A political minefield: southern loyalists, the Irish Grants Committee and the British government, 1922–31

Abstract

All classes of the loyalist community ... [are] victims.Irish Grants Committee report, 3 Nov. 1930I‘A considerable number [of refugees] have left on a plea of compulsion without any justification whatever for that plea,’ declared the secretary to the Provisional Government in 1922, referring to the departure from the twenty-six-county area of disbanded members of the R.I.C., British ex-servicemen and civilians believed to have been loyal to the British régime in Ireland. Such a claim was greeted with scant belief in Britain in the spring of 1922 as perhaps as many as 20,000 people, some with their entire families, arrived on British shores and were given refugee status by the British government through its Irish Distress Committee, founded to aid Irish loyalist victims of the Civil War. The committee first sat in May 1922 under the chairmanship of Sir Samuel Hoare, a Conservative, and its function was to give loans of money to refugees from Ireland until they either found work in Britain or decided it was safe to return home. At first it had a budget of £10,000, which was fairly meagre, even by the standards of the early 1920s, considering that it dealt with 3,349 applicants in its first six months. Relief was available to claimants through loans and grants. Even at that early stage when the Civil War was far from over, the Irish Distress Committee realised that its work ‘only touches the fringe of the bigger question of compensation’, though perhaps it did not realise just how big that question was to be in the aftermath of Irish independence.