Saving ‘Ireland's children’: voluntary action, gender, humanitarianism, and the Irish White Cross, 1921–1947

Abstract

This article focuses on the Irish White Cross, a little-known voluntary organisation that through its Children's Relief Association provided support to children who had lost their ‘breadwinner’ during Ireland's struggle for independence. In 1921 American fundraisers drew up plans for relief in Ireland as humanitarian largesse spread in the aftermath of the First World War. This international context provides a framework for this article as it charts the evolution of the Irish White Cross organisation, exploring the impact of pre-war social activism and post-war internationalism in shaping its priorities during the interwar period. International discourses on children as ‘future citizens’, paternalistic views about women's welfare, and the wishes of the White Cross’ American benefactors shaped the organisation's actions as it navigated its role in newly independent Ireland. Largely absent from wider histories of interwar humanitarianism, this Irish case-study highlights the influence of humanitarian organisations, like the Red Cross movement or Save the Children, even in the absence of direct humanitarian intervention, while emphasising the particular utility of a focus on children as depoliticised objects of attention in a nation emerging from civil war.