What is it about?
This article looks at two court cases fought in the Irish courts between the British, Irish and Northern Irish governments and several other interested parties, between 1923 and 1929 over two British military charities. It interrogates those two cases and their legacies within the contexts of the First World War and Irish independence.
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Why is it important?
This article makes an original contribution to both the historiography of British ex-serviceman in Ireland after the Great War (and independence) and the history of the British ex-serviceman in general. It serves to complicate what we know to date about the Irish Free State government’s engagement with ex-servicemen more broadly and the Anglo-Irish relations and interactions around the issue of British ex-servicemen in Ireland in the 1920s specifically, as well as the difficulties faced when building a new state.
Perspectives
This article is wholly original in its focus and contextualisation. The history of the army wife and family and military charities in Ireland remains minuscule. This lays the foundations for immense future engagement and the substantial expansion of the subject in Britain, by highlighting not only the existence of these organisations but also the debates that they stimulated and the accessible sources that exist.
Paul Huddie
University College Dublin
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Legacies of a Broken United Kingdom: British Military Charities, the State and the Courts in Ireland, 1923–29, Irish Economic and Social History, August 2018, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0332489318791867.
You can read the full text:
Resources
‘Fighting over the scraps of the Union: the cases of two four-nations court battles over ‘Irish’ military charities 1923-9’
Blog post related to this article. It offers a summary of the article's content and sets it within the 'four nations' context of Great Britain and Ireland.
Disputed legacies: British military charities, the new Irish state and the courts, 1923-29
Podcast of this paper. Accessible via '10 - Episode 15 - Panel 4a'
Legacies of a Broken United Kingdom: British Military Charities, the State and the Courts in Ireland, 1923–29
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Sage Publishing in Irish Economic and Social History in December 2018, available online: http://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/PwHhDF2wgYB8fGB8ESVa/full
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