In Justice and Fair Play: Female veterans, the Irish Free State, and Military Service Pensions, 1934-1958

This thesis utilises a case study approach to analyse the military service and wound/injury pension applications of thirty Irish female revolutionaries. Using the files housed in the Military Service Pensions Collection, militant women's reasons for pension application and resulting pension outcomes are investigated. A meticulous reading of applicants' pension applications reveals that recognition for efforts in state-formation and compensation for financial loss and bodily/mental harm provided the primary motivations for claiming veteran privileges. Such a reading also exposes the rhetorical strategies used by applicants to navigate the tension between veteran entitlement and the Free State's unwillingness to reward women's transgression of conservative gender norms during conflict. Thus, as indicated by an exploration of applicants' military labour during the Irish revolution (1916-1923), in conjunction with an analysis of the creation, debate, and implementation of the 1924 and 1934 Military Service Pensions Act (MSPA), Irish women's successful pension outcomes were not wholly determined by active military service, but by Fianna Fáil's gendered, state-building agenda. The conflict and post-conflict experiences of Irish female revolutionaries, however, bears relevance outside the boundaries of mid-twentieth-century Ireland. Investigating multiple case studies to uncover the intricacies of Irish female veteran's exclusion and inclusion in the Free State's transition from a colonial to post-colonial state has offered the needed temporal and spatial link for comparative analysis with modern-day female veterans. This thesis thus uses the Irish context as a historical basis to argue that female ex-combatants' limited access to reintegration programmes in the recent global cases of Zimbabwe and Timor-Leste was not a modern-day phenomenon but seen decades earlier in the Free State's 1934 MSPA.