Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North-West, Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context

149. To ask the Taoiseach and Minister for Defence the nature of the work in digitising the Military Service Pensions Collection; the total number of records to be digitised; the total number outstanding; and the time expected to complete the task. [36958/25]

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
Link to this: Individually | In context

The Military Service Pensions Collection (MSPC) involves cataloguing and partially digitising approximately 275,000 files dealing with the service of qualifying members of the Irish Volunteers, the Irish Citizen Army, the Hibernian Rifles, Cumann na mBan, Na Fianna Éireann, the Irish Republican Army and records of the Department from the period April 1916 to the 30th of September 1923.

The decision to afford public access to the MSPC was announced in 2006 by the then Taoiseach, Mr. Bertie Ahern, TD, in the context of the 90th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising. The MSPC project was established in 2008.

To date, the Project team have processed and databased all files relating to the 1916 veterans, the casualties of the War of Independence and the casualties from both sides of the Civil War.

Work on the project has also included the development of a website for the public release of material from the MSPC through the Military Archives (MA) website. There have been a total of 18 releases of information from the Collection to date, the latest in June 2025.

The Project currently stands at approximately 161,000 files catalogued and circa 95,000 scanned to date. The Project has now digitised and made available some 2.7 million pages of archival material online. In addition, there have been three publications during the lifetime of this project:

• Guide to the Military Service (1916-1923) Pensions Collection - Published in 2012
• The Brigade Activity Reports - Published in 2019
• A Very Hard Struggle – Lives in the MSPC – Published in 2023