The response of the Dáil Ministry of Local Government to this imposition was clear-cut. All councils were directed not to strike a rate for the amount involved. This directive was by and large observed in the south and west of the Ireland. Even in the unionist-controlled councils in Ulster councillors were reluctant to comply with the wishes of the LGB, as the financial burden would fall heaviest on their own supporters. To reinforce the message, in 1921 the Ministry stated that anyone making a claim under the relevant legislation was guilty of “the highest crime against the state”. There was a clear inference that the IRA might be used to deal with those who defied its will. Those families who had lost wage earners in the Troubles were consequently caught between a rock and a hard place, albeit many nationalist families did find themselves the recipients of pay outs from the White Cross.
Given the numerous demands upon its own revenues, the Dáil was neither particularly willing nor even close to being able to make good the local authorities’ loss of grants from the British régime. Only in early 1921 had those finances improved to the extent that some gesture of support could be given to the hard-pressed councils in question, in the form of a £100,000 loan. This sum was much less than that which was required. Even at that it was directed in the first instance to those councils who collected the highest proportion of available rates, a policy that tended to favour those authorities in the less disturbed parts of the country.
The combined effect of these various developments was that, as the War of Independence progressed, the services provided by local government across nearly all parts of the island were progressively downgraded. This added to the all-pervading sense of crisis abroad across the land. From the perspective of the Dáil Ministry, however, the same period was a story of undoubted, if not unqualified, triumph. The local authorities had absorbed all that their former British masters could throw at them, and the overwhelming majority continued to recognise the Dáil as the source of their legitimate authority. In so doing, the Ministry of Local Government went a long way towards making that authority not just legitimate but utterly real in the eyes of the localities they served.