Post by Waverley on Dec 28, 2008 0:55:32 GMT 1
Donal Lowry considers Keith Jeffrey's new book on the Irish experience of 1914-18

Ireland and the Great War by Keith Jeffery
The Great War occupies a peculiar place in modern Irish history. Well over 200,000 Irishmen, the majority Catholic and nationalist, fought in British and allied armies, and more than 27,000 were killed. The scale of this involvement dwarfs the Irish independence struggle and was the greatest collective experience of twentieth-century Ireland. In later decades, however, the conflict was widely held to have had little impact on the direction of Irish history. The battle lines, it was argued, had already been drawn between unionist and nationalist well before 1914. Later scholars and politicians, while acknowledging that the Battle of the Somme had provided Ulster loyalism with its chief insignia of oblation, tended to regard war service as having had no long-term impact on southern Irish life. ‘No one denies the sacrifice ... the patriotic motives’, Vice-President Kevin O’Higgins (whose own brother had been killed in Flanders) declared in 1927, ‘and yet it is not on their sacrifice that this state is based.’
A growing ‘amnesia’ about southern Irish participation emerged to suit the political objectives of Ulster unionists and Irish republicans alike. While unionists steadily ‘appropriated’ and then virtually monopolised the experience of the Great War, republicans asserted that those, including constitutional nationalists, who had ‘taken the King’s shilling’ had chosen the lesser path. During the independence campaign, the IRA targeted ex-servicemen whom they categorised alongside such deviants from republican virtue as members of the Royal Irish Constabulary. The poppy, which in the 1920s had higher sales in Dublin than in Belfast, became associated with imperialist ascendancy recalcitrance, rather than ex-servicemen’s welfare. Armistice Day became a rallying point for republican street fighters, who regarded annual ceremonies as occasions for thinly-veiled ‘loyalist’ defiance and Catholic ‘West Britonism’. Irish governments were embarrassed by having to protect such commemorations. War memorials were often vandalised, sometimes destroyed, but usually allowed simply to decay.
While in Britain the war could still command a fading continuity with later generations, in nationalist Ireland it was contained within a new ‘Hidden Ireland’. Some schools, clubs and (mostly Protestant) churches erected memorials, usually far from public view, like the military headstones secluded behind the high grey walls of former British army barracks. Ex-servicemen increasingly recused themselves, and their experiences became confined to private family histories. Kevin Myers has remarked that not since Stalin’s purges had such a colossal experience been so successfully expunged from the public memory of a people. In 1966, this divided legacy returned dramatically to haunt the governments of both Irish states, as they commemorated the fiftieth anniversaries of the 36th (Ulster) Division’s ordeal at the Somme, and the Easter Rising. Since then, however, even as the band of surviving veterans dwindled to less than a handful, there has been a remarkable resurgence of popular interest in the conflict and its legacy, culminating in the unveiling of the ‘Island of Ireland Peace Tower’ at Messines by President Mary McAleese and Queen Elizabeth in 1998.
Keith Jeffery’s volume, based on his 1998-9 Lee Knowles Lectures, provides critical examinations of the immediate impact and legacy of the war, and is the most authoritative, engaging and accessible introduction to the subject to date. There are chapters on the complex question of recruitment motivation, on the home and overseas experiences, on artistic and literary responses, and on the heated politics of commemoration of the conflict in both Irish states. The volume also includes a comprehensive bibliographical essay. His approach is inclusive, encompassing the roles of constitutional nationalists, unionists, separatists, pacifists, women activists and voluntary workers, and the comparatively few war veterans who later joined the IRA. He also highlights the widespread constitutional nationalist belief that the war could reconcile nationalist and unionist (a sentiment which would underpin the Messines Memorial of 1998). The volume is full of interesting detail. We learn, for example, that until 1917 all of the Royal Navy’s submarine periscopes were manufactured in County Dublin, that most recruits in 1918 went to the RAF, and that an orchestral piece written in memory of the nationalist martyr Patrick Pearse was recycled as a score for David Lean’s Oliver, while its composer ended his career with a knighthood as Master of the King’s Music!
In spite of such telling anomalies, the war still polarises opinion in Northern Ireland. While the IRA’s Remembrance Day bombing of Enniskillen has done much to promote reconciliation, the confrontation at Drumcree hinges on the Orange Order’s right to march from their parish church in commemoration of the Battle of the Somme. The leadership of the SDLP meanwhile feels unable to join Scottish and Welsh nationalist parliamentarians in annual commemorations at the Whitehall Cenotaph. The conflict thus possesses an almost inexhaustible capacity for research at the levels of national, local and family history. This volume should provide an excellent starting point for all such projects.
About the Author
Donal Lowry is the editor of Studies in Imperialism: The South African War Reappraised (Manchester University Press, 2000)

Ireland and the Great War by Keith Jeffery
The Great War occupies a peculiar place in modern Irish history. Well over 200,000 Irishmen, the majority Catholic and nationalist, fought in British and allied armies, and more than 27,000 were killed. The scale of this involvement dwarfs the Irish independence struggle and was the greatest collective experience of twentieth-century Ireland. In later decades, however, the conflict was widely held to have had little impact on the direction of Irish history. The battle lines, it was argued, had already been drawn between unionist and nationalist well before 1914. Later scholars and politicians, while acknowledging that the Battle of the Somme had provided Ulster loyalism with its chief insignia of oblation, tended to regard war service as having had no long-term impact on southern Irish life. ‘No one denies the sacrifice ... the patriotic motives’, Vice-President Kevin O’Higgins (whose own brother had been killed in Flanders) declared in 1927, ‘and yet it is not on their sacrifice that this state is based.’
A growing ‘amnesia’ about southern Irish participation emerged to suit the political objectives of Ulster unionists and Irish republicans alike. While unionists steadily ‘appropriated’ and then virtually monopolised the experience of the Great War, republicans asserted that those, including constitutional nationalists, who had ‘taken the King’s shilling’ had chosen the lesser path. During the independence campaign, the IRA targeted ex-servicemen whom they categorised alongside such deviants from republican virtue as members of the Royal Irish Constabulary. The poppy, which in the 1920s had higher sales in Dublin than in Belfast, became associated with imperialist ascendancy recalcitrance, rather than ex-servicemen’s welfare. Armistice Day became a rallying point for republican street fighters, who regarded annual ceremonies as occasions for thinly-veiled ‘loyalist’ defiance and Catholic ‘West Britonism’. Irish governments were embarrassed by having to protect such commemorations. War memorials were often vandalised, sometimes destroyed, but usually allowed simply to decay.
While in Britain the war could still command a fading continuity with later generations, in nationalist Ireland it was contained within a new ‘Hidden Ireland’. Some schools, clubs and (mostly Protestant) churches erected memorials, usually far from public view, like the military headstones secluded behind the high grey walls of former British army barracks. Ex-servicemen increasingly recused themselves, and their experiences became confined to private family histories. Kevin Myers has remarked that not since Stalin’s purges had such a colossal experience been so successfully expunged from the public memory of a people. In 1966, this divided legacy returned dramatically to haunt the governments of both Irish states, as they commemorated the fiftieth anniversaries of the 36th (Ulster) Division’s ordeal at the Somme, and the Easter Rising. Since then, however, even as the band of surviving veterans dwindled to less than a handful, there has been a remarkable resurgence of popular interest in the conflict and its legacy, culminating in the unveiling of the ‘Island of Ireland Peace Tower’ at Messines by President Mary McAleese and Queen Elizabeth in 1998.
Keith Jeffery’s volume, based on his 1998-9 Lee Knowles Lectures, provides critical examinations of the immediate impact and legacy of the war, and is the most authoritative, engaging and accessible introduction to the subject to date. There are chapters on the complex question of recruitment motivation, on the home and overseas experiences, on artistic and literary responses, and on the heated politics of commemoration of the conflict in both Irish states. The volume also includes a comprehensive bibliographical essay. His approach is inclusive, encompassing the roles of constitutional nationalists, unionists, separatists, pacifists, women activists and voluntary workers, and the comparatively few war veterans who later joined the IRA. He also highlights the widespread constitutional nationalist belief that the war could reconcile nationalist and unionist (a sentiment which would underpin the Messines Memorial of 1998). The volume is full of interesting detail. We learn, for example, that until 1917 all of the Royal Navy’s submarine periscopes were manufactured in County Dublin, that most recruits in 1918 went to the RAF, and that an orchestral piece written in memory of the nationalist martyr Patrick Pearse was recycled as a score for David Lean’s Oliver, while its composer ended his career with a knighthood as Master of the King’s Music!
In spite of such telling anomalies, the war still polarises opinion in Northern Ireland. While the IRA’s Remembrance Day bombing of Enniskillen has done much to promote reconciliation, the confrontation at Drumcree hinges on the Orange Order’s right to march from their parish church in commemoration of the Battle of the Somme. The leadership of the SDLP meanwhile feels unable to join Scottish and Welsh nationalist parliamentarians in annual commemorations at the Whitehall Cenotaph. The conflict thus possesses an almost inexhaustible capacity for research at the levels of national, local and family history. This volume should provide an excellent starting point for all such projects.
About the Author
Donal Lowry is the editor of Studies in Imperialism: The South African War Reappraised (Manchester University Press, 2000)