Ireland and World War One

Ireland in 1914

In all, about 210,000 Irishmen served in the British forces during World War One. Since there was no conscription, about 140,000 of these joined during the war as volunteers. Some 35,000 Irish died. Irishmen enlisted for the war effort for a variety of reasons. Some, just like their fellows in other warring states, joined up for the perceived justice of the cause. But in Ireland, which in 1914 was deeply divided between nationalist and unionist political groups, more local considerations played an important part for many individuals.

Nationalists, for whom the establishment of an Irish 'home rule' parliament in Dublin had been the principal political aim for most of the 19th century, were committed to the war effort by their leader, John Redmond, in September 1914.

This was on the grounds that the necessary legislation had been passed (though in fact it was suspended for the duration of the war), and that the 'freedom of small nations' (such as Belgium or Serbia) was that of Ireland as well. The plight of gallant, Catholic little Belgium, invaded by a militaristic aggressor, was disadvantageously compared with Ireland, achieving freedom (so Redmond argued) within the British Empire, rather like Canada or Australia.

Joining up

'Off: the Ulster Division', by William Conor, 1915  © Unionists, who were particularly concentrated in the northern province of Ulster, naturally needed less justification to join up. Having from 1912 organised a sizeable, armed, paramilitary 'Ulster Volunteer Force' (UVF) to oppose home rule and secure the union with Great Britain, they could scarcely stand idly by when Great Britain itself went to war. Despite some jockeying for party advantage, a substantial proportion of the UVF enlisted to form the predominantly unionist and almost wholly Protestant 36th (Ulster) Division. Nationalists, themselves mostly Catholic, joined the other two of Lord Kitchener's 'New Army' divisions raised in Ireland: the 10th (Irish) and 16th (Irish) Divisions.

But Irishmen joined up for more than political reasons. Some were simply after adventure, like Tom Barry, later to become a noted IRA commander, who enlisted in June 1915 'to see what war was like, to get a gun, to see new countries and to feel like a grown man'.

For others there was an economic motive. James Connolly, the socialist revolutionary, said that employment opportunities were so bad in Ireland that men had no choice but to enlist. It was, he asserted, 'economic conscription'. Certainly an unskilled worker might more than double his pay by joining up. By some accounts, Francis Ledwidge, poet, nationalist and trade union organiser, enlisted on the rebound from an unhappy love affair. And yet others, as the historian Philip Orr has argued, may have been borne along on 'a surge of naive patriotism'.

Fighting

Irish soldiers on the Western Front  © The first of the Irish New Army Divisions to see action was the 10th Division, which landed at Suvla Bay in Gallipoli in August 1915. The composition of one battalion, the 7th Royal Dublin Fusiliers, illustrates the wide social range of Irish recruits. 'D' Company, which was nicknamed 'The Footballers' included many rugby-playing professional men, as well as a professor of law from Dublin University who died at Suvla. But another company in the battalion contained Dublin Dockers, many of them 'Larkinites' after the charismatic radical trade union leader, James Larkin. Francis Ledwidge, who served here with the Royal Iniskilling Fusiliers, remarked after one battle, 'It was a horrible and a great day. I would not have missed it for worlds.'

The other two divisions served in France, both taking part in the Battle of the Somme. The 36th (Ulster) Division had the worst of it, going over the top on the first day, 1 July, and suffering terrible casualties. On 1 and 2 July the division lost 5,500 killed, wounded or missing out of a total of about 15,000. Because 1 July coincided with an important Orange anniversary - it was the original date (before the calendar was changed by 11 days in 1752) of the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 - the losses came to be identified particularly with the Ulster Unionist cause. And the close-knit character of the formation meant that the casualties had a disproportionate impact back home. The 12 July Orange parades were cancelled, and five minutes' silence was observed in Belfast that day.

The 16th (Irish) Division first saw serious action in September 1916, still as part of the long drawn-out Somme campaign. Eight months later, up the line in Belgium, the 16th and 36th Divisions fought alongside each other at the Battle of Messines, causing some observers to hope that the common experience of unionists and nationalists serving together on the battlefield might help political reconciliation back home - a hope, in the end, which was not fulfilled. At Messines, John Redmond's younger brother, Willie, was killed. Although it was just one of so many individual tragedies, Willie Redmond's death was particularly poignant. Although over 50 years old, he had insisted both on joining up and on serving in the front line. 'I can't stand asking fellows to go and not offer myself,' he wrote.

1916 and after in Ireland

Dublin ablaze during Easter Rising, 1916  © Not all nationalists followed John Redmond's lead. A small minority of separatist republican radicals broke away to form the 'Irish Volunteers' and, believing the old nationalist adage that 'England's extremity is Ireland's opportunity', they began planning for a rebellion against British rule in Ireland. At Easter 1916, led by James Connolly and the visionary nationalist, Patrick Pearse, some 1,800 volunteers seized the General Post Office (GPO) and various other major buildings in Dublin, proclaimed an Irish republic, and held out for a week before overwhelming force obliged them to surrender.

Irishmen fought on both sides, and some 500 people were killed during the Rising, mostly civilians caught in the crossfire. But the fatalities which had the greatest long-term impact were the subsequent executions of 15 leading rebels, including Pearse and Connolly. The sharp suppression of the Rising was undoubtedly influenced by the general belief that the rebels were acting with German connivance and help. Widespread public revulsion at the executions exacerbated a growing alienation from the British administration in Ireland. In turn this fuelled support for the republican separatist movement, Sinn Féin, which comprehensively defeated the Redmondite nationalists in the December 1918 general election, thus providing a political underpinning for the Irish war of independence (1919-21).

Perhaps the most difficult process was that faced by those nationalist volunteers in the British army who had set off, fired by John Redmond's claim that 'Ireland's highest interests' lay 'in the speedy and overwhelming victory of England and the Allies'. Having helped raise what he described as 'a distinctively Irish army, composed of Irishmen, led by Irishmen and trained at home in Ireland', Redmond asserted in the middle of the war that 'the achievements of that Irish army have covered Ireland with glory before the world'. But by the time the survivors of the war returned home, words like these had turned into empty rhetoric.

Soldiers return

Officers reading out news of the armistice to their men  © In a more definitively nationalist Ireland, where many hearts had been thrilled by the valour of the men of 1916, there was no triumphant welcome home. It was as Tom Kettle, a former nationalist MP who was killed on the Somme serving with the 16th Division, had predicted. 'These men' (the 1916 leaders), he wrote, 'will go down in history as heroes and martyrs; and I will go down - if I go down at all - as a bloody British officer.'

So it was to be. Many veterans returning to nationalist areas met grudging acceptance, hostility, or even physical violence. For all of them the high public honour and celebration with which they had departed contrasted sharply with the changed circumstances of their return. The disillusionment which, across the world, many returning soldiers felt with the outcome of the war, that the prodigious costs had not been matched by commensurate benefits, was felt especially sharply in nationalist Ireland.

In July 1919, 4,000 people attended a fête organised in Celtic Park, Belfast, 'in honour of the Belfastmen of the 16th Irish Division'. It was, reported the press, 'a notable demonstration of the part played by Belfast nationalists' in the war. Joe Devlin, MP for West Belfast, declared that their fallen comrades had 'died not as cowards died, but as soldiers of freedom, with their faces toward the fire, and in the belief that their life-blood was poured out in defence of liberty for the world. Unfortunately,' he continued, 'the close of the war brought to Ireland no peace and freedom, but strife and repression.'

The memory of the war

The Irish President and the Queen open the Island of Ireland Peace Park, Messines, 1998  © The 50th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising was remembered with great celebrations across independent and nationalist Ireland. Similarly the sacrifices of the Ulster Division on the Somme were commemorated in Northern Ireland. By this stage the great mass of Catholic, nationalist Irishmen who had volunteered and served in the war had virtually been forgotten, in a sort of Irish 'national amnesia'. Their history and their experiences did not fit in with either the republican legacy of southern Ireland or the unionist tradition of the North.

But 30 years later, on the 80th anniversary of the armistice, 11 November 1918, the President of Ireland and Queen Elizabeth II together dedicated a memorial at Messines to all the Irish people who had fallen in World War One. This 'Island of Ireland Peace Tower' was conceived as a device to assist political and social reconciliation.

The hope is that, by recovering the memory of the common suffering of all sorts of Irish - Protestant and Catholic, unionist and nationalist - in World War One, the peace process in contemporary Northern Ireland, aiming to heal its equivalent shared suffering, might markedly be advanced. And if it does this, then surely the Irish fallen of World War One may not have died in vain.

Find out more

Books

The Road to the Somme: Men of the Ulster Division Tell Their Story by Philip Orr (Blackstaff Press, 1987)

Ireland's Unknown Soldiers: the 16th (Irish) Division in the Great War by Terence Denman (Irish Academic Press, 1992)

Politics and Irish Life by David Fitzpatrick (Gill and Macmillan, 1977)

Ireland and the Great War by Keith Jeffery (Cambridge University Press, 2000)

Orange, Green and Khaki: the Story of the Irish Regiments in the Great War, 1914-18 by Tom Johnstone (Gill and Macmillan, 1992)

Links

The Somme Heritage Centre Commemorates the Irish contribution to World War One.

The Royal Dublin Fusiliers Association Promotes a wider awareness of the Irish men and women who served in World War One.

About the author

Keith Jeffery is Professor of Modern History at the University of Ulster. He is the author or editor of eight books, including Ireland and the Great War (Cambridge, 2000) and A Military History of Ireland (Cambridge, 1996) which he edited with Thomas Bartlett.