Hugh Childers - Retirement and The Childers Commission

Retirement and The Childers Commission

He retired from parliament in 1892, and his last piece of work was the drafting of a report for the 1894 "Financial Relations Commission" on Irish financial matters, of which he was chairman (generally known as the Childers Commission). This found that, compared to the rest of the United Kingdom, Ireland had been overtaxed on a per capita basis by some £2 or £3 million annually in previous decades. The matter was finally debated in March 1897. In the following decades Irish nationalists frequently quoted the report as proof that some form of fiscal freedom was needed to end imperial over-taxation, which was prolonging Irish poverty. Their opponents noted that the extra tax received had come from an unduly high consumption of tea, stout, whiskey and tobacco, and not from income tax. His younger cousin Erskine Childers wrote a book on the matter in 1911.

Childers' 1894 report was still considered influential in 1925 in considering the mutual financial positions between the new Irish Free State and the United Kingdom. In 1926 an Irish Senate debate included claims by some Senators that, with compound interest, Ireland was owed as much as £1.2 billion by the rest of Britain.