Between August 1914 and November 1918 considerably over 200,000 Irish served in armed forces engaged in the First World War. They fall into three main categories. In the first place a fair number were serving soldiers at the start of the conflict. For example in August 1914, in the British army there were 28,000 Irish-born regular soldiers and 30,000 reservists who were immediately called up back to the colours. Secondly there were what were known as 'Kitchener's men', people who responded to the urgent call for volunteers made by Lord Kitchener, appointed Secretary of State for War in August 1914, and most dramatically represented in the world-famous 'Your Country Needs You' poster. Between August 1914 and February 1916 (more or less when conscription was introduced in Great Britain, and just before the Easter Rising in Ireland) about 95,000 men joined up. Thirdly, there were those who joined up during the rest of the war, after the initial recruiting 'surge', up to November 1918. These men total about 45,000, including nearly 10,000 recruits in the last three and a half months of the war alone.
These figures do not include all the Irish people who joined up. They do not include officers, nor do they include all of the Irishmen in the Royal Navy, and they do not take into account Irishmen serving in formations raised outside the United Kingdom-in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, for example-or in foreign armies (most notably that of the USA), nor even those in non-military services like the Merchant Marine, which participated and suffered in the Great War. I have four great-uncles from Ireland who served in the First World War. Each one of them emigrated to Canada before 1914, and each of them served with the Canadian forces (two perished), thus they do not appear in the statistics already quoted. This is surely not unique, and there must be many similar cases among families in our emigrant Irish society.
We can break down the statistics by location and religion, though not quite for the whole war. The figures for recruitment by religion and province from August 1914 to January 1918 (which is the period for which we have more-or-less reliable figures) are as follows:

Province Catholics Protestants Ulster 17,092 45,798 62,890 Leinster 25,357 4,989 30,346 Connacht 4,316 410 4,726 Munster 17,842 1,168 19,010 Totals 64,607 52,365 116,972

What these figures show, overall, is that more Catholics than Protestants (and hence we can assume more nationalists than unionists) joined up in Ireland during the First World War. Only in Ulster (nine counties) does the number of Protestants exceed the number of Catholics. But these figures are largely meaningless without some idea of the proportionality of enlistment, and the following table shows the recruiting response as a proportion of the religious group, again by province and again over the period from the start of the war to January 1918 (% of population first; % of recruits in brackets):

Province Catholic Protestant Ulster 44 (27) 56 (73) Leinster 85 (89) 15 (11) Connacht 96 (92) 4 (8) Munster 94 (93) 6 (7) Ireland 74 (55) 26 (45)

What these figures show us is, as we might expect, that, overall, a higher percentage of Protestants joined up than Catholics. In Ulster, for example, where the population was just over half Protestant, nearly three-quarters of all the recruits came from that section of the population. But in the other provinces the figure was by no means so clear-cut. While in Munster, the proportions of population and religion were more or less equal, in Leinster, which includes Dublin and which we have seen from the previous table supplied more recruits than any other province except Ulster, Catholics were slightly more likely to join up than Protestants. Thus, we cannot easily come to any simplistic conclusions about which group was more likely to join up than the other.
To put the numbers into some sort of context, we can relate the 200,000-odd to the total number of young men living in Ireland at the time. According to the 1911 census there were just over 700,000 men between the ages of 15 and 35 in Ireland. The great majority of the recruits fell between those ages. We can say, therefore, that between a quarter and a third of the available young men in Ireland-a very strikingly high proportion-joined up to serve in the First World War.
And of those who enlisted, many did not return. The casualty statistics are as imprecise as those for recruiting, but one careful calculation of the dead has come up with a figure of 29,779 'born in Ireland'. Even this, apparently very precise, figure is only a start, and the compiler has suggested that we add 'approximately 5,000' more to allow for Irishmen in British imperial armies and that of the USA.
Why did these men join up? This is one of the most tantalising questions we can pose about the First World War. We know-with the benefit of hindsight, to be sure-how terrible it was on the Western Front, and how futile and hazardous it seemed to be. And yet many thousands of young Irishmen continued throughout the whole war to join up. The popular view we have of enlistment in the war is that of huge crowds of men surging to the recruiting offices in August 1914, like lambs to the slaughter, or lemmings heading for a precipice. But we also know that recruitment continued throughout the war, even after it had certainly become clear to those back home that the war was no simple adventure. No-one in Ulster, or any other part of Ireland, could have been misled about the risks of joining up after the terrible casualties of the Somme in July 1916, and yet many, many more young men continued to join up after then. And we must remember that throughout the war, unlike in England, Scotland and Wales, all the Irish recruits were volunteers, they did not have to go, and yet many decided so to do. What we have to try to do is recover the rationality of recruiting: individual men made individual decisions to join up, and although they may have been swayed by the kind of patriotic fervour we no longer experience, they nevertheless evidently had good reason for doing what they did. Any theory (or theories) which we come up with for enlistment must not only explain the thousands who joined up ain August and September 1914 (the 'easy bit'), but also the thousands who joined up in 1918 (which may not be quite so straightforward).
The standard, public reason for joining up was the moral purpose of the war. At the time it was widely seen as a kind of crusade against 'Prussian militarism'. Tom Kettle, an Irish nationalist who had actually been in Belgium buying guns for the nationalist paramilitary Irish Volunteers, argued that men went because the cause was a just one. It was, said Kettle, the cause of small nations threatened by large ones, of Belgium and Serbia, which Germany and Austria had outraged, and Britain and her allies had taken up. This made it right for Ireland to fight on England's side, especially since England had (at last) granted Home Rule for Ireland. Kettle himself joined up and died on the Somme in September 1916.
Home Rule had been the aspiration of Irish nationalists for fifty years and, finally, in 1914 it appeared that the deed was done. On 18 September 1914 the third Irish Home Rule Bill became law, although its operation was suspended for the duration of the war. No-one (at least on the nationalist side) thought that this would be for very long, but the passage of the legislation was crucial for John Redmond, the leader of the Irish nationalist movement. On 20 September he made a celebrated speech at Woodenbridge, county Wicklow, in which he said that 'the interests of Ireland, of the whole of Ireland, are at stake in this war'. He drew out the high moral purpose of the struggle against the Germans and Prussian militarism: 'This war is undertaken in defence of the highest interests of religion and morality and right, and it would be a disgrace for ever to our country, a reproach to her manhood, and a denial of the lessons of her history if young Ireland [note the allusion here to 1848 and the traditions of Irish nationalism] confined their efforts to remaining at home to defend the shores of Ireland from an unlikely invasion, and shrinking from the duty of proving on the field of battle that gallantry and courage which have distinguished their race all through its history'. Stirring words indeed, and words which clearly found a response among many young Irishmen.
But high patriotic duty was not the only possible reason why men might join up. Another factor was a simply desire for adventure. For many at home the war offered excitement and the chance of glorious opportunity. Tom Barry, later to become a leader of the IRA in Cork, enlisted in June 1915. Seventeen years old, he said he 'had decided to see what this Great War was like … I went to the war for no other reason than that I wanted to see what war was like, to get a gun, to see new countries and to feel like a grown man'. This was nearly a year after the war had started, and provides some evidence that the recruiting rush of the early days does not tell the whole story.
And if Irish nationalists were responding to their 'patriotic duty' as articulated by John Redmond, so Irish unionists, too, in Ulster and elsewhere, also joined up for patriotic reasons. Having pledged their loyalty to the Crown and the link with Great Britain, they could hardly stand back when the 'Mother Country' was in its hour of need. 'We do not seek to purchase terms by selling our patriotism', said Carson. 'England's difficulty is our difficulty.'
There were also economic motives for joining up, as there always had been. Service in the army, after all, was a steady job, and one with a pension at the end. Even in wartime, with the heightened risks of military service, many men were undoubtedly attracted by the rates of pay which the military offered (and the family allowances which accompanied them). The August 1914 rush to the colours was also boosted by the fact that across Ulster many factories laid men off, or put them on short time, when war broke out because of uncertainties in the economic situation. Irish linen mills specialised in the quality end of the market-fine table and bed-linen, high quality shirting and so on-just the sort of products which people might stop buying (as they did) because there 'was a war on'. Export markets in continental Europe and the USA were disrupted. Thus, just at the moment when there was a stirring and insistent call for troops, many workers were put out of a job, evidently making enlistment more attractive than might otherwise have been the case.
Nor were these the only possible motives for joining up. Some men enlisted through family tradition, for others it was merely a kind of emigration, though one which was not necessarily so permanent as going to America. Looking especially at big urban centres like Belfast, it is also evident that many men joined up in groups, with 'peer pressure' carrying them into the army with friends and work mates. By one account, Francis Ledwidge, the poet from Slane (and a socialist and nationalist), enlisted 'on the rebound' from being rejected by a sweetheart. Whether true or not, it adds another possibility to the wide range of motivations to joining up.
Looking at the recruiting figures, and taking into account the many possible reasons behind enlistment, it is impossible facilely or glibly to generalise about these fellows, about who they were or why they joined up. No single or simple explanation will do, and in many cases it must have been a combination of factors. Patriotic feeling might have been significant but not in itself sufficient to impel a man to enlist. Yet combine it with uncertain prospects at work and the urging of a next-door neighbour-'Come on, John, it'll be great crack'-and the lure might be irresistible. What, in any case, we can say about these men-who were both 'ordinary' and extraordinary at the same time- is that they became victims of circumstances well beyond their control.
Irishmen served in all theatres of the First World War, and in all branches of the army and navy, not to mention the air force by the end of the war. But if we concentrate on the volunteers of 'Kitchener's army', we find the Irish serving in three main divisions: the 10th (Irish) Division, the 16th (Irish) Division and the 36th (Ulster) Division. The 10th Division was the first to see action. In August 1915 it landed at Suvla Bay in Gallipoli in Turkey, as part of the unsuccessful effort to open a way from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea and force the Turks out of the war. By the end of 1915 the division had been moved to Macedonia, and in 1917 to Egypt and Palestine. In November 1917 they fought in the battle of Gaza and participated in the capture of Jerusalem in December that year. In March 1918 they were fighting near Nablus, now in the occupied territories of the West Bank.
The other two divisions fought on the Western Front, in places more familiar to us. The most famous engagement they were involved in was, of course, the Ulster Division at the battle of the Somme, where they suffered appalling casualties on the first day, 1 July 1916. This was the first major battle they were involved in. The 16th Division had, in fact, gone into action before the 36th. In April 1916, during the same week as the Easter Rising in Dublin, they had suffered a bad gas attack at Hulluch, north of the Somme. The 16th Division also took part in the Somme battle itself, though not until September 1916. Both divisions fought together, sometimes alongside each other, at the battle of Messines in June 1917 and at Langemarck, part of the battle of Passchendaele, in August 1917. The following spring both divisions fought against the great German offensive in March 1918, which proved to be the last big German attack of the war.
This very sketchy outline of where the Irish New Amy divisions fought cannot do justice to the Irish service in the First World War, nor does it in any way do justice to the extraordinarily wide range of experience on land, sea and in the air seen by volunteers from all parts of Ireland. We should not forget that women as well as men served. In St Anne's Church of Ireland Cathedral in Belfast is a memorial to eighteen nurses who died while serving with Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service. In the same church, incidentally, there is also a huge memorial to the printing tradesmen, Protestants and Catholics, who served and died in the war. Across Ireland are local war memorials with their own stories to tell of individual service and sacrifice, and including both women and men. The names of two nurses, for example, will be found on the war memorial in Dungannon, county Tyrone. At the dedications of war memorials-an all-to-frequent occurrence in the 1920s-some sentiments were expressed which we would do well to recall today. Among the most striking is the speech made by General Sir Oliver Nugent (who had commanded the 36th (Ulster) Division at the Somme) at the dedication of the war memorial in Virginia, County Cavan, in August 1923. 'The day', he said, 'is not, I hope, far distant when the memory of all those of our country who gave their lives for civilisation as we interpret it and in obedience to what they believed to be their duty will be honoured and perpetuated in every town and village in Ireland' (emphasis added). These are signally tolerant and inclusive remarks, especially for their time. But the call to remember all the fallen resonates with us still today. Perhaps, after eighty years, we can rise to Sir Oliver Nugent's challenge.

 

"Turning 11 November into 12 July?":
Commemorating the Great War in Ireland

In the centre of the Irish midlands town of Birr, there is a 15 metre-high mid-eighteenth century Doric column, which was surmounted with a statue of the Duke of Cumberland. It was erected to mark his victory over Catholic Jacobite forces at Culloden in Scotland in 1746, which secured the Protestant monarchy in Britain. In the early autumn of 1919 this unusual and unexpected memorial-no other monument to Culloden exists beyond the battlefield itself-came under discussion in the town. By this time the statue of the duke, who was popularly known as the 'butcher of Culloden', had been removed, ostensibly because it was in a dangerous condition, and only the pedestal remained. Looking to put up a war memorial, the Birr Comrades of the Great War applied to the urban council to use the site for this purpose. Simultaneously, and evidently as a response, the local branch of the Transport Union applied 'for the site for the erection of a statue to the late James Connolly', one of the leaders of the Easter Rising of 1916. Neither application succeeded, nor has either a Great War memorial or a statue of James Connolly ever been erected in the town. This illustrates one theme which emerged in the years after 1918: the mutually challenging commemoration of what might collectively be called Irish war dead. The empty column, which survives to this day, epitomises another Irish response to the painful legacy of 1914-18: a willing, perhaps even a wilful, suppression of the public 'memory' of those years. This national 'amnesia', however, contrasts sharply with the fervent celebration of the war effort by Irish unionists, especially those in the north of Ireland, for whom the losses sustained by the Ulster Division at the battle of the Somme in 1916 represented a sealing with blood of the political union with Great Britain.
In Ireland the political memory of the Great War has been inextricably bound up with that of the conflicts at home. This is above all exemplified by the strikingly different place of 1916 in the unionist and nationalist traditions. But even here there are ambiguities. While the Easter Rising serves as an iconic event for Irish republicans, and the first day of the Somme, 1 July, when the Ulster Division went over the top and suffered some five thousand casualties, has become a sacred point of reference for Ulster unionists, 1916 also saw the first engagement on the Western Front of the nationalist 16th (Irish) Division, also in the battle of the Somme, though not until September. The varying ways in which the service and sacrifice of these different groups of Irish soldiers has been marked and commemorated since the end of the war reflects the broader political and social ambiguities of Ireland, north and south, especially in the inter-war years, but also right up to the present day.
The overlapping of existing Irish political divisions with the commemoration of the Great War is demonstrated by the worry, expressed both by British ex-servicemen and Irish nationalists (sometimes, of course, the same people) that commemoration should not take on an 'Orange and Green' dimension. In September 1926, General Sir William Hickie, who had commanded the 16th (Irish) Division in the war and was now the Chairman of the Southern Ireland Branch of the British legion, told a British Legion meeting in Athy, County Kildare, that he deplored those who were 'trying to turn the 11th of November into the 12th of July'. The following year Kevin O'Higgins, the Minister of Justice and Vice-President of the Executive Council, told the Dáil that he deprecated 'profoundly the mentality of either side that would make of the 11th November a Twelfth of July'.
O'Higgins was speaking in a debate about the location of the Irish National War Memorial and the problematic nature of Irish First World War commemoration is particularly well illustrated in the tortuous, and somewhat troubled, history of the Irish National War Memorial, first proposed in principle in 1919. The design and location was not settled until ten years later, it was only partially completed within another ten years, but subsequently fell into considerable disrepair, was restored in the 1980s and not formally dedicated until some fifty years after its original completion. Part of the difficulty with this memorial stemmed from the very term 'national', which conveyed different meanings to different people. Thus it was understandable that some veterans at remembrance ceremonies sought to recover the reconciling power of common war service, which the nationalist leader John Redmond had so ardently desired. Two examples from 1925 illustrate this point, the first at the eighth anniversary service in memory of Major William Redmond, John Redmond's brother and also a nationalist MP, who was killed in June 1917 during the battle of Messines. Both at the time and since, much was made of the fact that the nationalist 16th Division in which Redmond was serving fought here alongside the unionist 36th Division. Delivering the oration at Ennis, in the East Clare constituency Redmond had represented, Thomas O'Donnell, another former MP, made the most of the fact the Redmond had died in a 36th Division casualty clearing station:
Side by side with his Orange fellow-countrymen he fought in France-and, strange irony of fate, or perhaps the guiding hand of Providence, when a German shell laid that noble spirit low he was brought by Orange stretcher-bearers back to the Orange camp and there tended with all the solicitude and anxious care that could be given to their dearest comrade. There in that stricken camp was buried for ever the prejudice of ages…
While O'Donnell might have been a shade over-optimistic in his conclusion, the celebration of common service between 'Orange' and 'Green' was frequently invoked at remembrance ceremonies. At the dedication in November 1925 of the war memorial at Portadown, County Armagh, Mr R. M. Cullen, a Catholic ex-N. C. O. of the Connaught Rangers, said that joint participation was 'emblematic of the brotherhood that was born in the gullies of Gallipoli and cemented on the firing-steps of Flanders (Applause.)'
In post-partition Ireland, and bearing in mind the traumatic and bitterly divisive experiences of the war of independence, the civil war and sectarian violence in many parts of the island, though especially in the north, it was understandable that many should invoke a time of apparently unproblematic Irish unity in the not-so-distant past. Not only their war service, but also the mythic attractions of that military 'brotherhood', meant that some ex-servicemen, far from trying to forget the war might actually seek to preserve and sustain the military cameraderie and common purpose they enjoyed during the 1914-18. This was certainly a factor in the development of veterans' organisations in countries across the world; while public opinion 'wanted to forget the war', veterans, reflected one Canadian ex-serviceman charged with organising the civil re-integration of soldiers after the Second World War, 'seemed to want to keep the memory alive'. The most recent manifestation of this is the enlistment (as it were) of the First World War into the Northern Ireland 'peace process', with cross-community 'pilgrimages' to the battlefields (and cemeteries) in France and Belgium, and the building of a 'Peace Tower' at Messines in Belgium.
But there was (and is) also a religious and denominational dimension to commemoration. Religious ceremonial was inextricably part of remembrance services, and the broad identification in Ireland of Catholics with nationalism and Protestants with unionism, meant that any religious service could have a clear political dimension. In a number of places Catholic ex-servicemen organised ostentatiously Catholic ceremonies, perhaps deliberately to protect themselves against accusations of 'West Briton-ism', or any lingering sympathy for the ancien régime in Ireland. In Longford, for example, a parade of ex-servicemen to St Mel's Catholic cathedral for high mass, carried a banner 'bearing the inscription "The Supreme Sacrifice" in large white block letters on a dark background, underneath a painting in oils of a dying soldier beneath the cross on which hung a life-like figure of the Redeemer, set upon the roadside somewhere in France'. On the back of the banner were the words 'Better love than this no man hath than that he lay down his life for his friends'. Catholic ex-servicemen in Lurgan, County Armagh, were equally anxious to commemorate their dead comrades. Indeed, they sponsored one of the very few Great War memorials in an Irish Catholic church. But they also seem to have been keen to avoid becoming too closely involved in the main public remembrance ceremonies, with (in Northern Ireland) their powerful British and unionist symbolism. At first the Catholic ex-servicemen paraded annually in July, sometime between the anniversary of the signing of the peace (28 June 1919) and the day appointed in 1919 (19 July) for the official peace celebrations. Whatever the precise reason for the timing, on 9 July 1920 'over four hundred demobilised Catholic soldiers of Lurgan' met to make arrangements for a remembrance mass on the Sunday following, 11 July. But this was plumb in the middle of the Orange 'marching season'. A local priest, Father McGivern, 'made it clear it was to be a purely religious function… He gave warning to all present to refrain from giving or taking offence during the forthcoming July celebrations'. He was 'glad to see toleration and comradeship between Catholic and Protestant demobilised soldiers in Lurgan and hoped that nothing would now occur to break it'. The Catholic ex-servicemen continued to parade in July until 1923, but thereafter changed the date to later in the summer, when the ceremonies became associated (though not always coinciding) with the feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary on 15 August.
Remembrance in Lurgan, however, also demonstrated the extent to which the commemoration of the Great War in Northern Ireland became associated with the unionist political cause and confirms Neil Jarman's observation that 'after 1918, the World War, condensed into the single event of 'the Somme', was introduced into Orange mytho-history as a contemporary equivalent to 1690'. From the early 1920s annual 1 July parades were staged to mark the Somme anniversary. There were Ulster Division memorial services, and after the Lurgan war memorial was completed in 1928, wreaths were laid at it on 1 July as well as 11 November. Orange banners quickly emerged with illustrations showing the 'First day of the Battle of the Somme' (generally reproducing the famous painting by J. P. Beadle which now hangs in Belfast City Hall) as well as King William III and the Battle of the Boyne. An unexpected linking of the Boyne with the Somme occurred in 1919 when the 'Boyne Obelisk' which had been erected in 1736 at the site of the battle was offered for sale to the County Tyrone War Memorial Committee. The offer, however, was rejected on the grounds 'that to remove so historic a monument from the site which it commemorates would be an outrage'. In fact the monument was soon removed, by republicans, who blew it up in the 1920s. 'The elevation of the Somme', wrote Jarman, 'into the iconography of the Orange Order confirmed its near-sacred status in popular memory' In 1923 the Lurgan Mail declared of 1 July that 'every Ulster man and woman should recall the fact that their gallant sons, the sons of the victors of the Battle of the Boyne, went to their death with the cry of the Boyne, No Surrender, on their lips!'
In the 1920s, war commemorations were also often explicitly tied in with the establishment and preservation of the new Northern Ireland state and the loyalty of Ulster to the British crown. Although the inscriptions on many Northern Ireland war memorials were quite reticent about the reasons for men (as they mostly were) having served, some, like those at Ballywalter, Comber and Newtownards (all County Down), explicitly stated 'King and Country'. At the unveiling of the Coleraine, County Londonderry, memorial on 11 November 1922, Sir James Craig, the first prime minister of Northern Ireland, told the assembled crowd that 'those who passed away have left behind a great message to all of them to stand firm, and to give away none of Ulster's soil'. In October 1925, at a meeting called to organise the erection of a war memorial in Cookstown, County Tyrone, Captain Creighton, organising secretary of the British Legion in Belfast, remarked on the sacrifices of the 'men from Northern Ireland [which, of course, did not exist before 1921] who went voluntarily to meet the foe'. They had volunteered, moreover, 'not only for their own land, but for a far greater, the British Empire. (Applause.)' Dedicating the war memorial in Derry City in June 1927, Major-General Felix Ready, GOC Northern Ireland District, remarked that the city's history 'was an example to the whole Empire for its loyalty and devotion to the Crown'.
In Northern Ireland the commemoration of the Great War and the political legacy of 1916 became on the whole an exclusively Protestant and unionist affair. Partly this was because nationalists, uneasy and unwelcome in the new polity, for the most part absented themselves from the public rituals of the province. In terms of war remembrance, far from demobilising in any way, Ulster unionists remained rather on a war footing, dwelling as they did in 'a state under siege'. The struggle to remain within the United Kingdom 'was the Siege of Derry and the Battle of the Boyne all over again, it was the Great War continued'. Unionists' selective memory of the war, which erased the considerable Catholic and nationalist participation, was cast in materials arguably more enduring than bronze, for it was firmly incorporated into the unionist/Orange mind-set. The Somme was conflated with the Boyne, and annual ceremonies on 1 July and 11 November, which embodied explicitly Protestant rituals, were used to recall Ulster's ungrudging sacrifice in the war and confirm its continuing loyalty to the United Kingdom and (while it existed) the British Empire.
Naturally the nationalist memory of 1916-cum-1919-21 was rather different and ever since 1919, republicans have provided a kind of running commentary to the commemoration of the Great War in Ireland. Again, this demonstrates the conflation of 11 November with 12 July, and it is ironic that republican protests against remembrance ceremonies might themselves have made those events more loyalist than might otherwise have been the case. Inter-war reports of Armistice Day ceremonies are invariably accompanied by reports of republican counter-demonstrations of one sort or another. Describing the official peace celebrations across Ireland on 19 July 1919, the Belfast News-Letter also noted black flags in Cork, 'a huge poster' in Athlone, bearing the words, 'Ex-soldiers, you have fought for freedom. Where is it?', rioting in Limerick 'arising out of an attempt by Sinn Feiners to pull down flags exhibited by Loyalists', and an inscription defacing the courthouse in Dundalk reading: 'Peace now. The world is safe for hypocrisy.' In November 1925 a local Foresters' Band was unable to take part in the veterans' parade in Tullamore because their instruments had been stolen or damaged. Shopkeepers in the town 'who had exhibited the Flanders Poppy poster had their premises daubed with paint and offensive letters'. A meeting in Dublin on 8 November 1927 heard the republican leader Eamon de Valera protest against 'imperialistic displays' on Armistice Day. 'The time had now come', he said, 'when the citizens should make it clear that they would not countenance this action by Imperialists, that they had the power to stop it, and that it should be stopped'. One consequence of such views is summarised by a subsequent headline in the unionist Londonderry Sentinel: 'Wild Dublin Scenes. Poppy-Sellers attacked by Republicans. Police Baton Charges.' On the eve of Armistice Day 1932 Frank Ryan, editor of the republican journal An Phoblacht, declared that 'no matter what anyone says to the contrary, while we have fists, hands and boots to use, and guns if necessary, we will not allow free speech to traitors'. The passions provoked among republicans by Great War commemorations were perhaps sharpened by the coincidence of two republican anniversaries falling in November: Patrick Pearse's birthday on 10 November 1879, and that of the execution of the 'Manchester martyrs' on 23 November 1867.
Another facet of Great War commemoration is the celebration of an 'Irish military tradition', by which military prowess in general (for whatever army) is believed to be part of the Irish national character. This is reflected in some more recent types of commemoration which suppress whatever political (or even moral) motives there might have been for fighting, and, indeed, also perhaps even subordinate the fighting itself to the 'heroic' or 'noble' suffering which Irish people suffered in the face of battle. One example of that is seen in the Irish National Day of Remembrance (in July each year) for all Irishmen who have died in wars and in the service of the United Nations. But in terms of this 'military dimension' (and the military ceremonial which usually accompanies remembrance) there was a difference in First World War commemoration after 1939, and a further change after 1969, specifically regarding the commemoration of service in the British armed forces,. In the former case, the events were affected by the awkwardness of celebrating (to whatever extent) service in British uniform when once again (in 1939-45) Irishmen were doing so, but while independent Ireland remained neutral. In the latter case, after 1969, difficulties arose because the British Army itself was a participant in the 'Troubles', so that remembrance in nationalist eyes became (or could become) associated with the 'British military machine', leading, thus, to such horrors as the 1987 Remembrance Sunday bombing in Enniskillen.
This brings me on to some final reflections about the relationship between the commemoration of the Great War and our more recent communal conflict.
The first point concerns the notion of shared military service transcending local Irish political and/or sectarian divisions. What has undoubtedly happened over the thirty years or so of the Troubles is an intensified polarisation of communities which has helped entrench (a handy military metaphor) political attitudes. One thing largely absent (to our great cost) from what one might call the 'civil war' of the past 30 years is any powerful sense that shared military experience on each side of the conflict might have any sort of reconciling potential. If we are serious about trying to extract some good from common suffering in 1914-18, then we must also seriously contemplate the possibility that some good might be extracted from an understanding of common suffering and loss in more recent times. What has happened, though, is the recovery-or attempted recovery-of a the more distant shared experience, specifically that of the First World War, and its mobilisation as part of the 'peace process'.
Some individuals-as we have seen-have been suggesting this since the war itself, and the dedication of war memorials sometimes gave an opportunity to make the reconciling case. A good example is General Sir Oliver Nugent (who had commanded the 36th (Ulster) Division at the Somme) at the dedication of the war memorial in Virginia, County Cavan, in August 1923. 'The day', he said, 'is not, I hope, far distant when the memory of all those of our country who gave their lives for civilisation as we interpret it and in obedience to what they believed to be their duty will be honoured and perpetuated in every town and village in Ireland'. Nugent's sensitive words were in fact strikingly more tolerant of difference, more open and all-embracing that the memorial he was dedicating which actually commemorates 'the willing sacrifice of [those] … who gave their lives in defence of king and country'.
But war memorials, however, well-intentioned, can still be divisive. There is a recent example on Shore Road, Newtownabbey, dedicated in September 1992 'in memory of the members of H.M. Forces who gave their lives in the Two World Wars and in subsequent conflicts'. The key words here are 'H.M. Forces', which can be construed to include the state security forces, and 'subsequent conflicts', which is sufficiently ambiguous to include (or not) the past 30 years in Northern Ireland. I do not suppose the designers of the memorial actually meant to exclude those who were not members of Her, or His, Majesty's Forces, who gave their lives-fireman, air raid wardens, merchant seamen and the like. The monument undoubtedly expresses deeply-felt and sincere emotions, but its effectiveness is also limited by its political agenda. There is a parallel, antagonistic, narrative in the erection of republican memorials specifically to the events of the past 30 years (in Downpatrick, Castlewellan and other places) which reminds us that we cannot easily dismiss or side-step the costs of our own civil war, and in this context, perhaps the resonance of the First World War might most appropriately be found in the entrenchments, barbed wire and no-man's land of Drumcree.
The fact, nevertheless, of the Island of Ireland Peace Tower at Messines, and its dedication by President McAleese, Queen Elizabeth and the King of the Belgians on 11 November 1998, suggests otherwise. And, although criticisms can be made of the whole scheme, its imaginative harnessesing of shared memory and shared experience, and the drawing together of the now fairly distant past with the altogether more contentious and hazardous present, provides an opportunity, to paraphrase Sir Oliver Nugent, for differing interpretations of what we may believe to be our duty to be accommodated in a creative rather than destructive fashion. The recent past is so painful that we may require the more remote experience of the First World War to help us come to terms with it. Perhaps, indeed, we need to turn the 12th of July into the 11th of November.

 

(A fuller discussion of Ireland and the First World War and references for the information contained above can be found in Keith Jeffery, Ireland and the Great War, Cambr. U.P., 2000.)