Minister with Responsibility for Defence, Paul Kehoe, T.D., Announces the 2017 Release of material from the Military Service (1916-1923) Pensions Collection

Minister Kehoe today announced the latest release online of material from the Military Service (1916-1923) Pensions Collection (MSPC). This follows a number of previous releases of material beginning in 2014. Today’s release is comprised of 5,000 files relating to 1,576 individual veterans who had active service in the period between 1916 and 1923.

Speaking in relation to this new release the Minister said, “I am delighted to announce the further release of material from this very significant collection. I believe that this material affords our current generations a real opportunity to understand and empathise with our forbearers who fought to gain our independence thus allowing us the freedoms that we have today. He went on to say, “This research project forms a bridge for us to explore our past and contributes hugely to our understanding of the circumstances and social history of the people of that period. With over 250,000 records in the entire collection, it contains unheard voices and brings the historical narrative down to the personal, the rank and file Volunteer as well as the leadership. It illuminates the organisations, events and individuals in their particular context. I am very proud of the work done on the project to date and I look forward to further releases of material in the coming years. As we enter the second half of the Decade of Centenaries I would like to encourage everyone to participate in the Public Consultation Process announced by Minister Humphreys last week to assist in framing the Government’s commemoration programme over the coming years”.

The files, amounting to 294,000 individual scanned pages, is today available to the public for the first time and can be viewed online on the MSPC pages of the Military Archives website at www.militaryarchives.ie. Included in this latest release are the files of 300 women participants in the revolutionary period, 343 IRA Civil War casualties, 66 individuals who were executed during the Civil War and 352 files relating to applications of dependants during the period. It also includes a further five veterans of Easter week and 510 applications for service from the War of Independence and the Civil War.

END

NOTE FOR EDITORS

The Military Service (1916-1923) Pensions Collection (MSPC) project is a joint Department of Defence and Defence Forces contribution to the Decade of Centenaries. The project is mandated to release the files and records of the Department of Defence dealing with the service of qualifying members of the Irish Volunteers, the Irish Citizen Army, the Hibernian Rifles, Cumann na mBan, Na Fianna Éireann and the Irish Republican Army from the period April 1916 to the 30th of September 1923. This involves cataloguing and partially digitising nearly 300,000 files.

Since the first release of material in January 2014 a total of 83,583 files have been processed and released amounting to more than 850,000 individual scanned pages.

Information on the Public Consultation Process can be found here.