I

Marie Coleman’s research has advanced our understanding of the Irish Free State’s MSP legislation and how male, female and disabled veterans navigated the claim process.Footnote ⁸ In contrast to considerations of the development of MSPs at a legislative level, this study adopts a ‘ground-up’ perspective focusing on the practical and subjective experiences of the dependants — widows, parents, siblings and children — of deceased rank-and-fileFootnote ⁹ combatants during the claim process.Footnote ¹⁰ The different experience of the MSP claim process in Northern Ireland has increasingly become the subject of academic interest, particularly concerning Cumann na mBan veterans.Footnote ¹¹ Much of this research has focused on Belfast, and this article, through its six-county perspective, uncovers regional variances in the experience of the dependant claim process throughout the north. Considerable police and postal censor scrutiny on northern veteran claimants has been noted, but the emotional burden that the claim process and threat of interference placed on dependants, who generally did not have activist pasts, is equally revealing with regard to early nationalist experience in Northern Ireland.Footnote ¹² Irish Free State jurisdictional restrictions shaped the ad hoc character of the northern dependant claim assessment process, and the novel methods used to gather and verify information on northern dependant claimants are examined.

Dependant letters in engagement with the pension process reveal much about their attitudes toward life in Northern Ireland and toward the northern and southern governments. These civilian nationalist and republicanFootnote ¹³ perspectives, particularly those of women who predominantly claimed dependant pensions (mothers and widows), are often missing from research on northern nationalist experiences during the interwar period that largely focus on political developments and divisions within nationalism, the Boundary Commission and the Catholic Church.Footnote ¹⁴ The female dependant perspectives considered in this study bring a new dimension to the historiography of northern women and politics in the first half of the twentieth century, which has been more developed in relation to unionism.Footnote ¹⁵ The supplicatory pension context and ‘poverty’ letter format — the need to emphasise adversity and elicit sympathy — complicate our use of the pension material as a historical source. This article, therefore, considers dependant letters as both ‘strategic pieces of writing’ and ‘truthful scripts of experience’.Footnote ¹⁶

This article draws on a sample of 237 dependant pension files from the six counties that comprise Northern Ireland.Footnote ¹⁷ Dependant claims for deaths through active military service, sectarian violence, accidental deaths and deaths from disease throughout the 1920s and 1930s that allegedly stemmed from military service are all considered. Most dependant claims within the sample (39 per cent) were made from Belfast and County Antrim. Between July 1920 and October 1922, 499 people, overwhelmingly civilian (86 per cent) and disproportionately nationalist (57 per cent), were killed in Belfast through political violence. IRA and Fianna Éireann members accounted for only thirty of these fatalities in the city.Footnote ¹⁸ As a result of persistent intercommunal violence, the city had the highest per capita death rate associated with political violence on the island between 1920 and 1922.Footnote ¹⁹ Violence outside Belfast was concentrated in areas with large Catholic populations where sectarian tensions ran high, including Derry city, east Tyrone, south Armagh and south Down, but IRA members formed a greater proportion of the total fatalities than in Belfast.Footnote ²⁰ Relative to the other Irish provinces, however, Ulster, and particularly the counties that formed Northern Ireland, had fewer IRA combatants and casualties. Dependant claims within this sample also relate to deaths during the Irish Civil War, and indeed, many northern nationalists, primarily driven by economic necessity, joined the ranks of the new National Army, with 1,685 enlisting between April and December 1922.Footnote ²¹

II

Before Irish Free State MSP legislation was passed, several sources of financial assistance and compensation were open to northern nationalist and republican dependants in the early 1920s. Certain families successfully claimed in the northern courts under the Criminal Injuries Acts (CIAs) of 1919 and 1920 for the death of their relative through sectarian violence. However, any award under the CIAs disqualified dependant claims under section 13 of the 1923 APA. In contrast to the boycott of CIA decrees by Sinn Féin-controlled local authorities in most southern counties in 1920, these decrees that were levied on local ratepayers continued to be paid in most northern areas and remained in force in the new Northern Ireland.Footnote ²² Northern dependants who secured compensation through the CIAs generally fared better financiallyFootnote ²³ than equivalent claimants in the south, who were often paid smaller sums under the Compensation (Personal Injuries) Committee in the mid 1920s after the CIAs were repealed with the 1923 Damage to Property (Compensation) Act.Footnote ²⁴

The Irish White Cross (IWC) was the most significant fund providing much-needed relief to nationalists impacted by revolutionary and communal violence through lost livelihoods and homes or the imprisonment and violent death of a relative.Footnote ²⁵ Belfast received almost 50 per cent of the IWC’s entire outlay.Footnote ²⁶ Though represented as philanthropic or welfare-focused by its promoters, such economic relief for nationalist and republican families, often impacted by sectarian and state violence, was heavily politicised in Ulster.Footnote ²⁷ The Northern Whig, reflecting Ulster unionist opinion, considered the IWC a ‘Sinn Féin subsidy’.Footnote ²⁸ The Irish Republican Prisoners’ Dependents Fund (IRPDF) provided aid (£2 weekly subsidies) to families impacted by the northern authorities’ internment policy, which saw an estimated 728 imprisoned between May 1922 and December 1924.Footnote ²⁹ ‘By helping the dependants of republican prisoners, this fund indirectly helps the republican cause,’ concluded one Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) report on a Newry Prisoners’ Dependents Fund ‘Garden Party’ fundraiser in June 1924.Footnote ³⁰ The RUC ensured a physical presence at this event and the fund’s local organisers were kept under police surveillance,Footnote ³¹ but, in general, it adopted a policy of non-intervention towards dependant fundraising endeavours given their limited fundraising potential.Footnote ³² The Irish Free State authorities similarly monitored and targeted the ‘Irregular’ IRPDF during and after the civil war.Footnote ³³ The RUC also conducted surveillance on Catholic Church-affiliated collections in Belfast in May and June 1923 for the dependants of those interned in the Larne workhouse and on the prison ship Argenta.Footnote ³⁴ RUC reports detailed whether the fund’s committee members were ‘Constitutional Nationalists’ or ‘Sinn Feiners’,Footnote ³⁵ while the fund’s organisers felt sufficient pressure to publicly stress their financial accountability and that there was ‘nothing political attached to the collection’.Footnote ³⁶ A by-product of their role in administering such relief may have been to heighten unionist suspicions of linkages between armed republicanism and the Catholic Church. The Northern Ireland government’s clampdown on republicanism through its special powers legislation and broader vigilance towards dependant funds between 1922 and 1924 — dates that align with the development and introduction of the first APA and MSPA — gave the Irish Free State DoD an indication of the treatment that awaited northern pension claimants as it finalised and introduced its pensions legislation.

Under the 1923 APA, dependant claimants in Northern Ireland, such as Annie Matthews, mother of the deceased National Army sergeant John Lavery of Tandragee, County Armagh, were informed of the ‘difficulty’ that the DoD encountered obtaining the information necessary to assess claims as they resided ‘outside the jurisdiction of the Saorstat’.Footnote ³⁷ Anticipated interference by northern security forces because of the sensitive information in pension statements detailing activity with proscribed organisations complicated the DoD’s development of a northern MSP policy.Footnote ³⁸ Critically, it could not turn, as it would normally have done, to agents of the state to check or verify aspects of the claim or to gather supporting evidence. This can hardly have been a surprise. The pensions it was creating and was about to administer were rewards for service, but they were also designed to inculcate loyalty to the southern state. Certain northern state officials were, therefore, unwilling to provide documentation or signatures to help dependant claims.Footnote ³⁹ The Garda Síochána and the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) initially investigated and reported on dependant economic circumstances in the Irish Free State, while, in Northern Ireland, the DoD adopted an ad hoc policy of primarily securing reports from the lay Catholic organisation the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul (SVDP), best-known for its extensive economic relief work.Footnote ⁴⁰ For dependant claimants resident in Britain, the DMP worked with local British police to verify their economic circumstances as outlined in their claims.Footnote ⁴¹ The Pensions Board reassured the Irish Free State’s president’s office that the RUC played no part in northern dependant claims and, in contrast to RUC vigilance, local British police saw dependant pension claims as a non-threatening means of welfare provision.Footnote ⁴²

During the initial enlistment of northern SVDP members as report authors in 1924, internal DoD communications deliberated on alternative options on how to verify the information included in northern dependant claims. In September 1924, when claims under the first APA were already under consideration, the office of the adjutant general recommended sending a ‘representative from the Army Pensions Department to the different areas in which the dependents of such [northern] deceased soldiers reside.’Footnote ⁴³ A Pensions Board official, in response, detailed the three options that he considered available, which included sending an ‘investigating Officer into the Six County Area’, sending forms to the claimant for completion or having the claimant appear before the Pensions Board in Dublin at their own expense. The first option, he warned, raised ‘questions of policy which it might be desirable to avoid’, while claimant financial and health restrictions undermined the viability of the third. The second option, that of sending forms to the claimant, was deemed ‘the only feasible one’.Footnote ⁴⁴ In late November 1924, however, General Gearóid O’Sullivan, secretary of the Board of Assessors, again outlined the board’s view that each claimant should be seen by an official of the pension department with Belfast, Derry and Enniskillen serving as possible regional centres where claim information could be verified and returned to Dublin. O’Sullivan suggested that ‘arrangements could be made with the Govt. of Northern Ireland by which our representative and his documents would be immune from all interference’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Pension officials’ perception of cross-border relations soon after partition appeared at times naïve in its presumption of northern government acquiescence. A November 1924 Pensions Board memo titled ‘Postal Censorship in the Six Countries [sic]’ acknowledged that the ‘Northern Authorities are alive to the possibilities of obtaining data relating to the I.R.A. Activities in the North-East’ that would provide them with ‘abundant evidence which may justify the conviction’ of National Army officers and soldiers.Footnote ⁴⁶ Several precautions were proposed to safeguard northern claimants. This included forwarding MSP ‘forms in plain envelopes, with plain stamped envelopes enclosed for reply’,Footnote ⁴⁷ monitoring the time communications took to pass through the six counties,Footnote ⁴⁸ and copying communications in case of interception.Footnote ⁴⁹ Despite DoD concern regarding the threat of northern interference, these precautions likely did little to assuage the worries of northern claimants.

It has been noted that male and female northern revolutionary veterans used covering addresses south of the border for their correspondence with the pensions authorities as they were vulnerable to postal censorship, surveillance, raids and arrest.Footnote ⁵⁰ Amid the spike in IRA and Cumann na mBan veteran claims following the 1934 MSPA, the mid 1930s marked a period of routine mail interference, police pressure on old IRA veteran associationsFootnote ⁵¹ and pension liaison officers,Footnote ⁵² and, on one occasion, charges brought against a County Tyrone IRA veteran for possession of MSP documentation in January 1936. These charges against Peter Devlin resulted in a sentence of three months with hard labour.Footnote ⁵³ Press reports on Devlin’s case cited a similar case as a precedent in which charges (later dismissed on appeal) were brought against a County Fermanagh IRA veteran for possession of Old Comrades Association documents in 1934.Footnote ⁵⁴ Both cases indicate a legal grey area under the special powers legislation concerning IRA veterancy and veteran associations in the north. The RUC knew of IRA veteran associations’ role in organising pension information in the mid 1930s, but only sporadically acted against them.Footnote ⁵⁵ Terms like the ‘Old IRA’ and ‘veterans’, intended to assuage suspicions of continuing IRA involvement, proved important in the post-civil war political landscape as a means of demarcation for consecutive Irish Free State administrations. Such demarcations were arguably of greater importance to northern veterans, but veteran letters to the Irish Free State DoD detailing police pressure indicate that they did little to deter police attention. This targeting of republican pensioners can be seen as a continuation of the northern state’s repressive policy towards republicanism, which saw the proscription of republican Easter commemorations and publications in the late 1920s and the continued extension of the special powers legislation until it was made permanent in 1933.Footnote ⁵⁶ Modest IRA growth and activity in the early 1930s and rising sectarian tensions in the mid 1930s might also have informed the targeting of MSP claimants.Footnote ⁵⁷

Despite most dependants not having revolutionary or activist pasts, several, encouraged by the DoD,Footnote ⁵⁸ took precautions like posting their letters from the Irish Free State and using covering addresses.Footnote ⁵⁹ Dependant letters demonstrate that the claim process, and in particular correspondence with the pension authorities, was inherently unnerving given the threat of postal censorship and police victimisation. Ostensibly innocuous occurrences such as late replies, failures to acknowledge receipt of a letter or late pension payments sparked anxiety among northern claimants. In November 1933, almost three months had passed without a reply since Susan Boyle, widow of John Boyle of Belfast, had sent a completed APA form and several certificates to the pension authorities. For her peace of mind, she sought clarity on the whereabouts of her documentation: ‘Perhaps you could let me know if it arrived safely, as I am naturally very anxious.’Footnote ⁶⁰ In July 1936, Brigid O’Donnell of Belfast expressed concern that her normally punctual dependant’s pension was a week late: ‘The delay is causing me great anxiety and it leaves me to think that your letter has been intercepted.’Footnote ⁶¹ Already the subject of RUC raids, Luke Quinn, former Sinn Féin activist and brother of IRA private Patrick Quinn of Newry, confided that he was ‘very uneasy’ about his dependant pension claim correspondence in an August 1940 letter. The RUC had ‘searched every part of the house and read every letter the[y] came across’ and he feared that letters ‘could have gone astray as every letter is censured [sic] now that comes here so one has to be careful what they write’.Footnote ⁶² However, most northern dependants did not express concern regarding correspondence with the DoD or developing their pension claim. In general, unease concerning the threat of interference, more often than the experience of it, characterised certain dependant narratives. Broader experiences of conflict and victimisation as northern nationalists undoubtedly influenced this concern. The pension claim process raised other emotions among dependants. For Annie Kane and her family, receiving communications relating to her pension claim for the death of her son, National Army private Gerald Kane of Belfast, was upsetting. She wrote that the postman calling ‘casts a gloom of sorrow with those who were left behind’.Footnote ⁶³ Charles Kearney, father of IRA private James Edward Kearney of Whitecross, County Armagh, expressed a similar sentiment in his letter that detailed the events leading to his son’s death in Crumlin Road Prison (Belfast) from cardiac failure in September 1920 and his interactions with ‘murder gangs’ in his locality before and soon after his death: ‘It pains me very much to have to open this wound again.’Footnote ⁶⁴

The exceptionality of northern violence during the revolutionary period was not factored into MSP legislation. It was built around a southern-focused periodisation that did not recognise how much violence occurred in the north, particularly in Belfast, during the Truce period (July to December 1921).Footnote ⁶⁵ Another bone of contention for certain northern dependants was the rejection of claims deemed to have occurred outside active military service amid the intercommunal violence and reprisal killings of Belfast in the early 1920s. Certain dependant claimants like Mary Rea, mother of Fianna Éireann member Leo Rea, did not accept this reason for the rejection of her claim under the 1927 APA. She maintained that her son, aged seventeen when he was fatally shot on 23 June 1922, was mobilised and defending his Catholic neighbourhood in anticipation of a backlash following the assassination of the Unionist MP and military advisor to Northern Ireland, Sir Henry Wilson. Such reasons for the rejection of a claim might well have seemed abstract to dependants, who were often certain of their relative’s military contributions and death for the national cause.Footnote ⁶⁶ The rejection of a claim was often seen by dependants as the rejection of their relative’s military service. Mary Rea stressed that her son ‘was no coward’ and argued that his comrades would not have raised money for his burial expenses ‘if he was not worth it’.Footnote ⁶⁷ More common reasons for the rejection of dependant claims included: no membership of a prescribed organisation under the pension legislation; death occurred outside of active military service, through personal negligence or was deemed unattributable to military service particularly in cases of illness-related deaths; and failure to meet eligibility and administrative criteria, such as applying outside designated claim windows, being an ineligible family member or not being deemed dependent on the deceased.

John Murray’s dependant claim for the death of his son, Belfast Fianna Éireann member John Leo Murray, highlighted additional pitfalls dependant claimants encountered. His claim was rejected as his son was deemed not to have been on active service when fatally shot by the British military on 29 August 1920. Limited records of the Belfast Fianna, errors in the evidence provided by refereesFootnote ⁶⁸ and difficulty securing evidence from others well placed to provide testimony, such as the imprisoned Fianna and IRA veteran Sean McNally,Footnote ⁶⁹ all complicated the verification of his son’s military service. Contacting former comrades of their deceased relative was another problem many northerners encountered. A consequence of postal censorship and social disruption, in the view of Elizabeth Early, widow of IRA private Edward Early of County Armagh, was that it became ‘very hard to get in touch with some of the men who would furnish the evidence’ in support of her dependant claim.Footnote ⁷⁰ Many republican veterans had left the north through police victimisation, economic boycott or a refusal to live in Northern Ireland.Footnote ⁷¹ Individuals who could vouch for military service were often dead, uncontactable or would not engage with the Irish Free State DoD, further complicating the development of claims.

By the late 1930s and early 1940s, instances of cooperation between the DoD and certain Northern Irish state departments emerged. In 1937, the Army Pensions Board (APB) directed the Department of External Affairs to request information on the prison records of Annie Walsh of Dungloe, County Donegal, from the northern authorities to determine her medical history.Footnote ⁷² Requests for information also came from the northern authorities. The Northern Ireland Ministry of Labour contacted the DoD enquiring whether a claimant for an old age pension in the north was still in receipt of a dependant’s allowance under the APA.Footnote ⁷³ Such cooperation, albeit limited, did not translate to a relaxation in attitudes among dependant claimants. Bridget O’Hare, mother of IRA captain John Francis O’Hare of Newry, remained wary of corresponding with the APB into the 1950s. She used an address in Dublin for her claim correspondence and wrote that most letters to her house ‘are opened by northern P.O. [post office] authorities’. She remained fearful of ‘victimisation or police annoyance’ if the northern authorities became aware of her ‘relations with Eire’.Footnote ⁷⁴ The relatively limited engagement with the Bureau of Military History (BMH) among IRA veterans resident in Northern Ireland between 1947 to 1957 also spoke of the entrenched unease felt by those with revolutionary pasts and contrasted with the greater contribution of witness statements by northerners living in the south.Footnote ⁷⁵ Long conditioned to life in a hostile Northern Ireland, such mistrust might never have lessened for those with personal and familial associations with republicanism.

III

Certain state bodies were tasked with investigating and gathering evidence for the DoD on dependant claimants’ economic circumstances and their degree of dependency on their deceased relative. This evidence was used to verify the information provided by dependants in their APA claim forms. Investigations comprised of interviews and residence inspections were carried out by the Garda Síochána and the DMP under the 1923 APA, customs and excise officers under the 1932 APA, and social welfare officers under later acts. They reported on the composition of the family and its income sources, its land valuation, the occupation and income of the deceased relative before military service and the degree of dependency at the time of death.Footnote ⁷⁶ In the north, however, the DoD mostly relied on local Catholic clergy and the SVDP, which was particularly strong in north-east Ulster in the first half of the twentieth century, to furnish these economic reports.Footnote ⁷⁷ Through its relief work and its local personnel, often from the same neighbourhoods as the claimants, the SVDP was well placed to furnish economic reports for the DoD.Footnote ⁷⁸ Urban working-class economic reliance on charitable bodies, and particularly the SVDP, was indicative of the northern authorities’ indifference to poor relief.Footnote ⁷⁹ The SVDP was by far the most prolific report-writing body in 1924 for claims made under the 1923 APA. It stopped producing reports in 1926, with local clergymen taking over as the main economic report-writing body. The Pensions Board acknowledged the society’s limited reach outside urban centres, which may have informed this shift.Footnote ⁸⁰ Solicitors and teachers were occasionally called on to supplement meagre reports submitted by the SVDP or a clergyman, or when these bodies could not reach a dependant claimant. The Gardaí returned eight reports on northern claimants predominantly residing in remote border areas in 1924, five of which related to dependant claims made from County Fermanagh. Overall, the variety of report authors underlines the ad hoc character of the reporting process in the north.

This makeshift approach was epitomised by the Gardaí producing reports in 1924 on northern dependants beyond its jurisdictional remit and by how it evidenced these reports. For example, a Garda sergeant stationed in Muff, County Donegal, received orders to ‘go to Derry yourself in plain clothes’ to interview Margaret Browne, dependant claimant and mother of National Army captain William Browne, if he ‘cannot otherwise get the necessary information’ on her circumstances.Footnote ⁸¹ His subsequent cross-border visit to her home in Derry city might well have been deemed a breach of sovereignty by the northern authorities. It is unclear whether certain northern dependants subject to Garda reports, and particularly those in County Fermanagh, travelled south of the border for an interview or if a Garda came north for the investigation. The case of Catherine Adair, mother of the deceased National Army commandant Sean Adair, highlighted less rigorous methods of procuring evidence deemed sufficient to decide on her claim. She moved to Sligo to live with friends after her home in Lisburn was ‘burned out during the pogrom’ that followed the IRA’s assassination of District Inspector Oswald Swanzy on 22 August 1920.Footnote ⁸² Catherine Adair was awarded £2,750 compensation for the destruction of her residential and business property in February 1921.Footnote ⁸³ By early 1924, she had returned to Lisburn, but this relocation meant that her sister in Sligo, where Catherine Adair initiated her claim, was instead interviewed by a Garda sergeant regarding her circumstances.Footnote ⁸⁴ These examples highlight the DoD’s appreciation that evidence-gathering for northern claims required flexibility and its desire to accelerate claim decisions for National Army dependants.

In September 1924, internal DoD communications detailed two dependant cases in which awards were granted without securing economic reports.Footnote ⁸⁵ In one of these cases, evidence was taken from Catherine McGrade’s dependant’s allowance claim form when the SVDP was unable to report on her circumstances.Footnote ⁸⁶ The other case related to the claim of Edward and Mary Jane Fitzpatrick of Kilgarrow, County Fermanagh, parents of local IRA leader Matt Fitzpatrick. He was killed on 11 February 1922 at Clones railway station during a gun battle between a party of nineteen Ulster Special Constabulary (USC) and local IRA units in what became known as the ‘Clones affray’. Instead of procuring a standard report, the Pensions Board drew on an informal report on the family’s circumstances by Garda Commissioner Eoin O’Duffy, who worked closely with Matt Fitzpatrick during his time leading the IRA’s Monaghan brigade.Footnote ⁸⁷ It outlined how the family’s home was burned down by the ‘Specials’ and juxtaposed the ‘humiliation’ of the decline in the family’s economic standing with their continued ‘loyalty to the present Government’. O’Duffy enquired about the possibility of the Fitzpatricks receiving a separate grant from another fund alongside the maximum £150 gratuity for the dependants of an officer under the 1923 APA that they were duly awarded.Footnote ⁸⁸ O’Duffy’s intervention in this case inevitably held far greater weight than standard evidence from a SVDP or Garda report. This case raises the importance of political connections and endorsements in the dependant claim process.Footnote ⁸⁹ Many MSP claimants urged their local TD and government figures, often those from their locality, to raise their case with the DoD. Lobbying on behalf of claimants became an accepted informal dimension of the claim process.

Whether economic reports on a ‘family’s circumstances or character reflected the moral registers at work at a given time in a given place’ is an important consideration.Footnote ⁹⁰ It is perhaps even more pertinent in the northern context, where Catholic social doctrine and the pastoral care and charitable responsibilities that defined clergy and SVDP relationships with the report subjects, influenced the nature of the reports emerging and the lens through which their lives were articulated. The implicit social expectations on those who availed of wider church and SVDP charity may have extended to MSP claimants, whose position of local supplication, given the report author’s capacity to make or break claims, became more pronounced.Footnote ⁹¹ That said, there is little evidence to suggest that the clergy or SVDP applied any additional moral code to the existing criteria of pension eligibility. SVDP, clergy and Garda report authors frequently advocated sympathetic consideration for ‘deserving’ cases. Deservingness was ‘central to the relationship between those who sought relief and those who granted it’ in twentieth-century Ireland. Those seeking relief sought to demonstrate their deservingness through reference to their hardship and personal and familial sacrifice, while those granting it often sought discourse, behaviour or economic conditions that confirmed their idea of what constituted it.Footnote ⁹² Report authors, and particularly clergymen, often framed a claimant’s deservingness through discussion of their virtuous qualities which were contrasted with their economic hardship. The children of Matthew Mongan of Strabane were deemed ‘hardworking, thrifty people, deserving any help you can extend to them’,Footnote ⁹³ the Rices of County Derry a ‘poor but decent and honest family’Footnote ⁹⁴ and the parents of William Canning of Magilligan praised for rearing their children well despite limited means.Footnote ⁹⁵ However, the disposition of the report author was significant, as not all authors advocated deservingness or the sympathetic consideration of claims.

Personal relationships between the report author and the dependant claimant or the deceased relative, or the lack thereof, often determined the length and tone of an economic report and raised the question of objectivity. Certain authors detailed such relationships, while others may not have known the report subject, or may have chosen to omit this information. Republicans were a small minority within northern nationalism, but certain republican families might have been apprehensive that their claims depended on favourable reports from local clergy who were generally hostile to their relatives’ IRA activity in the early 1920s.Footnote ⁹⁶ Priests occasionally conveyed messages from dependants to the pensions authorities in their reports, suggesting a degree of collaboration with the report subject. In his report, Rev. Fullerton of Belfast wrote that: ‘Mrs Kearns wishes me to add that she is indignant at her son being referred to as a Private.’Footnote ⁹⁷ In certain cases, such as in that of the deceased IRA section commander William Canning of Magilligan, County Derry, Rev. Kerlin ‘knew the deceased from his infancy’ and, upon his death, ‘officiated at the funeral’ pointing to an intimacy that only clergymen could have held with dependants and the deceased.Footnote ⁹⁸ Such intimacy meant that reporting on a family and the deceased relative occasionally brought up difficult memories, such as in the case of Rev. John Doherty. His May 1934 report on the dependants of IRA private Francis MacNeece of Annaghmore, County Armagh, detailed his role in returning the body home ‘rolled in a blanket’ after his fatal shooting by crown forces in August 1920. He found it ‘hard to write any report on the Dec.[deceased]’ and explained how this ordeal impacted him: ‘that home going in the middle of the night; that meeting with the poor old father and mother and helpless little sisters I shall never forget.’ Doherty also detailed his role in helping the father ‘buy his little farm’ and expressed concern at his ability to clear his debts.Footnote ⁹⁹ This likely served to underline the father’s financial need to the APB. Other priests witnessed the death of the report subject. Rev. P. Kerley noted in his October 1924 report how he stood beside IRA member Peter Charles McCreesh of Aughanduff, County Armagh, when he was shot after a gun battle broke out at an aeraíocht [outdoor gathering] in Cullyhanna in June 1920. Kerley deemed McCreesh’s parents ‘respectable good people and this knowledge goes over 37 yrs’, which informed his appeal to the pension authorities to ‘do the very best you can for these poor old persons’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ This personal appeal contrasted with the more formal tone of most Garda, customs and excise and SVDP reports, as both Revs Doherty and Kerley expressed concern for the financial welfare of the bereaved families whom they knew well.

The relative autonomy with which northern clergymen interacted with the APB and the economic report process often contrasted with the more dutiful and muted report writing of other bodies. Clergy members were not necessarily under the same orders as Gardaí, customs officers or even SVDP members to produce dependant reports or to cooperate with the APB, and local grievances or the disinclination of a priest could, in rare instances, impede the progress of a dependant’s claim.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The relocation or death of a priest, doctor or referee also slowed down claims.Footnote ¹⁰² Although rare, heated exchanges with the APB emerged, such as Rev. C. O’Neill’s defence of the dependants of IRA private Sean McCartney of Belfast in 1939. Asked to account for the McCartneys’ expenditure of a prior £75 gratuity under the 1923 APA, O’Neill wrote how they ‘bought bread with it when they were hungry and clothes when they were almost naked’. He contrasted the national sacrifice of their son, who died in May 1921 during an exchange with British forces at Lappanduff, County Cavan, with what he considered the demeaning line of APB questioning. He further criticised the drawn-out claim process, what he saw as the tight-fisted approach to compensation, and he likened the pension process to going ‘down on their knees for a miserable sum of money’.Footnote ¹⁰³ O’Neill ultimately withdrew his cooperation having grown frustrated with the bureaucracy of the claim process. Another priest, Rev. J. McShane of Omagh, County Tyrone, remained, like most report authors, ‘anxious to do all I can for deserving claimants’, yet also expressed his fatigue at the elongated MSP claim process.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ When asked about providing details on a local dependant claimant, Rev. Francis J. O’Hare, with barely concealed hostility, questioned: ‘why not pay an official to make whatever investigations you require’ since ‘you have so much money to expend in the “Free” State.’Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The contrast between reports emerging in both states in the 1930s becomes starker when these clergy narratives, and their sympathetic perspective towards claimants, are compared with the formal reports produced by customs and excise officers.

IV

Shortly after the death of the Belfast IRA and National Army veteran Patrick Dougan in April 1937, his brother, Daniel Dougan, recalled Patrick’s life. It consisted, Daniel wrote, of ‘suffering, ill-health, no work’ and having to give up his business ‘through petty persecution’ by the RUC. The northern MSP files stand as a record of how veterans and dependants experienced the formative decades of life in the northern state, and many narratives, like Dougan’s appeal on behalf of his brother’s widow and child, were a desperate plea for economic support from a marginalised community struggling to make ends meet.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Frustration at the economic and political lot of northern nationalists underpinned many dependant narratives: ‘I need not hardly tell you that owing to the way we were placed in Northern Ireland at the time owing to the terrible Riots […] it was absolutely impossible to earn a livelihood.’Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Letters to the pension authorities served as one of the few outlets for these northerners to express frustration at their reduced status after partition, yet their narratives, although genuine, were inevitably shaped by the pension context. Perhaps claimants felt that the DoD, far removed from the daily hardships and humiliations of nationalist life in Northern Ireland, needed to hear about their lives to better understand the context from which their claims were made.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Certain claimants appealed directly to fellow northerner Frank Aiken, commander of the IRA’s 4th Northern Division during the War of Independence and minister for defence between 1932 and 1939, for his understanding of their hardships since partition.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Thomas Finn, father of IRA private Francis Finn of Charlemont, County Armagh, wrote to Aiken requesting the ‘hand of friendship’ in the form of compensation. He detailed local hostility that left him ‘almost crushed’, pleading ‘you know yourself what the six counties are’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Despite this personal appeal, his claim was unsuccessful as his son was deemed not to have contracted the disease (tubercular meningitis) that killed him in October 1925 during his military service.Footnote ¹¹¹

Certain claimants contrasted their relative’s death and the raw deal for northern nationalists after partition with the independence secured in the southern twenty-six counties. In 1933, retired Royal Irish Constabulary sergeant Hugh Cassidy of Irvinestown, County Fermanagh, wrote to the DoD of his son William ‘dying in the cause of freedom of which you now enjoy’.Footnote ¹¹² William Cassidy and two Trillick (County Tyrone) nationalists, Edward McLaughlin and Francis Kelly, were executed on 24 March 1922 in reprisal for the IRA’s killing of two local ‘B Specials’ — Samuel Laird (20 March) and George Chittick (23 March).Footnote ¹¹³ William Cassidy did not appear to have had IRA service, but his father claimed that he supplied motor cars to local IRA units.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Despite Hugh Cassidy’s ostensibly ‘loyal’ past which included serving as a recruiting officer during the First World War, he detailed considerable local hostility from the USC towards his family after his son’s death.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Other dependants similarly experienced new or increased local hostility after the publicity of their relative’s death, especially when they died on active service.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Hugh Cassidy and his wife, Elizabeth Cassidy, received £250 under the CIA in June 1922, which made them ineligible for APA compensation.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Feeling entitled to compensation from both the northern authorities and the Irish Free State, Hugh Cassidy replied to the DoD that ‘what I got in N.I. it has got nothing to do with you’. His anger was palpable after his claim was rejected: ‘I won’t forget you during the rest of my life & anything I can do for you both with tongue & pen will be done.’Footnote ¹¹⁸ Through his experiences of local victimisation, the murder of one son and the forced emigration of another son through intimidation,Footnote ¹¹⁹ it becomes apparent why Cassidy contrasted the ‘freedom’ enjoyed in the Irish Free State with his circumstances.Footnote ¹²⁰

Unsuccessful claim outcomes heightened suspicions that the northern IRA’s military and broader nationalist contributions during the revolutionary period were overlooked. Mary Cosgrove, widow of the IRA member John Cosgrove, argued: ‘I think we did as much here around Camlough & in the North as any where else.’Footnote ¹²¹ Bernard Ward, father of IRA member Francis Ward of Sixmilecross, County Tyrone, echoed this sentiment and the feeling of unrewarded sacrifice characteristic of many other northern dependant narratives: ‘We fought as hard in Tyrone as any other part of Ireland we got nothing for our fight only the loss of lives and the loss of property.’Footnote ¹²² Pension awards improved the quality of life of successful claimants, yet unsuccessful claimants lived with a grievance that was accentuated by their economic and political subjugation as northern nationalists and republicans. The rejection of dependant claims likely hardened perceptions among these northern nationalists that they had been left to fend for themselves.

Certain claimants and testimonial authors appreciated the moral weight of emphasising popular sentiments of northern abandonment often in the hope of eliciting sympathetic consideration from the APB. A testimonial letter for Margaret Creegan of County Armagh pleaded that ‘an award in this case and similar cases in the north would make the people here feel that they have not been forgotten’.Footnote ¹²³ In February 1935, Louis J. Walsh asked his sister, Fianna Fáil TD Helena Concannon,Footnote ¹²⁴ to intervene on behalf of Margaret Larkin’s dependant claim for her son IRA Brigade O/C Sean Larkin of Ballyronan, County Derry. His letter, which Concannon forwarded to the minister for defence, suggested that the snubbing of prior appeals made on Margaret Larkin’s behalf ‘lends colour to the truth of the allegation that “those who suffer in the north, were left to suffer alone”’.Footnote ¹²⁵ Emphasis on religious persecution and appeals to a shared Catholicism emerged in the narratives of certain Belfast claimants who witnessed severe intercommunal violence between 1920 and 1922. Annie Kane noted how two of her sons were interned in Maidstone Prison in England ‘for taking up Arms against the Belfast MURDER GANG who were out to banish the Catholics of Northern Ireland’.Footnote ¹²⁶ Jack McCusker’s 1936 letter on behalf of Ann Hamilton stated that her son, Alexander Hamilton, died ‘in defence of Catholic women and children’ in July 1921 and that sympathetic consideration of her claim would ‘show other Catholics in the north that it was [worth]while to continue the fight […] for a free Ireland and Catholic justice’.Footnote ¹²⁷ Overall, claimant reference to party-political loyalties and the republican, soldierly and Catholic credentials of the deceased and the family proved a more common strategy in the hope of appealing to the sensibilities of the pensions assessors. Protestant authors of ‘poverty letters’ to the Belfast unionist lord mayor in the 1930s similarly underlined resistance to home rule, loyalty to king and country, and First World War records.Footnote ¹²⁸ Other dependant claimants contrasted their perceived ill treatment in terms of compensation with the dependants of crown forces killed in their locality, while others implied that southern loyalists were compensated more generously by the Irish Free State authorities than they were.Footnote ¹²⁹

V

The MSP machinery was designed with southern dynamics in mind, which inevitably complicated northern engagement with it. The southern-focused periodisation of the APAs did not recognise the exceptionality of the northern revolutionary experience, such as the intensity of violence during the Truce period. Other dependants were bitterly disappointed that deaths during sectarian violence were ineligible under the acts. Nor was the more challenging context from which northern nationalists claimed acknowledged in the APAs. The DoD was concerned about the prospect of northern state interference when MSPs were first introduced, but its administrative records betray its reactive and at times confused approach towards establishing a northern pension policy. Jurisdictional limitations and the risk of interference required novel methods for gathering evidence on northern dependant claimants. The DoD turned to northern SVDP members and local clergymen in the 1920s and 1930s, who inevitably produced reports different to those by agents of the state in the south. These northern reports were shaped by interpersonal, ideological and institutional biases and considerations. This can, of course, also be said of the Garda and customs and excise reports south of the border, but the more personal and sympathetic approach to reports, especially by the clergy, was a significant differentiating factor, particularly in the 1930s.

Practical and subjective experiences of the claim process for dependants were largely determined by the threat of state interference. The claim process opened them to risk and required vigilance largely unknown to claimants south of the border, and many remained deeply mistrustful of the northern state decades after the death of their relative. Some felt that northern challenges relating to the claim process and broader hardships were not fully appreciated by the pension authorities. Given the northern authorities’ hostility to republicanism and how poorly northern nationalists fared from partition, many dependants looked to the Irish Free State for recognition and financial support. Rejected claims accentuated feelings of isolation and abandonment for certain claimants. Dependant letters provide insight into everyday life for these dependants in the new Northern Ireland, albeit expressed through the supplicatory lens of an official compensation claim. Experiences of sectarian victimisation and economic hardship were central to how many framed their suffering, need, and personal and familial sacrifice. Alongside the loss of their family member, such experiences were often central to feelings of entitlement to compensation. This dependant perspective broadens the post-revolutionary narrative beyond republican activists and veterans and highlights grassroots nationalist and republican experiences and outlooks often absent from the literature on the northern nationalist minority.