FROM THE ARCHIVES:The introduction of means-tested old-age pensions of five shillings a week (about 32c) for those over 70 in the UK, including Ireland, at the start of 1909 was described in this article by John McCaffrey on its 50th anniversary. – JOE JOYCE
THE PENSION officers were directed to interview all applicants in their respective places of abode. The object of this regulation was to prevent fraudulent claims.
So far as Ireland was concerned the weather during the last three months of 1908 was exceptionally good, and the 300 additional officers drafted from Great Britain to assist the overwhelmed Irish officials were thrilled with their enchanting departmental journeys on jaunting-cars along the lovely Irish rural roads. They were welcomed everywhere they called.
In Ireland, however, the absence of documentary evidence of age caused considerable concern to the authorities. The registration of births was not compulsory during the vital period. In many cases the registers of baptism or marriage could not be traced. Fortunately the census returns of 1841 and 1851 were available in the Record Office, Dublin. But these were not always reliable, as the enumerators were occasionally careless in entering the correct ages of the residents in each household.
Where satisfactory evidence of birth was not available, the pension officers were authorised to accept the ages shown in family Bibles, marriage certificates and insurance policies. The physical appearance of claimants and letters from clergymen were also taken into consideration in recommending the acceptance of claims by the local Pension Committees.
In this connection it soon became generally known that many Pension Officers were particularly impressed when applicants asserted that they remembered “the night of the big wind.” This was, of course, irrefutable evidence that they were at least two years of age on the night of January 6th-7th, 1839, when Ireland was swept by a western hurricane.
One obviously very old Irishwoman said to an English Pension Officer in 1909: “I am a hundred years of age.” “Then you are a centenarian,” he observed. “I am no such thing,” she replied. “I am a good Roman Catholic.”
In the inevitable rush a number of pensions were granted, but withdrawn at a later date. In “The Journal of H.M. Customs and Excise,” dated January 10th, 1931, a former pension officer, who served in Ireland during this hectic period, wrote in his reminiscences: “There was that wild gang at the Dublin Record Office where a body of Englishmen swooped down on the poor old Irish pensioners and cut off the pensions of men and women in the prime of life.”
In rural Ireland residents who are now elderly recall the local astonishment when gay bachelors and sprightly spinsters “put in applications for a pinshin!” It was never suspected that they were septuagenarians.
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