Suchergebnisse

Following its War of Independence from Britain (1919-21) and subsequent Civil War (1922-3), the Irish Free State government introduced disability pension legislation to compensate revolutionaries and soldiers who had been wounded, and the dependants of those who had died, in the conflicts. The legislation was initially limited only to physical wounds but this remit was extended in 1927 to cover mental illness and disease contracted during active service. In expanding eligibility in this way, the Irish Free State went against the trend internationally among the belligerent nations of the First World War, where disability pension eligibility was circumscribed considerably during the 1920s, with psychiatric cases often being downgraded or excluded entirely. This article explores the evolution of the opposite trend in independent Ireland, exploring the reasons for the initial privileging of physical wounds and locating the decision to expand eligibility in the variables governing veteran privilege identified in the work of Martin Crotty, Neil Diamant and Mark Edele.

Recently released archives from the Irish military service pensions collection (M.S.P.C.) offer an important opportunity to examine the post-conflict experience of veterans of guerrilla conflicts. Pensioning has been used effectively to study the post-conflict lives of veterans of conventional wars but the experience of guerrillas after the conflict is largely limited to analysing the security threat posed to peace by these former combatants. The pensions awarded to veterans of the Irish revolution (1916-1923) indicate that recognition was central to veterans' concerns and serve as a useful historical example of the post-conflict reintegration of ex-combatants.

Using recently released archives from the Military Service Pensions Collection (MSPC), this article assesses the archival evidence available for assessing how many rebels are recognised as having military service in the Easter Rising of 1916. It argues that while the MSPC contributes towards a more accurate estimation of the number who participated in the Rising, especially in the regions outside Dublin, it does not constitute a definitive figure for rebels active in Easter week. Through an examination of the assessment criteria for military service pensions, it shows how the decision to grant recognised pensionable service for the Rising was affected by geography, politics, legal challenges, the timing of an application, and the subjective assessment of individual assessors.

The newly released Irish Military Service Pensions Collection offers the most comprehensive opportunity to examine the role of women in the Irish revolution (1916-1923) or in any comparable nationalist revolution. It is also an extremely useful source of evidence for an emerging historiographical trend of tracing the post-revolutionary lives of female veterans by examining the award of service pensions to them by that state. This article will examine the role played by gender in the award of such pensions, the economic and financial significance of them in a state that had under-developed welfare provision and the importance of them as a symbolic recognition of women's roles in helping to achieve Irish independence. It also compares the post-conflict experience of Irish female revolutionary veterans with women who were involved in comparable international military conflicts.

In the aftermath of the Irish revolution and Civil War the governments of independent Ireland introduced various compensation schemes to provide financial reintegration assistance to revolutionary veterans. This would be recognised today as part of a programme for DDR. This paper will examine various service and disability pensions paid to veterans in the context of literature on post-conflict reintegration. It will examine various challenges to reintegration in an effort to analyse the success of revolutionary compensation as a post-conflict reintegration mechanism in independent Ireland after 1922.

In 1924 the Irish Free State government passed legislation to award pensions to veterans of the Irish revolution and Civil War. This article argues that the motivation for the pensions was the need to placate the national army after a failed mutiny in 1924 and that this explains their unusual nature in being based on service alone rather than disability. It will also explore the problems this created for defining service, examine the extension of eligibility to former republican enemies of the state and women revolutionaries in 1934, and describe the application and assessment procedure.