1968 - Present

In order to fully understand how the Milibern Trust came to be founded in 1968, one has to go back to go back to the period immediately after World War 1 when efforts were being made to re assimilate British ex-service personnel into civilian life. Understandably the key targets were

A) Care of the disabled, widows and dependants;

B) Employment;

C) Housing;

In the euphoria after the war no one wanted to be reminded that historically the Nation had been less than generous in it’s treatment of it’s military forces returning from previous conflicts, perhaps best focused by Francis Quarles, the English Religious poet ( 1592-1644 ) who wrote:

During the war, to justify conscription, the Government had promised ‘homes for heroes’ In the event, such money as could be afforded for building homes for which ex-servicemen could be given preference was channelled through local authorities in England, Scotland and Wales. However, in Ireland there was a problem that, whereas World War 1 had been fought by the ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland’, that is all Ireland, the partition of Ireland into the Free State and Northern Ireland, negotiated the end of the war, had become a fact by 1922. There were now, therefore two separate governments in Ireland to be satisfied - one in Belfast and another in Dublin - although both at the time were in the British Empire. The solution was the foundation of an independent government sponsored Trust - the Irish Sailors and Soldiers Land Trust ( ISSLT )  which was eventually to build 2,500 cottages in the Free State and 2,000 in Northern Ireland to help meet the ‘homes for heroes’ commitment in Ireland.

The assets to fund ISSLT were a composite of:

Cash from the British (Westminster) Government: to build the cottages.

Land or sites for the cottages made available by the two governments in Ireland - Dublin and Belfast. Note that these Proportionate contributions were to be of vital importance in deciding the percentage distributions to the three ‘Remainder Men’, i.e. Westminster, the Dail and Stormont, when it was decided to begin the wind-up of the ISSLT in the late 1990s.

Unfortunately there was one major snag which arose, as often happens, because of rather loose drafting of the Act setting up the ISSLT and agreed by both the British and Irish governments of the day. It limited the cohort of beneficiaries to ‘those who served in any of His Majesty’s naval, military or air-forces in the late war, and for other purposes incidental thereto. There are various criticisms that could be made of this rather vague wording - for example, note that though listed in the beneficiaries, the RAF is not mentioned in the title of the Trust; and in the event the use of the phrase ‘in the late war’ was most unfortunate in that the cottages could not be allocated later to other ex-service personnel when all the World War 1 veterans and their widows had died.

As a result the trustees found that by the 1960s they had increasing difficulty in finding World War 1 qualified tenants to fill the cottage vacancies. Built to the standards of the 1920s the cottages became increasingly valuable because they all had large gardens so that the veterans could grow all their own vegetables. These large gardens considerably increased the value of each cottage and later for example the purchase of two or three cottages together became the target of entrepreneurs wishing to build a large complex.

The first step taken by the trustees in the 1970s was to offer cottages to the sitting tenants at knock down price depending on their years of occupancy. However even this scheme did not prevent an increasing number of unoccupied cottages on the open market in order to keep the trust solvent.

This inevitably led to a build-up of cash and as the ISSLT was in effect a Government Charitable Fund required to provide an annual report to three governments - London, Belfast and Dublin - the Chairman of the Trustees, Sir Edmund Compton, GCB, KBE a former Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, expressed concern that ISSLT might be required to hive off a major slice of the Trust’s cash holding to the three original government investors in the Trust. Sir Edmund had been chairman of ISSLT since 1946 and he came from a distinguished Co. Monaghan family. Though a very distinguished senior British civil servant, he had strong bonds with Ireland and indeed for many years he was the major Westminster negotiator determining the Northern Ireland budget. Bearing in mind this background it is understandable that Sir Edmund conceived the idea of using some of the surplus cash in the ISSLT to set up a separate Trust in the Province with similar but much wider objectives and which would avoid the unfortunate limiting of conditions that had led to the frustration of the ISSLT. In another flash of genius he proposed that the name of the new Trust should mark its close link with the Irish Sailors and Soldiers Land Trust, and therefore it became ‘The Milibern Trust’ - the word ‘Milibern’ being a composite from the Latin ‘miles’ - soldier and ‘Hibernia’ - Ireland - thus ‘an Irish soldier’.

Two ‘exploratory’ meetings were held in August and October 1968 to consider approaches to possible Trustees and the first ‘formal’ meeting at which Sir Edmund Compton was elected Chairman was held on 17th January 1969.

The ISSLT had made a provisional fund of £100,000 available and so at last the Milibern Trust was in business. It might reasonably be asked why the ISSLT did not set up a similar trust to Milibern in the Republic of Ireland formerly the Irish Free State. The explanations are :

1. That since 1928 as a result of a High Court judgment in the South all ISSLT tenants there had lived rent free;

2. That almost all of the cottages in the South had been sold at very discounted prices to existing tenants and only 15 remained;

3. That therefore over 90 percent of the money held by ISSLT had accumulated in the North where tenants had always paid full market rent and therefore subsidized the maintenance costs in the South;

4. That the South had left the British Empire after World War 2 and was now an independent sovereign state. So the ISSLT Trustees decided that, as most of the surplus funds had been accumulated as a result of its operations in the North, it was fair and reasonable to finance the new (Milibern ) Trust whose core objective was to provide sheltered housing for all ex-service personnel and their dependants in the Province.

It is interesting to note that while eventually office accommodation was found for the Trust at 1 University Street, Belfast - this was too small for meetings and as a result the Trustees for several years had a rather itinerant existence - at times meeting at 11 Lombard Street, Belfast; 53 Danes Street, London; Bedford House, Belfast; Church House, great Smith Street, London; Ely Lodge, Enniskillen; various hotels in Northern Ireland; the Board Room at Stranmillis College during 1973 and 1974; at the Trusts own Twinburn House when it was opened in October 1974 and finally in its own purpose-built headquarters at Hamel Court, Cregagh, Belfast.