History of the Milibern Trust

1. ‘Homes for Heroes’

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 channeled though local authorities in GB. However in Ireland that was a problem in 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 Irish Free State and Northern Ireland, negotiated at the end of the war, had become a fact by 1922.

The presented two separate governments in Ireland to be satisfied - one in Belfast and one in Dublin. However both at that time were in the British Empire. What was to be the solution?

The foundation of an independent government sponsored Trust. This was to be known as the Irish Sailors & Soldiers Land Trust (ISSLT). The Trust was to eventually build 2500 cottages in the Free State and 2000 in Northern Ireland to help meet the ‘homes for heroes’ commitment in Ireland.

2. Origins of the Trust

The Irish Sailors' and Soldiers' Land Trust was constituted under the Irish Free State (Consequential Provisions) Act 1922 for the provision of cottages in Ireland, with or without plots or gardens, for ex-servicemen, under the powers given by the Irish Land (Provision for Sailors and Soldiers) Act 1919, including the power to carry out schemes made by the Local Government Board for Ireland prior to the passing of the 1922 act.

That Act provided for a body of 5 members, and empowered the Treasury to make regulations as to the procedure of the trust, the application of the proceeds of sale, the audit of its accounts, and generally as to the manner in which the trust should carry out its powers and duties. It also stipulated that the trust should not come into operation until the Treasury had certified that legislation had been passed by the Parliaments of the Irish Free State and NI to enable the trust to acquire and hold land, to vest in the trust any land and other property to be transferred to it under the act, and otherwise to enable the trust to carry out the purposes of the act.

The Treasury gave the required certificate in its Regulations dated 31 December 1923, under which the trust was to function. In official letters of the same date, the home and colonial secretaries announced the appointment of the 5 trustees. The trust, a body corporate with perpetual succession and a common seal, first met on 22 January 1924 and during the 1920s and 1930s provided over 4000 houses.

Prior to the first meeting of the Board, agents for Trust property were the Ministries of Finance of Home Affairs in NI and the Dublin branch of the Colonial Office in Southern Ireland, which paid rents from properties into a general account of its own. Subsequently 2 agencies were set up, in Belfast and Dublin, under the two acting Secretaries to the Trust. These were responsible for the management of Trust tenancies and for the payment of receipts into the Trust's accounts established in 1924 at the Bank of Ireland. Local trustees were appointed in Dublin and Belfast. The agents had local counterparts dealing with the day to day payments of rent and tenancy affairs.

The headquarters of the Trust were in London. A salaried secretary was appointed in 1924 with a small permanent staff. The trustees, consisting of a chairman and 4 trustees, usually met in the London office. Meetings were attended by representatives of the Dublin and Belfast offices. The proposal, put forward in 1924, that alternate meetings should be held in Belfast, Dublin and London was not adopted although some meetings were held outside London.

Litigation

In Eire, operations of the trust were complicated by a series of rent strikes culminating in a decision (the Leggett Judgement) by the Supreme Court of Eire in 1933 that the trust as constituted was not entitled to charge rents to ex-service tenants. The NI Courts reached the opposite conclusion. Thereafter the trust received no rents from tenants in the South. As a result no further houses were built in the South after 1932. Maintenance was reduced to a minimum. In NI building continued, the last house being completed in 1952.

In 1961 the trust affirmed that its scope was limited by law to provision of cottages for ex-servicemen of the First World War, but that applications from ex-servicemen of the Second World War to purchase Irish cottages would be considered.

In 1967, the Irish Sailors' and Soldiers' Land Trust Act enabled the trust to provide or assist in providing living accommodation other than cottages and extended its powers to sell cottages to widows of former tenants. By the 1980s most of the houses in the Republic had been sold and the 90 or so in NI still rented were administered by the Milibern Trust.

The Dublin office was closed in 1974/1975. The local management of individual properties then transferred to a firm of estate agents.

In 1987 under the terms of the Irish Sailors and Soldiers Land Trust Act the trust was wound up. Money provided by the sale of the houses was distributed to the original contributors. Three-fifths of the United Kingdom's share was paid into the UK and Northern Ireland Consolidated Funds. The remainder was paid to the Royal British Legion. Use of the share returned to the Republic of Ireland was decided by the Dail.

3. The assets of ISSLT

The assets of the fund were a composite of the following:-

1 Cash from the British (Westminster) Government; to build the cottages

2 Land or sites for the cottages made available by the two governments in Ireland - Dublin and Belfast

The ‘Remainder Men”

It is noteworthy that these proportionate contributions were to be of vital importance in deciding the percentage distribution to the three ‘Remainder Men,’ ie Westminster, the Dail and Stormont, when it was decided to begin the wind-up of the ISSLT in the late 1990s.

4. Focus of the Conflict

Francis Quayle’s, the English religious poet (1592 - 1644) wrote as follows,

5. The Cohort of beneficiaries

There is always a snag! The major snag that arose, as often happens, occurred due to the rather loose drafting of the Act of Parliament 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 myriad criticism that can flow from this from this rather vague drafting. For example, though listed in the beneficiaries, the RAF is not mentioned in the title of the Trust. Further the use of the phrase ‘in the late War’ was most unfortunate. The meant that the cottages could not be allocated later to other ex-service personnel when all the World War 1 veterans and their widows had passed away.

6. Searching for ‘heroes’

The trustees found that by the 1960s they had increasing difficulty in finding World War 1 ‘heroes’ as tenants to fill cottage vacancies. Built to the standards of the 1920s the cottages became increasingly valuable because they all had large gardens, This was to enable the veterans to grown their own vegetables. These large gardens subsequently increased the value of each cottage. That led to entrepreneurs endeavouring to purchase two or three of the cottages in order to exploit the building market.

A solution?

The first step taken by the Trustees in the 1970s was to offer the cottages to the sitting tenants at a knock-down price depending on the years of occupancy. Sadly this scheme still did not prevent an increasing number of the cottages becoming vacant. The trustees eventually were forced to place the empty cottages on the open market in order to keep the Trust solvent.

7. The historic record & legislative provisions et al

Orders of the Day — IRISH SAILORS AND SOLDIERS LAND TRUST BILL [Lords] – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 16th October 1952.

The National Archives Kew

Records of the Irish Sailors' and Soldiers' Land Trust set up to provide cottages for ex-servicemen in Ireland.

Minutes, agendas and papers of the trust are in AP 4, correspondence files in AP 1 - AP 3, and a register of properties in Northern Ireland in AP 5. Accounts ledgers are in AP 6, miscellaneous records of the Dublin office in AP 7and registers of documents to which the Trust's seal was applied are in AP 8

Oireachtas.ie

Seanad Éireann díospóireacht - Dé Céadaoin, 16 Samh 1988

Irish Sailors & Soldiers Land Trust Bill, 1988: Second Stage

Mr R Burke

Minister for Energy & Minister for Communications……

It is interesting to note that one of the Saorstát Éireann representatives on the first trust was a Member of this House, General Sir Brian Mahon who was, of course, also a former serviceman and was the nominee of the Irish Free State Government to the trust in 1923.

Perhaps at this point it is no harm to point out that he was one of a number of very prominent Unionists who had been nominated to the First Free State Seanad by W.T. Cosgrave, an indication that the then Government saw the Unionists as having a very full role to play in the building up of a new Free State and a guarantee to a place in the life of that State. Indeed that is one of the original reasons this House came into existence and it is a great pity that that initial gesture did not come to fruition in the way which it deserved to over subsequent years.

It is also important at this stage to bring to mind once again the people for whom this legislation was designed. To a great extent, the Irishmen who went off to fight in the First World War are the forgotten, and in many cases the excluded men of this century. They left to fight. Who knows why they went? They went to escape the poverty and the lack of opportunity at home. They went because they heeded the appeals of the parliamentary party, the Nationalist Party, and the appeals of John Redmond and John Dillon and others who believed that Ireland's participation in the war and a victory for the British forces would result in the speedy granting of Home Rule for all of Ireland. They went, perhaps because some like Tom Kettle and others believed they were fighting for the freedom of small nations or perhaps they went as young people would go out of a sense of adventure.

For whatever reason they went, they went and those who were lucky to come back came back to a very changed situation. They found themselves as I have said to a great extent excluded in their own country. Those of us who are now in what we call middle age would have known a great number of these people. I knew them growing up down in Bagenalstown, County Carlow where some very fine soldiers' cottages were built under the provisions of this particular Bill.

I often wondered about them because to me they were no different from anybody else. They were certainly as Irish as anybody else was and yet they seemed to be excluded in some strange way from the Nationalist orthodoxy. There was something about them that made them less than full participants in their own country. I always regretted that. I regret, too, that recent events have shown how deep seated in certain quarters is the antipathy to what these people represent and to the choice they made in 1914.