I move that the Bill be now read a Second Time. This Bill has been denounced in all moods and tenses by certain sections throughout the country long before it saw the light of day. It has been said to be contrary to the Constitution, to disregard the law of the land, to show disrespect to the decisions of the Supreme Court, and to betray a callous indifference not only to the public in general but to the Old I.R.A. in particular. The publicity given to these unworthy and unfounded allegations has prejudiced the merits and intentions of this Bill, and I must, therefore, ask the House this evening to bear with me while I point out the necessity for and the motives underlying the Bill. For that purpose I propose going back to the beginning and to outline briefly for the benefit of the House the history of the administration of the Military Service Pensions Act, 1934, which the present Bill seeks to amend.
The Military Service Pensions Act, 1934, became law on 13th September, 1934. The first task which confronted the Department was to devise a form of application for claimants which would cover the various periods of pensionable service set out in the Bill. As the Act of 1934 differed in many respects from that of 1924, the drafting of the precise form of application took a little time, but eventually it was prescribed by a regulation published on 18th October, 1934, but the forms themselves having to be printed were not available until several weeks later.
Meanwhile the most careful consideration was being given by the Government to the selection of persons who were to administer the Act. The machinery prescribed by the Act for dealing with claims was a Referee assisted by a committee of four persons described as the Advisory Committee. The Referee was to be a judge, a justice, or a practising barrister of ten years' standing, and the committee was to consist of two officers of high rank in the Forces, together with two other persons, one nominated by the Minister for Finance and the other by the Minister for Defence.
After the most careful consideration it was decided to ask a judge to leave his circuit to perform the functions of Referee and for the committee were chosen two men of conspicuous merit in the I.R.A., together with two officials of senior rank in the Civil Service. Meanwhile a secretary with staff was appointed to deal with administrative work.
The Act was passed on 13th September, 1934. The form of application was published on 18th October, 1934, and the date by which application was to be made was fixed as 31st December, 1935. The Referee and Advisory Committee, though appointed early in October, 1934, did not begin to function until 17th December, 1934. Between October and December, 1934, the Department was engaged on the preliminary work of getting things in order for the Referee and one of the problems with which it was preoccupied was, in what way should applicants be informed that their claims were not allowed by the Referee. Section 5 (5) of the Act prescribed that "the Minister may make rules regulating the procedure of the Referee", and under that section the Department published an Order in October, 1934, prescribing that where an applicant had not proved his claim the Referee would send by post a notice to him setting out the matters of fact on which he had not so proved his claim, but that he would not make his report to the Minister until the expiration of at least 20 days after the service of the notice. Such a procedure of notifying in writing the grounds of the Referee's decision would only be practicable where applications were few, but when the Referee and the Advisory Committee had functioned for a short time and had seen the rate at which applications were arriving, they found the procedure unworkable and first amended the Order by making a verbal notification sufficient, and later abolished both the verbal and the written notification. In point of fact, from the 1st February, 1935, until the 21st February, 1936, no procedure was prescribed by Order as to how the Referee was to notify applicants regarding their applications. On the latter date an Order (S.R.O. 61 of 1936) directed that the Referee should simply inform applicants whether the Act applied to them or not and should allow them at least 20 days in which to appeal against the finding. This Order still remains in force, and the only amendment of it was in 1938, by an Order (S.R.O. 58 of 1938), which prescribed the procedure which the Referee should follow when, after issuing the original notice of award to an applicant, new evidence came to hand showing that the award was excessive.
I have referred to these published statutory documents to show that even on the relatively simple question of how applicants were to be notified, the Referee was wrestling with a problem of procedure from the very beginning.
When the Referee and Advisory Committee began to function they were confronted with two other serious problems—(1) how were the claims made by applicants to be verified; and (2) what internal procedure was to be followed in adjudicating on the claims.
As regards the first problem of verification the position under the 1934 Act was far different from that which obtained under the Act of 1924. Under the latter Act verification of post-Truce service was available from documents existing in the Army and it was not difficult to verify pre-Truce service, first, because the most of the witnesses were Army officers, and secondly, because only three or four years had elapsed between the period and the date of examining the pension so that memories were fresh on the subject. Under the 1934 Act, however, an entirely different set of circumstances operated, because for one thing there was no documentary evidence on which the Referee could rely, and for another the memories of essential witnesses had not improved with the lapse of time between the passing of the two Acts.
The difficulty was, however, solved by asking the various brigades throughout the country to set up committees, to compile brigade records and to choose members who would act as verifying or certifying officers before the Referee when the applications from their particular areas were being dealt with. The verifying officers were old members of the I.R.A. who had taken a prominent part in the fight in their respective areas. They were drawn from both parties who had opposed each other in the post-Truce trouble, and they co-operated irrespective of the political and other differences which divided them. Their work was voluntary and they sacrificed their time, leisure and business in order to do their best for their comrades and to see that the claims of any genuine applicants were not overlooked.
The Referee's second problem was what procedure was he to follow in determining the applications for service certificates. That obviously depended, within the framework of the Act, on the number of applications to be dealt with. Now, at the end of December, 1934, only 204 claims had been referred to the Referee, and I have no doubt that for a period the Referee followed the strict procedure laid down by the Act. But the year 1935 was not long in progress when the Department was inundated with applications. They were coming in at the rate of over 4,000 a month and by the final date, 31st December, 1935, the Referee was faced with the colossal task of dealing with 51,880 applications.
Now, it is easy to be wise after the event. We all know now that, on a strict literal interpretation of the Act, the correct procedure was that the Referee should sit with the Advisory Committee to examine the information received before making his report to the Minister, and that he should be present when any person attended for examination as a witness. To deal with each case in that manner would have taken, it is estimated, about 70 to 80 years to complete the work, and that, of course, would be farcical as a practical proposition. The Referee could, of course, have come to the Minister at this stage and have pointed out that the strict procedure provided in the Act was impossible to operate and, in that case, we would then have asked for the legislation we are asking for now, and I have not the slightest doubt that this House would have implemented our proposals. But the Referee did not do so. Under Rule 7 of the Order published in 1934.
"the Referee, subject to the provisions of the Act and these Rules, may regulate his own procedure".
The Referee was a judge of the Circuit Court and he considered that, within the provisions of the Act, he could allow the committee to take evidence either as a body or in pairs and that he could then, on the evidence received, determine the claim of the applicant, and it would appear that at an early period this was the procedure actually followed.
Whatever was the procedure adopted in particular cases, the fact remains that at the end of 1935 the Referee had reported on only 1,065 cases. The same rate of progress obtained during the first eight months of 1936, and in August of that year the Referee was asked if the work could be expedited by the appointment of four interviewing officers. The idea behind the proposal was that if the advisory committee, either as a body or as individuals, were relieved of or helped in the work of interviewing applicants, the output of reports could be increased enormously. The Referee saw no objection to the proposal and the officers were engaged in this aspect of the work from about October, 1936, until April, 1942. Two of the officers chosen had been active members of the I.R.A. and the others were civil servants with long experience of administration. Where, therefore, the interviewing officers were not actually biased in favour of the applicants, they were men whose experience would enable them to bring out every favourable feature in the applicant's claim, while the informal atmosphere in which the evidence was taken considerably assisted the applicant. Between the Referee himself, the advisory committee and the interviewing officers, no less than 30,245 persons were interviewed regarding their claims between 1934 and 1943.
Before April, 1939, only 64 rejection notices had been issued, but meanwhile the files had been scrutinised and any claim which did not seem on its face likely to succeed was put aside for rejection. Towards the end of 1938 an arrangement was made with the brigade committees whereby before the rejection notices were issued the committees would be informed 28 days beforehand of the names of the persons concerned, so that if necessary the committees could make representations to the Referee about any person whose claim they considered to warrant further consideration. I think this was a wise plan. On the one hand, there was no use putting applicants to the expense of coming to Dublin and encouraging false hopes, and, on the other, it prevented the Referee from overlooking any point in the applicant's favour. Between 1939 and 1943 the brigades were notified of 45,416 rejections. This arrangement was, it will be noted, additional to the ordinary statutory notice of rejection in which the persons concerned had at least 20 days in which to appeal.
Up to the end of January, 1943, the Referee had issued 11,329 qualifying and about 48,538 non-qualifying reports giving all concerned 21 days in which to show cause why the report should not be made to the Minister. Against the qualifying notices there were 2,158 appeals and, against the non-qualifying notices, there were 23,238 appeals. In addition to the appeals made on the 21 days' notice, there was another series of appeals made to the Minister on grounds of additional evidence not available prior to the making of the report becoming available. There were about 12,000 such appeals and of that number 922 were referred to the Referee for review. The House can see for itself the amount of work involved in dealing with all this mass of material.
I have now described at some length the procedure adopted in determining claims for pensions under the 1934 Act, and I have outlined briefly the work of the Referee, the advisory committee, the interviewing officers, the verifying officers and the brigade committees. What I should like to stress at this point is that persons chosen to constitute the administrative machine prescribed by the Act were weighted in favour of the applicants. The Referee was a judicial personage whose only purpose was to administer the law, irrespective of its consequence and the two civil servants on the advisory committee were acting under an enabling statute to administer justice; but the other members were I.R.A. officers whose function it was to see that credit was given, within the ambit of the Act, where credit was due. At least two of the four interviewing officers had active, indeed prominent, service with the I.R.A., and all the verifying officers from the 82 brigade areas were bent on extracting the last ounce of credit for the applicants of their areas.
Unless the procedure adopted was manifestly unjust—and there is not one tittle of evidence to that effect; indeed, all the evidence points to the contrary —I cannot conceive any administrative machine so heavily weighted in favour of applicants as was that operated under the 1934 Act. The date for receiving applications was extended on several occasions, but the position to date is that there have been 60,131 applications. Out of that number, 11,577 succeeded in obtaining service certificates and the remainder were refused.
Such is the final result of the past ten years' work on the administration of the 1934 Act. Interpreted financially, the cost of the Referee and advisory committee with administrative staff is about £130,000, and payments on foot of awards made by the Referee total, to the 31st December, 1944, £2,561,071.