FROM THE ARCHIVES:Southern Unionists were the main losers in the move towards independence, abandoned by Northern unionists, targeted by the IRA in the War of Independence and Civil War, and facing an uncertain future under the new order. Under the Treaty, the Free State was responsible for compensation for injuries and damage after the Truce but quickly cut back on payments, leaving the British government to pick up the balance for some 3,300 claimants. It finally increased its compensation fund to £1 million in 1928, as this editorial welcomed.
Great Britain has decided to pay, at least in part, her long overdue debt of honour to the Southern Irish Loyalists. The Chancellor of the Exchequer announced the decision in the House of Commons yesterday. It gave much satisfaction to the large body of Conservative members that has championed the claimants’ cause, and it will be a message of relief and joy for many Irish households. By the terms of the agreement of January, 1922, the Free State Government undertook to compensate persons who had suffered after the truce, but the British Government declared that these victims must receive “equitable” awards and accepted a moral responsibility in the matter. When the Free State Parliament, in 1923, passed an Act which greatly restricted the basis of post-truce compensation the British Government was required to discharge this responsibility.
The new concession raises the British Government’s total grant, in compensation for post-truce losses, to the round sum of one million pounds; and the increase of £375,000 permits a most welcome improvement in the scale and manner of payment. Mr Churchill promises that all awards up to £1,000 will be paid at once in full. Of the excess over the sum of £1,000 sixty per cent will be advanced on account immediately, and the residue of the total grant of £1,000,000 will be distributed at the close of the Committee’s inquiry. The debt certainly is not being paid in full, but it is being paid at least in fairly substantial measure; and two considerations may be set legitimately against disappointed hopes. One is the present state of the British Treasury, drained by a vast social expenditure and by a long period of industrial depression. The other-for which there are a thousand proofs in the history of post-war Europe-is the fact that no other Government would have gone nearly so far as the British Government has gone in the honouring of a moral responsibility. We shall rejoice if Mr Churchill’s final terms prove to be a real settlement of a sad and tedious contention. So long as even a small minority of Irishmen has felt the pangs of betrayal an element of discord has lingered in the relations between different classes of Southern Irishmen, and an element of embarrassment in the relations between the British and Free State Governments. If the sufferers are able henceforth to turn their minds from London to the new Ireland, they and Ireland alike may gather gain.
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