Irish Pension Records

The Old Age Pensions Act 1908 introduced a non-contributory pension for 'eligible' people aged 70 and over. It came into law in January 1909 across England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland.

Postcard of Patrick Street, Cork, around the time pensions were introduced in Ireland.

To be eligible, applicants had to have an income of less than £31-10shillings per annum (£31.50) and had to 'be of good character'.

Those automatically disqualified included those in receipt of Poor Relief, institutionalised 'lunatics', and anyone who had been in prison within ten years of applying. Discretionary refusals could also be given to those who had been convicted of drunkenness or those who, while fit and able, had a history of 'habitual failure to work'.

During the first three months of 1909, 261,668 applications were made in Ireland. By 31 March 1910, 180,974 Irish pensions were in force.

Poverty in Ireland

The Journal of the Royal Statistical Society published in December 1910 suggested that the percentage of take up among those eligibile for the Old Age Pension 'could probably be accepted as approximately indicative of the relative poverty of the population'.

The level in England and Wales was 44.7%. In Scotland it was 53.8%.

In Ireland it was 98.6%, once again demonstrating the plight of the island and central government’s lack of investment in it. The pensioner with an income of less than £21 received the full pension of 5s a week. The value diminished by 1 shilling a week for every extra £2.12.6 of annual income. An income of £31.10.0 per annum meant no pension was payable.

The pension was paid on a Friday and was administered by the Post Office.

The genealogy value of Irish pension records

Apart from being an interesting social development and of huge importance to the elderly living in poverty, the introduction of the Old Age Pension seems, at first glance, to have little to recommend itself to the average genealogy researcher.

In England, Wales and Scotland that is probably still the case, but Ireland’s situation was unique.

State registration of births did not begin until 1864 in Ireland (much later than in the rest of Great Britain), so would-be pensioners had no official documentation to prove when they were born and how old they were. So a system had to be established to substantiate such claims.

The chosen method was for officials to search the 1841 and 1851 censuses (both still in existence when the Pension was introduced) for evidence of the claimant’s age.

Individual application forms were completed on what became known as ‘green forms’. The claimant had to complete the form with the names of their parents, the address where they were living in March 1841 or 1851 (when the censuses were taken), and the age they believed themselves to have been in the appropriate year.

Pensions Officers sent the particulars of the claimant to be checked against the census for the townland or address provided to see if the claimant (many of whom were children or young adults at the time) could be discovered and his/her eligibility confirmed.

Both the 1841 and 1851 censuses were held at the Public Record Office in Dublin, where officials carried out the checks and returned their findings to the local Pensions Officers.

When, as frequently happened, a search could not find the claimant, the form was returned with 'not found' or 'no trace' written on it. But many searches were successful, and these can often provide outstanding genealogy material.

Some officials added the names and ages of every person living in the claimant's household at the time of the census. Others, unfortunately, merely confirmed the recorded age of the claimant.

Access to the pension records

Ireland's pension records are held on microfilm, but they are difficult to read and they haven't been indexed.

The National Archives of Ireland (Dublin) holds the green forms for the 26 counties of the Republic while PRONI holds them for the six counties of Northern Ireland. In both repositories, county-by-county index books are readily available in the Reading Rooms.

Microfilmed records (mostly for Northern Irish) are available through the LDS Family History Centers.

About 32,000 pension record pages, mostly from northern counties, have been transcribed to reveal 100,000 names and can be searched at www.pensear.org. Each record contains at least three names – the applicant and his/her mother and father – and many records contain additional names (siblings, grandparents etc) that can help your genealogy research.

Searching is free. To view a full transcript of a record costs GB£2. Payment has to be made through PayPal and, when processed, the search results are emailed to you.

Status of the Pensear database as at August 2010:

• Complete set of Irish pension records for counties Fermanagh, Galway, kerry, Kilkenny, Kings, Leitrim.
• Incomplete set (still in process of transcription) for counties Antrim, Armagh, Down, Tyrone, Donegal, Waterford.
• Not yet started transcriptionfor counties Carlow, Cavan, Clare, Cork, Dublin, Kildare, Longford, Roscommon, Sligo, Tipperary.

• If your ancestors were alive in 1909, check out the Irish census pages.