Widow's pension

Qualitymark

When did the widow's pension start? Would someone widowed in Ireland have been able to claim it in the early 20th century? And are there records available of the dates and details of such claims and payments?

braddun

http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/1935/en/act/pub/0029/index.html

Qualitymark

So there was no widow's pension before 1935, is that correct?

It seems that Britain instituted widow's pensions in 1925.

Peregrinus

Yes, that's right. The Free State was a very much poorer country than the UK in the 1920s and 30s, not only absolutely but relative to population, and it had a much narrower tax base. It faced more acute social problems than the UK, with a much weaker budgetary position. Plus, there was a general prevailing social conservatism that came from political and economic insecurity. As a result the development of social policy tended to lag behind the UK. The surprising thing is not so much that it took Ireland ten years to introduce widow's pensions after the UK had done so, but that it took only ten years.

The development of social welfare fairly neatly illustrates this. On independence, we inherited old age pensions from the British. (They had been around since 1911.) One of the first acts of the Free State was to cut old age pensions, for budgetary reasons. Rightly or wrongly, they weren't prepared to levy the kind of taxes and/or run the kind of deficit that would have been necessary to pay the pensions in full and keep up all the other expenditures to which they were committed, or which they wanted to make. The pension was only restored to its full rate in 1925, the same year as the British were expanding their system to include widows and orphans pensions, and from then on the Free State was engaged in a long game of catch-up.

Qualitymark

Ah yes. Ernest Blythe, who famously killed an early Fine Gael (Cumann na nGaedheal) government by taking a shilling (10%) off the old age pension. Not to be matched till a later Fine Gael government taxed children's shoes, with a wealthy politician asking in astonishment how children could possibly need more than one pair of shoes per year. Bang goes that government.

Peregrinus

Qualitymark wrote: »

Ah yes. Ernest Blythe, who famously killed an early Fine Gael (Cumann na nGaedheal) government by taking a shilling (10%) off the old age pension.

Nitpick: The shilling came off in the 1924 budget. Cumann na nGaedhal won the next election, which was in June 1927. In fact, they weren't turned out until February 1932. Blythe himself did not lose his seat until 1933.

pinkypinky

Further nitpick, the old age pension came in in 1908.

Peregrinus

The legislation was passed in 1908. But it was a while before they brought it into force, set up the necessary machinery for collecting contributions and assessing claims, etc. I have it in mind that it was 1910-11 before payment of pensions actually began.

Mollymoo19

Peregrinus wrote: »

I have it in mind that it was 1910-11 before payment of pensions actually began.

According to an article by N.A.H. entitled ‘Old Age Pensions in the United Kingdom’ published in The Journal of the Royal Statistical Society in December 1910, there were 180,974 old age pensions in force in Ireland by 31 March 1910 - £2,321,729 was paid out that year, well exceeding 'four times the amount paid during the first quarter of 1909'.

I'm sure my great-great-grandfather was one of the recipients, but unfortunately, the documentation for his claim does not survive.

Qualitymark

Peregrinus, it seems that the General Elections of 1927 weren't altogether successful for Cumann na nGaedheal, since they lost their working majority when de Valera founded Fianna Fáil and the FF TDs took their seats for the first time? Is this correct?

Peregrinus

Well, it’s complicated, and there were of course other things going on besides the old-age pension cut.

It’s oversimplified to suggest that CnG “lost their working majority” at the next election. Strictly speaking, they were always a minority government.

In the 1923 election, CnG came out with 63 seats out of 153 - well short of a majority. But the 44 Republicans elected did not take their seats, which meant that for all practical purposes CnG held 63 seats out of 109. In addition they enjoyed the support of the Farmer’s Party, with 15 seats, and quite a few of the 13 Independents.

In the June 1927 general election the CnG vote slumped badly, and they won just 47 seats. The Republicans, now organised as Fianna Fail, again won 44. CnG formed a government with the support of the Farmer’s Party (11 seats) and a bunch of independents (there were 16 independent members). Fianna Fail did not enter the Dail until August, and they then aligned with the Labour Party and (somewhat surprisingly) Willie Redmond’s National League to oppose the government. A vote of confidence was dead-heated, and the government was saved by the casting vote of the Ceann Comhairle.

WT Cosgrave recognised that this was an untenable position so he called a general election which was held in September 1927. CnG and FF both increased their representation (to 62 and 57 seats respectively); all other parties, and the independents. lost seats. CnG formed a minority government with the support of the Farmers Party, and held office until the general election of 1932.

Obviously upset over the cut in the old age pension didn’t help CnaG, but if we are honest the people who were most upset by that were, disproportionately, people who weren’t going to vote for CnG in any event, so it’s questionable how much actual support it really lost them. Besides, the cut had been restored two years before the 1927 election; other issues had moved centre-stage since them. Much the biggest influence on the fortunes of CnG was the attitude of the Republicans - as long as Republicans followed an abstentionist policy, CnG were a shoe-in for government; when republicans took their seats, CnG could only ever form minority governments. Any votes or seats that CnG might or might not lose over pension policy were not going to be enough to change this calculus.

Qualitymark

I wonder, though. How many Acts are remembered 90 years later? Yet Cumann na nGaedheal's 10% cut to the old age pension is still a raw memory. Any time Fine Gael institute a policy that hurts the poor, the memory redounds back…
Talking of shoo-ins, it's surprising (to me) that 1932 when Fianna Fáil swept into government, was so relatively close - Fianna Fáil with 72 seats, Cumann na nGaedheal with 57. I'd always imagined it as much more of a bloodbath.

Peregrinus

Qualitymark wrote: »

Talking of shoo-ins, it's surprising (to me) that 1932 when Fianna Fáil swept into government, was so relatively close - Fianna Fáil with 72 seats, Cumann na nGaedheal with 57. I'd always imagined it as much more of a bloodbath.

Oh, no; it was a skin-of-the-teeth job, in many ways. The first Fianna Fail government was a minority government. Remember it was less than ten years since the end of the Civil War, and Fianna Fail was largely populated by relatively recently-retired gunmen who had taken up arms against a political settlement which Dail Eireann had endorsed, and which the great bulk of the population favoured either out of enthusiasm or out of war-weariness. The Civil War was deeply unpopular with the middle ground, and Dev was blamed for it. And, from the other side, he was blamed by people who had taken the Republican side in the Civil War on their faith in his leadership, and now saw him embracing the Free State, and wondered why the war had been necessary at all. An awful lot of people at the time regarded Fianna Fail in much the same light as an awful lot of people today regard Sinn Fein; glad they have stopped shooting people, but still deeply distrustful of them.

The swing to Fianna Fail in the 1932 election wasn't so much a vote of confidence in Dev as a vote of distaste for the party that had been unfortunate enough to be in power during the great depression, and whose ideology and policies were completely inadequate in the face of the economic crisis. But, even so, the CnG share of the vote in 1932, at 35%, was higher than it had been in 1923 (29%) or in the first 1927 election (27%).

It wasn't until Dev had demonstrated his ability to work with the Guards, the National Army, the Civil Service and the other institutions of the Free State and had had his own crackdown on militant republicanism that Fianna Fail started to become "respectable".

Qualitymark

Yes, and de Valera discontinued Cumann na nGaedheal's murder squad in Oriel House.
I'm currently reading an old autobiography that's very much from the Republican side of the Civil War, and it's full of eye-openers of one sort and another. One is that de Valera and the troops didn't actually take the Oath of Allegiance; what they did is push aside the New Testament they were asked to swear on, say this form of words: "I am not taking any oath. I am signing this document merely to gain admission to the Dáil" - then sign.

Peregrinus

Qualitymark wrote: »

Yes, and de Valera discontinued Cumann na nGaedheal's murder squad in Oriel House.

I’m not here to defend CnaG. But it’s only fair to point out that the Oriel House squad had been disbanded nine years earlier and most its members discharged from the force. Some - certainly less than 10% of the strength of the force at its highest - were transferred to the DMP and from there were amalgamated into the Guards, and some of them may have been still in service in 1932, and possibly the new government identified and discharged them, in which case good for the new government. But there wasn’t any kind of “gang” to “discontinue” in 1932.

Qualitymark wrote: »

I'm currently reading an old autobiography that's very much from the Republican side of the Civil War, and it's full of eye-openers of one sort and another. One is that de Valera and the troops didn't actually take the Oath of Allegiance; what they did is push aside the New Testament they were asked to swear on, say this form of words: "I am not taking any oath. I am signing this document merely to gain admission to the Dáil" - then sign.

An Irish solution to an Irish problem?

This isn’t exactly news; it was well-known and much-discussed at the time. The document Dev and his colleagues signed was, in fact, the oath that they said they weren’t taking. So, they took it in writing, while denying orally that they were taking it. You can see how a lot of people would regard this as a bit shifty.

I’m not a fan of the oath, so I don’t criticise de Valera for this strategy. And, from here, we can see that it was definitely the best thing for Ireland - one of the unpleasant compromises and fudges that was needed if helped the gun was to be taken out of politics (at least in the South). But at the time, a lot of people wondered aloud why, if it was possible to sign the not-an-oath in 1927, it hadn’t been possible in 1922. And they were conscious that an awful lot of people were dead or bereaved because what was considered possible in 1927 was impossible in 1922.

I’m not criticising de Valera; I applaud him for taking the constitutional route. My point is that this atmosphere of mistrust, cynicism and betrayal is not the kind of atmosphere that makes for massive popular landslides. Fianna Fail’s rise to political dominance in Ireland was a long slippery climb.

Qualitymark

Now that's news to me! I thought from (probably careless reading of) Conor Brady's history of the Gardaí that they were disbanded when O'Duffy took over command. Hadn't realised that of course that would have been under Cumann na nGaedheal.

Peregrinus

Qualitymark wrote: »

Now that's news to me! I thought from (probably careless reading of) Conor Brady's history of the Gardaí that they were disbanded when O'Duffy took over command. Hadn't realised that of course that would have been under Cumann na nGaedheal.

Yes. FF got rid of O'Duffy, in fact.

Qualitymark

But wait… wasn't the murder squad still getting rid of people in 1923 - Noel Lemass, for instance? His former boss, to whom he'd been lunching in hopes of getting his job back, described to the inquest how the two of them were taken to near Oriel House, and he thought Lemass had been taken in there.

Peregrinus

It was disbanded in (I think) October 1923.