In 1967, Irish historian FX Martin referred to a deliberate “historical amnesia” about southern Irish links to the first World War, in contrast to the manner in which the republican revolution was commemorated by the State.
Southern Irish survivors of the war came back to a radically changed political landscape; the IRA subsequently killed approximately 200 ex-servicemen during the War of Independence, and although not all were killed because of their British army service some undoubtedly were. In contrast, in what became the state of Northern Ireland after 1920, the focus was on commemoration of the war not just as a way of honouring the dead, but to demonstrate continuing loyalty to the UK.
Remembrance of the war thus worked in very different ways in both parts of the island: in the words of Catriona Crowe, “both sides effectively froze the war into shapes or absences that served darker purposes to do with foundation myths for societies born in violence.”
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Inevitably, given the slaughter of so many Ulster volunteers, remembrance of the Battle of the Somme became an important part of the Ulster Protestant self-image; from November 11th, 1919 Armistice Day in Northern Ireland featured broadly religious events in many towns, though the laying of wreaths at the Belfast Cenotaph did not include Catholics, despite their involvement in the Somme campaign.
An Ulster tower situated near to where the 36th Ulster Division had been positioned at the Somme was built by public subscription and dedicated in 1921; one part of the process of ensuring historical validation of the Ulster sacrifice that justified the creation of the state of Northern Ireland. In his speech at Thiepval in Belgium to mark this unveiling, the prime minister of Northern Ireland, James Craig, spoke specifically of an Ulster identity.
The following year, in unveiling a war memorial in Coleraine, Craig further declared: “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 soul”.
But commemoration also had a class dimension and use of the Somme sacrifice was inevitably affected by tensions within unionism (the idea that working class Protestants would see themselves as “puppets no more”) and, by the 1960s, the adoption by paramilitaries of its memory. The modern UVF was established in 1966 on the 50th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme and presented itself as historically validated by using the iconography of the Somme, part of a mythologising process that reduced the past to select events.
In 1966, prime minister of Northern Ireland Terence O’Neill, after the UVF’s first murder, insisted there was no connection between “men who were ready to die for their country in the fields of France and a sordid conspiracy of criminals prepared to take up arms against unprotected fellow citizens”.
Amnesia
The notion of amnesia about the war in the South can be exaggerated. Thousands gathered at College Green in Dublin in the early 1920s on remembrance days – 150,000 poppies were sold in Dublin in 1923, and in 1924, 20,000 veterans assembled in Dublin with an audience of 50,000 watching them. There are war memorials in towns and villages all over Southern Ireland.
In 1999, archaeologist Seamus Taaffe pointed out that “the panoply of such memorials on this island is considerable. They include public monuments, memorial plaques in institutions, dedicated buildings, stained glass windows and church memorials. What is remarkable about them is how little is known about their existence. A conservative estimate would suggest a total of 15,000 on the island as a whole”.
The war, historian Jane Leonard argues, was not banished from sight or consciousness; an expanding British Legion network ensured large armistice parades in the 1930s, but at the same time, interwar Dublin was “an extremely unnerving and dangerous place to wear service medals or poppies”.
Bernadette McAliskey, raised as a Catholic in Tyrone, and who rose to prominence as a republican socialist in the late 1960s, also made the point that it was a myth to suggest Irish soldiers were forgotten in nationalist areas of Ulster: “Much has been made of the fact that there’s been a shift in the thinking in the South about the Irish participation in the battle of the Somme, and I think that again is a constructed narrative.
“When you talk about going back to my childhood, I still remember all the songs I learnt in my own home that related to Suvla Bay, and not simply the Irish songs of the people who didn’t go there, but of the people who did.
“Because in the real communities of real people, real grandfathers and real fathers died there and they were never, ever forgotten. Never forgotten. My mother bought poppies when we were children. We had Easter lilies on Sunday and we bought poppies.”
Much has also been made of the reluctance to talk about war experiences, but this too is less than the full story; one Irish historian of the war, Edward Madigan, recently pointed out that while veterans might have been reluctant to talk to their families about it, they did talk at great length to fellow veterans.
In 1965 and 1966, Taoiseach Seán Lemass made significant interventions to acknowledge the inappropriateness of ambiguity in relation to the sufferings of the Irish who had volunteered for service in the war (“I also was guilty in this respect”) and said they had died “as honourably” as those republicans killed during the war of independence. Significantly, Lemass was born in a part of Dublin city that had provided a large batch of recruits for the British army and many of his contemporaries had served.
From the 1970s onwards, journalist Kevin Myers, admirably ploughing what was then a lonely furrow, continually pointed out that the process of commemoration also had to be about proper research into the scale of recruitment, volunteering and death of Irish soldiers.
The exact figure of Irish fatalities is not known; as a result of his research, Myers has suggested a figure close to 40,000. He highlighted that about 40 per cent of “Irish-Irish” deaths (as opposed to British-born soldiers in Irish regiments) were of Irish born emigrants recruited in Britain, and that many deaths also “escaped a bureaucratic net that quite simply couldn’t cope”.
Moving memorial
But there is no doubt the idea of official State remembrance in what became the republic was problematic. The first government of the Free State commissioned a temporary cenotaph in front of Leinster House, the site of parliament, in 1923, but
Fianna Fáil
removed it in 1932. A war memorial had originally been proposed for Merrion Square, but this was so close to Government Buildings that Kevin O’Higgins, minister for justice in the 1920s, felt it “would be to give a wrong twist, as it were, a wrong suggestion to the origins of the State”.
He wanted it understood, however, that he spoke “in no spirit of hostility to ex-servicemen”, reminding fellow politicians that his two brothers had fought, with one of them, Michael, killed in Flanders. O’Higgins went on to represent the Irish government in London at the war cenotaph in 1926.
It was decided to situate the Irish war memorial, by Edward Lutyens, at the less central location of Islandbridge, outside the city centre, where from 1939, the British Legion held its armistice day ceremony. There was a permanent cancellation of the armistice parade in 1971 and the memorial lay decrepit and neglected until its restoration by the Office of Public Works in 1988.
‘We were never told’
In 2006, at the time of the 90th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, Myles Dungan recalled that when, in the 1980s, Frank McGuinness’s play
Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme
made quite a stir in the Republic, one of the common responses in relation to a new consciousness of the impact of the war here was “we were never told”, underlining how history was taught at schools and the exclusion of an Irish first World War narrative.
When mentioned in history books, or the classroom, the first World War was merely a backdrop to the home rule crisis or the 1916 Rising and not assessed as an event in itself; nor was the profound impact it had on Irish people or the scale of volunteers or deaths or motivations communicated.
Mary Hayden and George Moonan's widely used textbook A short history of the Irish people, 1603-1924 (1927) only mentioned briefly the British War Office's hostility to the idea of a separate Irish division in the British army, suggesting that, as a result, that so many southern Irishmen volunteered "is rather to be regarded as astonishing".
The book's narrative then moved swiftly on to the 1916 Rising and the conscription crisis of 1918 when Irish nationalists declared outright opposition to conscription being extended to Ireland. Even in 1969 Mark Tierney and Margaret Mac Curtain's textbook The Birth of Modern Ireland, in use for decades afterwards, focused on the war as something that held up the 1914 home rule act and provided republicans with an opportunity to plan for a rebellion.
It stated simply, without elaboration, “it should be remembered that thousands of Irish nationalists, under Redmond’s influence, also joined the English army, but were not allowed the same privileges as the Ulster Volunteers”.
The focus was very much on the idea of the world war underlining the extent to which Ireland was a divided country. In recent years however, the emphasis has completely shifted; in tandem with the peace process of the 1990s and early 21st century, the first World War and Irish revolution were no longer confined to their own spheres in historical analysis, as it was deemed necessary to “discard the prism of political allegiance” when looking at Ireland during the war years.
Historian John Horne suggested, “The Easter Rising and the conscription crisis are as important to Ireland’s first World War experience as Gallipoli and the Somme”. There were explorations of collective pressures for enlistment that existed outside of politics; there even developed a notion of the first World War as ‘Our War’, the title of a book published by the Royal Irish Academy in 2008. Arguably, this title has an element of contrivance and simplifies the multitude of allegiances and attitudes that existed in Ireland 100 years ago.
What is indisputable, however, is that the peace process from the 1990s transformed the relationship between the State and memory of the war. The previous decade, Irish governments had still been reluctant to embrace the annual Remembrance Day service at Dublin's St Patrick's Cathedral. President Patrick Hillery received an invitation from the British Legion to attend and was willing to go, but Taoiseach Charles Haughey refused permission. Hillery's successor, Mary Robinson, however, did attend, as did her successors.
Alongside these developments, the peace process gave the Islandbridge war memorial a new profile and greater political importance. Recognition of a shared heritage was also given much momentum by the opening of the Messines Peace Tower in Belgium in 1998. The tower was built to honour the memory of soldiers from the 36th Ulster Division and 16th Irish Division that fought alongside each other in the British army during the battle of Messines in June 1917.
‘Parity of esteem’
There was also a new peace process emphasis on “parity of esteem” for the war experiences of Catholics and Protestants, which suited the focus on reconciliation during the peace process, and in the republic, involved an unprecedented formal State commemoration of the Battle of the Somme in 2006.
In December 2013, Taoiseach Enda Kenny and British prime minister David Cameron spent a few hours together in the fields of Flanders in Belgium, visiting war graves, laying wreaths and paying homage to the dead.
It was the first joint visit by a Taoiseach and prime minister to honour the British and Irish men killed in that war as soldiers of the British army.
When he made the first official State visit of an Irish president to Britain in April 2014, President Higgins also took the opportunity to underline the historic ties that bind the two countries as a result of the war by invoking the memory of Tom Kettle, Irish nationalist politician and poet, and one of the best known Irish victims of the Battle of the Somme.
Higgins suggested Kettle had died “an Irish patriot, a British soldier and a true European.” Such joint gestures and language marked a complete transformation in the attitude of the Irish State to the memory and legacy of the war.
Diarmaid Ferriter is professor of modern Irish history at UCD
