Object Detail

Annie Gallagher PLIC Compensation File

Property Losses (Ireland) Committee file for Annie Gallagher.

Annie Gallagher and her son lived over a pork butchers shop at 5 Moore Street, Dublin, a few doors away from the house in which Pearse held the final Council of War before unconditionally surrendering on April 29, 1916. She was employed as housekeeper to the owner Mrs. Dunne. Gallagher submitted a claim for £53 5s to the Property Losses (Ireland) Committee for clothing, jewellery, a bicycle and personal effects destroyed as a result of the fighting.

The assessor sanctioned a relatively generous payment of £37 3s – but cast doubts on the accuracy of the claim saying it was probably exaggerated as he failed to see ‘how a housekeeper could afford to purchase such a bicycle for her son’. The amount claimed for the bicycle £9 was more than twice the price of a new ‘Lucania’ bicycle at the time. Gallagher submitted her claim from her new address, a rented property at 18 Turlough Terrace, Fairview, Dublin.

The Property Losses (Ireland) Committee was formed on May 8, 1916 in an effort to compensate property owners in the city for ‘Damages caused during the Disturbances on the 24th April, 1916 and following days’. The committee's secretary Hugh Love had a compassionate approach to handling applications for compensation but his superiors, Irish Treasury Remembrancer Maurice Headlam, and Assistant Under-Secretary John Taylor, had the final say in dispensing funds. Payment amounts were arbitrary: awards were usually reduced, sometimes by up to half, others were disallowed for a variety of reasons that included consequential loss, complicity or on the basis of inadmissibility.

Object Details

Creator:
Property Losses (Ireland) Committee
Date:
1916-09-26
Place:
Dublin, Ireland
Format:
Institution:
Rights:
© National Archives of Ireland
Type:
Subject:
Era:
Language:
English
Contributor:
Gallagher, Annie