸⁶

The 1934 act was considerably more comprehensive than its 1924 ancestor. One important addition to eligibility was the inclusion of Cumann na mBan, although its members were to be limited, along with Fianna Éireann, to the two lowest possible ranks for pension purposes – D and E. ⁸⁷ Aiken was sceptical of the chances of female applicants: ‘the same test of service will be applied to women as was applied to men and … that will result, in my opinion, in very few being granted an active service certificate’. ⁸⁸ This appears to have been borne out in practice, with Old Cumann na mBan ⁸⁹ subsequently complaining that only women with Easter Week service qualified for pensions. ⁹⁰

The initial bill as introduced in the Dáil also excluded those who did not have service in the Civil War; in the same way that national army service after 1922 was a precondition for a pension under the 1924 act, republicans would also need to have served in the anti-Treaty IRA in the same period. Richard Mulcahy was among a number of deputies who made representations to the government to relax this requirement, so as to entitle those who remained neutral in the Civil War to apply, but Aiken refused on the grounds that ‘The previous Government had to draw a line somewhere, and this Government has also to draw a line.’ ⁹¹ However, he soon relented in the face of pressure from all sides of the political divide, including his own party: ‘Representations were made to the Government by a number of members of Fianna Fáil, and by other organisations, that men who had 1916 service only, or who had Black-and-Tan war service only, should also be granted pensions … That plea was also supported by a number of the Opposition Party in the Dáil.’ Therefore, the government accepted a Senate amendment which made eligible those who had served in Easter Week or the last phase of the War of Independence, from April to July 1921. Financial considerations also probably influenced Aiken’s change of heart. These veterans would be compensated for quite limited periods of service, so their individual pensions would be small. Extending eligibility to them was expected to add only £40,000 to a bill that was expected to represent an annual charge on the exchequer of £400,000. ⁹²

A significant feature of the 1934 act was the speed with which the Irish Free State extended pension eligibility to the former enemies of the state from the Civil War that had ended just over a decade previously. As noted above, this was not done for nearly a century in the USA and 40 years in Spain, following those respective civil wars. The reconciliation of the majority of former republicans with the Irish Free State following the creation of Fianna Fáil in 1926, and its complete integration into democratic politics with the formation of its first government in 1932, is an obvious explanation for this. Yet, the debate on the 1934 bill in the Oireachtas highlights the desire of opposition politicians to use pensions to assist reconciliation. Complimenting the constructive attitude of the opposition, Fianna Fáil senator Seamus Robinson hoped that the new act would ‘help us to forget the hatchet that we all believe has been buried for some time’. ⁹³

VI

A considerable portion of the 1934 act dealt with the new mechanism for adjudicating claims. The referee, who had to be either a judge or a barrister of at least 10 years’ standing, was to be appointed by the government and had extremely wide powers for ‘enforcing the attendance of witnesses and examining them on oath … and for compelling the production of documents’. Summonses signed by the referee had the same status as ‘a formal process issued by the High Court’, and refusal to comply was deemed contempt of court. ⁹⁴ The only legislator to warn of the power being vested in one individual was Thomas Johnson, one of the keenest analysts of legislation in the Free State: ‘He has tremendous powers … He will be awarding £400,000 a year for a period of 30 years, or £12,000,000 roughly … The power of this referee will be greater financially than almost any other person in the State.’ ⁹⁵

Applications made to the minister for defence were referred to the referee, who made an initial decision as to the eligibility of the applicant; those deemed eligible would then have their cases decided on the basis of their service and rank, with the onus of proof resting with the applicants. In this regard the basic procedure mirrored that of 1924. The provision for unsuccessful applicants to request the minister to refer their cases, on the basis of additional evidence, was also retained. ⁹⁶ The new act contained much stronger powers for both the minister and the referee to alter or revoke pensions retrospectively. The minister could ask the referee to re-examine a pension that had already been awarded if he felt that new evidence had come to light questioning the applicant’s right to it. If the referee varied his report the minister had the power to revoke the certificate and reduce or revoke the pension. ⁹⁷ In 1945 this power was used to revoke the pension of Frank Conlan, but the action was overturned by the Supreme Court. ⁹⁸ While the powers of the referee were set out in detail, those of his Advisory Committee were dealt with in a brief clause stating that its function was ‘to sit with the Referee and assist him in the exercise of his functions under this Act’, a vagueness of language that would soon return to haunt the government and threaten the whole pension system. ⁹⁹ Late applications were permitted under the auspices of the 1924 act, and for that purpose the referee and Advisory Committee were occasionally reconstituted as the Board of Assessors under that legislation. ¹⁰⁰

The first referee appointed under the new act was Judge Joseph K. O’Connor, who served for four years until he resigned in 1938, seemingly over a salary dispute. ¹⁰¹ The non-civil-service members of the Advisory Committee were close allies of Fianna Fáil – John McCoy, a former comrade of Frank Aiken’s from the IRA’s Fourth Northern Division during the Civil War, who was also chairman of the Army Pensions Board, and Humphrey Murphy, former OC of the Kerry No. 1 Brigade in the Civil War (who died in 1935 and was replaced by Fianna Fáil senator Seamus Robinson, a leading anti-Treaty figure from Tipperary). Subsequent appointments, occasioned by changes of government in the 1940s and 1950s, resulted in similar appointments of political supporters. ¹⁰²

The first two procedural decisions to be made by the referee and Advisory Committee were how to verify service and what internal machinery they would employ to adjudicate claims. Verification proved much more difficult under the 1934 act because of the absence of documentary evidence for the post-Truce IRA and the lapse of time between the events in question and the passing of the act. This difficulty was solved to a large extent by requesting the formation by the former IRA brigades of brigade committees to assemble records of volunteer membership at local level, compile accounts of actions, and appoint verifying officers to assist the referee.

The 1934 act probably envisaged that the referee and Advisory Committee would sit together to examine all applications, as had been the case with the Board of Assessors. However, it soon became clear that this would not be practicable because of the volume of claims made: 51,880 were received by the deadline of 31 December 1935, and it was estimated that it would take up to 70 years for the five men to examine all of them fully. Under the 1934 rules which allowed the referee to ‘regulate his own procedure’, Judge O’Connor decided that the Advisory Committee could sit as a body or in pairs to examine applications and take oral evidence, without the need for the referee to be in attendance in all cases. As a result of this new division of labour, over 30,000 applicants were interviewed between 1934 and 1943, whereas only 1065 cases were disposed of before the end of 1935 under the old procedure. ¹⁰³

As applications were received by the Department of Defence they were numbered and divided by brigade and battalion areas. The referee and Advisory Committee then examined the files from each particular brigade area. The four members of the Advisory Committee examined the files to decide which ones qualified under the act or not, with those deemed eligible marked ‘Call’ and the applicant invited for an oral examination conducted by two members of the Advisory Committee – one Old IRA member and one civil servant. The full file, containing the application form, references, and transcript of evidence, was then re-examined by the referee and Advisory Committee (again working in pairs) and a decision was made as to whether the act applied; if so, the case was held for discussion with the verifying officer from that applicant’s brigade committee. Between 1941 and 1943 the Advisory Committee divided into two for this purpose, which allowed two verification sessions to be held simultaneously. The referee could attend either of these, although for a period in 1941 and 1942 he did not attend any. The Advisory Committee then made a recommendation to the referee as to whether or not the case qualified, and if so what service was to be awarded for each of the periods designated in the act. Appeals against the above decisions – failure to qualify or a dispute over rank or service awarded – were examined in a similar fashion by the referee and Advisory Committee, in consultation with brigade verifying officers. ¹⁰⁴

The contribution of the brigade committees to the whole process was very significant, although one referee admitted that cooperation was not uniform: ‘Some Brigades assisted the Board by early and accurate rendition of these records; others presented them in a form which did not separate active participants from the outposts; others furnished no records at all.’ ¹⁰⁵ Likewise, when seeking to verify borderline cases, ‘Some Brigades acted very reasonably in this regard suggesting for further verification only such cases as might come within reasonable range of qualifying standard. Others asked to have the whole or a high proportion of the list held for verification.’ ¹⁰⁶ Problems arose where old animosities had not been laid to rest. This was especially true of the Cork No. 3 Brigade Committee, where its most influential former officers, Tom Barry and Tom Hales, refused to cooperate with the brigade committee or act as witnesses for many applicants. The brigade committee accused them of fomenting discontent among unsuccessful applicants. Barry sought unsuccessfully to convince the referee that senior ex-IRA officers, such as Barry himself and Hales, carried sufficient weight that they should be invited to give evidence in their own right without having to use the brigade committee mechanism. ¹⁰⁷

Members of some brigade committees were also accused of inflating the contribution of their close friends and neighbours to ensure successful claims, a situation that Labour TD Seán Keane alleged existed in east Cork: ‘it is only human nature – that the people comprising these boards, in some cases, although not in all, feathered their own nests first and then proceeded to feather their friends’ nests’. ¹⁰⁸ The referee suspected the Longford Brigade Committee of engaging in such practice: ‘There are grave grounds for suspicion, but no positive proof to date, that there were a good many cases of blatant fraud in this county. To say that the Chairman of the Brigade Committee, Seán MacEoin, was irresponsibly credulous is to strain charity.’ He had similar suspicions about Leitrim. ¹⁰⁹ The Longford case was deemed sufficiently serious for the state to institute legal action against one pensioner, Michael Ryan, for falsely claiming a higher rank within the IRA and applying for a pension on that basis, although he was acquitted on the grounds of insufficient evidence. ¹¹⁰

Within the brigade committees the verifying officers played a crucial role, and the second referee, Thomas O’Donnell, reported that they ‘were the basis upon which the whole Act operated’, and credited them with enabling the Advisory Committee to dispose of 55,000 applications during his five years as referee. The work of these men, which was entirely voluntary, was voluminous and time-consuming, especially in large or active brigade areas. ¹¹¹ Oscar Traynor credited them with doing their utmost to help applicants successfully avail themselves of the provisions of the act: ‘all the verifying officers from the 82 brigade areas were bent on extracting the last ounce of credit for the applicants of their areas’. ¹¹²

The 1934 act appeared to be working relatively smoothly until the referee’s interpretation of the rules was challenged in the courts in 1943. James McCarthy and Ethel Cuthbert, applicants from Cork city, challenged decisions that they were not persons to whom the act applied, on the grounds that the referee had not been present during the hearing of their evidence. While the High Court was critical of the referee for exceeding his jurisdiction and failing to follow the procedure laid down in the act, a majority of the lower court did not feel that this resulted in unfair treatment for the applicants. However, the Supreme Court overturned this, finding that the original legislation had intended that the referee sit with the Advisory Committee to take evidence. As a result, the reports of the referee to the minister for defence finding that the act did not apply to the applicants were set aside as invalid. ¹¹³

This decision caused panic in the Department of Defence, which now faced the prospect of having to ask the referee and Advisory Committee (all sitting together) to reinvestigate over 45,000 cases that had been decided using the process that had fallen foul of the courts, in addition to 12,000 cases pending and appeals against rejections or unsatisfactory awards, which it argued could take up to 82 years to complete. Such an additional burden of work was not considered likely to have any effect in changing the decisions that had already been taken in the cases disposed of. The government decided that the simplest solution was to introduce legislation giving retrospective sanction to decisions that had been taken by the referee and legalizing the procedure that had been adopted for almost a decade. ¹¹⁴ The solution was effective, as shown in the case of Cornelius O’Shea, who challenged the referee’s ruling that he was not eligible on the grounds that the referee had not been present during his oral evidence. The High Court found in his favour, but the amending legislation was passed before the state’s appeal reached the Supreme Court, which ruled that the provisions of the new act ‘must be deemed to have existed at the time of the hearing of the prosecutor’s application’, and therefore ‘the procedure adopted by the Referee was legal’. ¹¹⁵

VII

The Irish state’s attitude to remembering and commemorating the events of its revolutionary birth was a mixture of embarrassment and tentativeness, hindered by political partisanship and lingering post-Civil War bitterness. ¹¹⁶ In this light, the decision to award pensions to the revolutionaries appears somewhat incongruous. Had it not been for the events of 1924, it is doubtful that these pensions, in this form at least, would ever have been introduced. They were born of the necessity to placate disaffected pro-Treaty elements in the aftermath of the army mutiny but soon spiralled into a system of political patronage that many subsequently saw as reflecting discreditably upon the revolutionary generation. In 1945 a former political revolutionary, P.S. O’Hegarty, described the clamour for monetary reward among veterans as telling ‘a sorry tale of patriotic degeneration and lack of public spirit’, ¹¹⁷ and many former volunteers came to regret the introduction of the pensions because of the public ridicule they had earned revolutionary veterans. ¹¹⁸

The political context in which the pensions were introduced explains their unusual nature in being awarded to able-bodied men purely on grounds of service in a conflict of short duration without any qualification to demonstrate disability – conflict-related or otherwise – or financial hardship. This in turn occasioned a serious problem of establishing a basis on which to judge pensionable service that was never satisfactorily resolved and led to further animosity among unsuccessful applicants. The guerrilla nature of the conflict, and the resultant absence of documentary evidence on which to assess applications, required reliance upon the verbal assurances, accurate memory (going back 30 years in some cases), and honesty of former senior IRA officers, and there is no doubt that some finessed their accounts to ensure monetary reward for their former colleagues, while others by refusing to cooperate damaged the chances of ex-comrades who had taken the opposing side in the Civil War.

The first Irish Free State government was not unique in restricting pension benefits to its own supporters in the Civil War. However, as the pensions were for service in both the campaign for independence as well as the Civil War, many legitimate revolutionaries were excluded from the process until their own political representatives subsequently acceded to power. The somewhat reluctant decision of Fianna Fáil not to reform or abolish the system and merely extend eligibility to its own side, and the willingness of the main opposition parties to accept this, was an important step in healing Civil War divisions, and thus the Irish Free State had a better record on this than many other states in which the losers had to wait considerably longer to avail themselves of veterans’ benefits.

Nor was the pensions system without other benefits. There is considerable anecdotal and circumstantial evidence of hardship among revolutionary veterans ¹¹⁹ that is yet to be addressed by historians, and these pensions, small though many were, made a considerable financial difference in the lives of many. The release of the pensions archive might also bring us closer to a realistic estimate of participation in the revolution. Hart estimated that ‘Well over 100,000 men were Volunteers at some point.’ ¹²⁰ Over 80,000 people applied for pensions, with 18,000 being successful; this might yet emerge as a generally reliable estimate for the most active participants in Ireland’s independence struggle. The greatest benefit of the pensions will possibly be to historians: the release of such a considerable archive of personal narratives, contemporary documents, and brigade compilations of events and personnel lists of the revolutionary period, as the Irish decade of commemoration approaches, will open many new avenues of research and throw considerably more light on the men and women who fought for Irish independence.