Dáil Éireann díospóireacht -
Tuesday, 1 Dec 1953

Vol. 143 No. 7

Private Members' Business. - R.I.C. Pensions—Motion.

Debate resumed on the following motion:—

That Dáil Éireann is of opinion that members of the R.I.C. who resigned from that force at the request of the First Dáil rendered meritorious service to the nation by so doing and requests the Government to consider the introduction of proposals for legislation to enable pensions to be paid to all such persons irrespective of the length of their service in the R.I.C. at the date of their resignation.—(Peadar Cowan.)

Mr. Davin

I support the very reasoned case made by Deputy Cowan in relation to this motion. I agree that the Minister in reply made a reasoned case against the motion mainly grounded on the wording of the motion, but he did not try, as far as I recollect his speech, to make a case against a favourable review of the very small number of outstanding claims that remained to be dealt with. In Volume 143, at column 1159, of the Official Report, the Minister said:—

"Round 1919 an appeal was made to them by the Dáil or the Sinn Féin organisation to throw off their uniforms and go out and join the forces of the country fighting for freedom at that time."

It is significant in relation to that statement that the Trade Union Congress, which was then a very strong and united body supporting the claims of the Sinn Féin organisation held a special secret session in Drogheda where they gave their unanimous support to the demands that were being made at the time. I remember quite well as Chairman of the Standing Orders Committee of that congress a deputation from the organised body of the R.I.C. accompanied by an Irishman from Liverpool who was theleader of a body of Irishmen in Liverpool, making an application to the congress for their case to be heard. They submitted a statement dealing with the demands that had been made by General Collins and other leaders of the I.RA. calling upon the R.I.C. to surrender their uniforms. The Trade Union Congress, after hearing the statement in secret session, gave their unanimous support to the demand made by the representatives of the I.R.A. and Sinn Féin organisation on behalf of the people as a whole. To that extent, having been associated with the matter at the time, I feel bound to say that every genuine applicant who responded to the appeal made at that time should have his case favourably reviewed.

The Minister has pointed out, and I am sure Deputy Cowan realises that there is something in it because the Minister is relying upon a certain section of the 1934 Act, that it is not necessary to pass amending legislation in order to comply with the reasonable request submitted by Deputy Cowan. The Minister has, however, given figures, and these figures have been given now for the first time as far as I understand. According to the Minister the original committee in 1922 dealt with 1,136 applications and gave awards in 502 cases. I am pretty certain that all those who received awards as a result of the investigation carried out by this 1922 committee did not actually receive pensions.

I am certain that there were a number of cases that were held up by the responsible Minister at that time, some of which were deserving applicants in whose favour awards were made but who did not receive pensions until after the 1934 committee had reviewed their applications.

The Minister went on to say that the 1922 committee, which dealt with 330 cases, gave awards in 50 cases. Between the two committees that investigated these claims the total number of awards was 552. I would ask the Parliamentary Secretary to state, if he has the figures available, what number of the 552 in whose cases awards were made did in fact draw pensions.

It is not desirable that we should make comparisons at this stage between the various classes of people who made sacrifices up to and including 1922. It is not fair that a limit of three or four years should be laid down in order to prevent young men who joined the constabulary after a certain date from receiving pensions. That principle has not been applied in the case of those who joined the I.R.A. a year or two before the Truce, and it should not apply in this particular case. Undoubtedly, arguments for or against cases of that kind can be adduced, but it is not desirable to make comparisons as to the extent and cost of the sacrifices made by the people who rendered national service at the period in question.

I would ask Deputies to admit that the man who surrendered his main source of livelihood at a particular period was making a great sacrifice. Many of these men were sons of small farmers. It does not necessarily follow that every young man who remained in the R.I.C. up to the conclusion of the Truce was not giving assistance to the I.R.A. while continuing to wear the uniform of the R.I.C. I know of men, and had contacts at that period with young men who joined the R.I.C. both before and subsequent to 1916, who remained in the R.I.C. on the instruction of the I.R.A. because they were regarded as being very helpful in view of the places in which they were serving at that time. There is evidence to show, and I was given reasons to believe, that many young men and many comparatively old men who remained in the R.I.C. up to the period of the Truce were among the first men taken into the Garda Síochána when that force was established. There was a certain amount of hostility to that type of people being brought in and given responsible positions in the Garda Síochána, but I am one of the Deputies who heard these reasons being given by those who founded the Garda Síochána. It is known to all Deputies that one of the highest officers of the Garda Síochána was a man who remained in the R.I.C. and who was subsequently rewarded by a high position in the Garda Síochána.

We are talking to the converted when we are talking to the Minister. I accept Deputy Cowan's assurance that there are less than 30 genuine claims outstanding. That is a good argument in favour of the reasonable suggestion advanced by Deputy Dr. Hillery. The Minister is carrying two portfolios at present but I would suggest that the Minister or the Parliamentary Secretary should, during the five or six weeks' holiday period, study the files on these cases. I am sure that there is a summarised version of the case on each file. The files are not very big or very numerous. They could be studied within a short period by the Minister or the Parliamentary Secretary or by a deputy appointed by the Minister.

There is no necessity to set up a committee such as was in existence in 1922 or 1934. Deputy Cowan and other Deputies who have spoken in support of the motion know that the leaders of the R.I.C. at that time are still alive. One of them lives only a short distance from the City of Dublin. I think two of the three recognised leaders live in the City or County of Dublin. I am certain that the leader who lives in Kildare, and who is probably known personally to the Taoiseach and most Ministers, would make himself available if advice were needed in doubtful cases still outstanding. With Deputy Dr. Hillery, I would urge that the small number of claims still outstanding should be reviewed personally by the Minister or somebody appointed by the Minister during the Recess.

Mr. Rooney

I would like this motion to be accepted as it stands, because it is designed to remedy a problem with which a small body of pensioners is now faced by reason of the falling value of money and the low purchasing power of the pension allowed to them at present. We must face the fact that these men who were administering the law of the British Government at that time were Irishmen. I am sure 99.9 per cent. of them were Irishmen. They were employed to do a job just as the civil servants at that time were employed by the British Government to administer the law. Notalone were these men born and bred Irishmen; they were Irishmen at heart, and in the years which followed 1916 a very large proportion of them showed, when it came to the test, that they were Irishmen and were in favour of national freedom.

Deputy Davin has very well pointed out that many of those men, though they were wearing the R.I.C. uniform and were in the employment of the British Government administering the law at that time, were in fact hand in glove with the foremost of our national patriots of those days in the effort to secure even a greater measure of freedom than we have secured since that time. Those men responded wholeheartedly to the call from General Michael Collins to hand in their uniforms and to take part then in the establishment of a free nation. That is why I consider that this motion is not a day too soon and that it deserves the support of this House. I hope that it will be accepted and that it will not be opposed. I hope that careful examination will be given to the circumstances of the few pensioners who are left. When we consider the small number who were there in 1936 and when we consider that it is 31 years or more since they served in the R.I.C., we can calculate that there is a very small body of persons now involved; but this is a very big matter for them because it is a question of getting an increase in their very meagre allowance for the purpose of meeting present-day costs.

We have seen that the British Government found it necessary by reason of rising costs to adopt a system of scaling pensions of different types of persons who retired in some cases 25 or 20 years ago. Obviously, the circumstances at that time when they had qualified for payment of pension differed very much from now. The pension at that time was calculated on a very much smaller wage than would have been paid in the years that followed the time when the pension was decided upon. I am not going to hold up the action of the British Government as an example to be followed here.

I am only pointing out that it was considered in Britain anyway, and probably in other countries, that, in the cases of persons who qualified 20 or 25 or even 30 years ago, in the circumstances of the present time it is desirable that they should be proportionately increased, which would enable them to make ends meet.

The nation owes to many of these men its gratitude for the help that they gave our former leaders when they were trying to establish this, our State as we know it to-day, and they did not make known to the people the help they gave. It was known only to the republican leaders of that time who were engaged in what proved to be the very hazardous business of establishing the free Government which we have at the present time, entitled to make its own decision and to look after its own affairs for the country.

I would emphasise again that we are dealing with men who were in the vast majority of cases Irishmen. I suppose there was not .1 per cent. of them who were not Irishmen. They were Irishmen who proved in the critical days after 1916 that they were also Irishmen at heart and that they deserve now the best thanks of the nation. This motion at least will enable us to show a token of our gratitude by adopting a plan to remedy the difficulty which their present scale of pensions is causing for so many of them.

Mr. Finan

I would like briefly to support this motion also. I think it is only right that the Government of this country should do a belated act of justice to those people. It seems a long time now to go throwing your mind back, but I am sure many members here will remember the heroic act of men who responded to the call of the first Government of this country and showed loyalty to its leaders. It required a certain amount of moral courage which we should not forget.

It is true that many of those men, even while they had shown where their allegiance lay, were often open to suspicion, and viewed with very serious suspicion by many people uninformed of their real motives. It has been said that the number is verysmall. The calls that will be made on the Exchequer in adopting this motion will be very light, and I think that this Government and this House should show even now some appreciation of the heroism of those men.

I well remember what must have been the remark of one of the first when he bluntly told his officer that no man could serve two masters and he chose Ireland. That man will not be making any demand on the Exchequer; he has embraced another and a nobler life; but surely some appreciation can be shown to his comrades who followed the noble example which he set, and even now I hope that they will be taken out of the penury in which many of them exist.

Mr. MacCarthy

I think that the statement in the early part of the resolution may be accepted. The question of introducing proposals for legislation is a separate question, to my mind, and while I agree with the fact that the men to whom Deputy Cowan has made reference did render meritorious service to the nation by their course of action at great personal sacrifice and risk in many cases, I understand that two commissions were set up to examine that question and did examine it and made awards on the basis of the information at their disposal. I have no personal knowledge of the work of these particular commissions, but I am given to understand that they went into matters very closely and very adequately, and if there are some dissatisfied, as I feel sure there are, and even if the number is as low as 30, my view in all these cases is that the question should be examined fully and that credit should be given where credit is due; but if that has already been done, and if we can be satisfied that it has, then I do not know how far we will be able to get with this problem, because if I were satisfied in the morning that there were only 30 Old I.R.A. men dissatisfied, or proportionately even 30 in each brigade area or in each battalion area dissatisfied, I would be a lot happier than I am.

I feel that there is a number of Irish volunteers who, through some circumstanceor other—perhaps the death of their senior officers, perhaps the unavailability of people who were intimate with the services they rendered, or for some other reason—when they tried to establish their own cases, even though their merits are recognised locally as is the case with the people to whom Deputy Cowan makes reference, officially it has not been recognised; and many of them, to my mind, who would merit service certificates, have been told that they are people to whom the Act did not apply. If anything were to be done in these cases now, something far more vigorous and far more specific will have to be done for the members of the Old I.R.A. who are dissatisfied. That is my view. I feel that there are numbers of them throughout the country still whose cases, though they may have been reviewed and may have been considered on more than one occasion, have not been dealt with the way they should.

That is only my judgment, from my personal knowledge, and I am sure that other people would be inclined to agree with me from their own areas. However, it is like all legislation, some people come out on the wrong side when all is said and done. Consequently I feel that in regard to this body of men, even though they are dissatisfied with what is being done—leaving out many of the members of the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Republican Army who are also dissatisfied—in the application of the Acts as they have been put through this Dáil and administered by people outside who are appointed to serve that purpose, I fear we must accept the judgment of those who are given that authority.

Captain Cowan

First and foremost, I want to express my appreciation of the way in which this motion has been considered by the House. I think the House is grateful to the Minister for the very informative statement he made. The Minister, in intervening in the debate, gave very valuable information which will be helpful to Deputies in considering this problem. I am glad the Ministertakes the line that new legislation is not necessary and I am glad he takes the view that the Act of 1923 is still existing and that its provisions can be called into operation at any time the Minister for Finance wishes.

It is very useful to know that that is the interpretation of the Act, that it is still in operation and that no new legislation would be required to deal with the cases of the 30 or lesser number of individuals who are covered by the motion I have put down and which I put down, as I said in opening, at the request of a committee and representatives of those resigned and dismissed R.I.C.

We had, as the Minister says, two major commissions to deal with this matter, one in 1922, which was known as the Batt O'Connor Commission, and the other in 1934. The commission in 1922 in considering the problem undoubtedly acted justly within the limits of their procedure. They were then limited to four years, that is, a person with less than four years service was not entitled to be considered under the Act referred to by the Minister. The present Minister for Finance in 1934, when he set up another commission, by specific Order, limited that to three years. Therefore, we had a four-year, a three-and-a-half-year, and then a three-year limitation. The result was, then, that no matter what a person's service was, no matter how beneficial it was to the nation, if he had less than three years' service in the R.I.C. he was not entitled to avail of the provisions of the Superannuation and Pensions Act of 1923. I feel that an injustice was done to the persons concerned by the limitation imposed on them by the O'Connor Commission in 1922 and by the limitation imposed on the new commission by the Minister in 1934. The injustice is contained within those two limitations.

In opening I said we are inclined to look on national service prior to 1922 more favourably now than we would have looked on it ourselves say, in 1922 or perhaps in 1934. There was a very strict code, if one likes to put it that way, laid down amongst the members of the Old I.R.A. themselves in regard to what type of national service wouldbe recognised as suitable to justify pensions. That very strict code applied in 1922 and it applied again in 1934 and looking back now from the year 1953, studying history as well as having helped to make history, studying the facts of particular actions, one comes to the conclusion that probably this very rigid and strict code we laid down for ourselves was too rigid and too strict and created injustice. I want the Minister to examine the very few cases that are left in that way.

I do not want to be taken as accepting this, that the moment we had 1916 we had a complete change of view all over the country. We had not. In 1916, unfortunately, the majority of the people were not in favour of the Rising. It required the brutal executions by the British authorities to stir up the national feeling. It required the propaganda which showed the lives of those men who were the leaders of 1916, and the type they were, to get the people as a whole to realise what great leaders they were and what tremendous service they had rendered to the country.

Then there was a campaign of propaganda from 1916 right through 1917 and 1918, when we had our general election. In that general election the majority of the constituencies returned Sinn Féin members to Parliament. Then, in January, 1919, we had the Irish Republic ratified by Dáil Eireann of that period. Dáil Eireann then established its Republican Government. That Republican Government called on the people of Ireland, as a properly and duly elected Government of the people, for their allegiance and support. It was subsequent to that that Dáil Eireann requested the members of the R.I.C. to resign from the force and to throw in their lot with their fellow citizens who were then fighting for freedom. The vital date in the Act is the 6th December, 1921. Therefore, we had this effective period from January, 1919, to the 6th December, 1921, a period of just three years.

In the ordinary way, young men who were perhaps not long out of school had a career selected for them in theway boys always have by their parents. Probably the parents really did not understand the vital issues that were involved in sending their boys into the R.I.C. When those young men had joined the force and realised the type of work they were called upon to do, they began to realise the difference between supporting the nation and supporting a hostile power and influence within the nation.

Those men then asserted their nationality and their nationhood. It is well to realise that when they got a correct appreciation, they were in a service that was paying them well and that promised them substantial pensions when their service would end. When they cut that aside and, by accepting the decree of Dáil Eireann, resigned and cut themselves adrift from the British forces, they lost their prospect of pension. In cases where, by more active steps on behalf of the new Republican Government within the R.I.C., they brought about their dismissal from the R.I.C. they placed themselves even in more danger than by resigning.

I would not like the House—nor would the House itself like—to look at such service, as I consider it service, of resigning or being dismissed in the circumstances I mentioned, in any derogatory way. We all remember the electric effect of what was known as the mutiny in Listowel during the Black and Tan period. It had a tremendous effect on the country and it was a powerful propaganda factor here, in Great Britain, in America and all over the world. The 14 members of the R.I.C. in that station, having been addressed in barbarous language by an assistant commissioner—I think his name was Smyth—threw off their uniforms, threw down their rifles and took their stand with the people of Ireland who were fighting against this foreign tyranny at the time. Those men rendered tremendous national service. Because some of them had less than three years' service in the R.I.C. they were refused recognition for that act of bravery and that wonderful expression of their national sentiments.

There is a big case to be made for those men. It would be wrong just toconsider it within the very strict and rigid code we laid down for ourselves in the early years after the Truce. I would strongly appeal to the Minister to reopen, as Deputy Davin put it, the files of the small number of men who are still alive.

The number is getting smaller day by day and in a very short time there will not be very many of them to be troubled about matters such as this. It would be a grand act of justice on the part of the country if the Government would examine into all these cases, every one of them on their merits, irrespective of their length of service in the R.I.C. If that were done, the Minister would be bound to do justice to them. Unfortunately, the limitation imposed in 1922 and 1934 prevented justice being done. A considerable number of the 115 were rejected in 1934 because of that limitation imposed by the Minister.

There is another small point. In 1922, certain men were excluded by the O'Connor Commission and when the matter was reopened in 1934, approximately 50 were considered to have been dealt with unjustly in 1922. Under the new Order made at that time, these men were entitled to be paid a pension as from that date. In other words, it was decided that they were unjustly treated in 1922, in that they did not receive a pension then, but the pension that it was found should be payable commenced only in 1934. I know the very same thing arises in connection with the I.R.A. but I do not want to introduce the I.R.A. from a comparsion point of view. When we are dealing with the I.R.A. we can deal with them on their own merits. I want to deal with this particular section on its merits and I think there is a case for this particular section.

This motion has been discussed in a most helpful way by all the Deputies who took part. I gather that the general expression of opinion was that the Minister should take steps to review those cases. I am perfectly certain that the Minister would be anxious to do justice. That being so, I want this motion to go to the Ministeras the unanimous expression of this House that their cases should be reviewed and that justice should be done to the individuals concerned. In that spirit, a Leas-Cheann Comhairle, I think the best interests of the people concerned would be served if we were to let the motion stand as it is, all sides of the House having expressed their sympathy and their support for it. Consequently, I will withdraw the motion and let it go to the Minister as the considered view of the House that their cases should be reopened and reexamined and that justice should be done to the people concerned.

Mr. Rooney

It is most improper to withdraw it.

Captain Cowan

I hope I am doing the best I can for the people I am representing.

Mr. Davin

There is no legislation necessary.

Motion, by leave, withdrawn.