Military records relate to ‘the 90% of people not known at all’

Women and children feature alongside household names in the files of more than 1,500 people whose War of Independence and Civil War roles are disclosed in historic records published today.

The files are online from this morning in the latest release from the Military Service Pensions Collection (MSPC), a joint initiative of the Defence Forces and Department of Defence.

The 4,700 files published on the Miltiary Archives website today related to 1,576 people, many of whom had multiple files if they claimed under more than one of the several military service pensions law was passed from 1924 onward. Most are previously unknown people who were the foot soldiers of the Irish battle for independence, and in the Civil War that followed.

“This collection is significant because it contains records relating to leadership but also the rank and file, the 90% of people who are not known at all,” MSPC project manager Cécile Gordon said. “It is fairly groundbreaking, everybody has a voice. Not just the applicant himself or herself, but also their dependants who make claims in respect of them.”

Among those whose files have become available to family members, historians, genealogists, and others researching the period are those relating to 300 women who took part in the events of 1916 to 1923.

Many of those women played key roles in the communications and intelligence networks that helped the Irish Volunteers and IRA keep ahead of Crown Forces actions and movements during the War of Independence.

Among the latest set of files are those relating to nearly 350 anti-Treaty IRA members who died or were wounded in the Civil War that began in June 1922.

They range from previously unknown names like 10-year-old Edmund Quirke in Co Tipperary to better-known figures like Dick Barrett. He was one of four IRA prisoners executed by the National Army in December 1922, the day after the IRA killed West-Cork pro-Treaty TD Seán Hales in Dublin.

Barrett is one of 81 IRA men executed by the Irish Free State from November 1922 to May 1923. His file is one of 66 executed men’s files coming into the public domain for the first time today, adding to seven whose files were previously released.

The last MSPC release in 2015 contained large numbers of files relating to National Army members killed in the Civil War.

The project running since 2008 has already helped to tell the stories of over 4,000 participants in events from the Easter Rising in 1916 through to the end of the Civil War in 1923.

This is the fifth large set of files made available since 2014, and will bring to over 6,500 the number of people whose files can now be viewed online.

A further 66,000 files of applicants for medals in respect of service in the Easter Rising or the War of Independence are open to researchers at the Military Archives at Cathal Brugha Barracks in Rathmines.

The names of those individuals and a summary of the file contents can also be found on the Military Archives website.

• The MSPC files are at militaryarchives.ie