Ireland and the First World War

In October 2012 David Cameron promised ‘a truly national commemoration’ to mark the centenary of the First World War. Concerns quickly emerged that ‘national’, in reality, meant ‘England’. Not only would this be unrepresentative of the United Kingdom as it exists today but it also disregards the geopolitical configuration of the state that declared war on August 4th, 1914: the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland.

Understanding the interconnected relationship that existed during the war between the now independent states of Britain and the Republic of Ireland is significant to our understanding of the First World War on a number of levels. How did nationalist Ireland – the most significant threat to the British authorities in the summer of 1914 – come to support the war effort? What contribution did Ireland make to the British war effort and how can it be framed more broadly within a colonial response? How did Anglo-Irish relations evolve over the course of and as a result of the war? Where and when did divergences emerge? What was the postwar legacy of Ireland’s contribution, for both Britain and the Irish Free State? How has that contribution been remembered, if at all?

Existing historiography on Britain and the First World War tends to exacerbate this sense of separateness. There is no shortage of work that looks at British experience of the war and its consequences either holistically or from specific angles. However, scholars of the British perspective have struggled to integrate Ireland into their explorations. Alan G.V. Simmonds devotes less than five per cent of his highly accessible Britain and World War One (2012) to the topic. Adrian Gregory’s The Last Great War (2008) is one of the most imaginative and important books on British society and the conflict and should be the starting point for anyone wishing to understand how British people ‘made sense’ of the war as it unfolded. However, while he acknowledges that the break up of the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland is crucial to any overall history of the war, he admits defeat, owing to restrictions of space. My own attempt to integrate Ireland into an examination of public responses to the outbreak of war in 1914 – A Kingdom United (2012) – tackles the conundrum directly but is not without issue. The confinement of Irish material largely to a single chapter continues to encourage a sense of separation.

Why has it been so difficult to write a fully integrated history of the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland in the First World War? It is a combination of difference and denial. First, the situation in Ireland was completely different from that in Britain, due to the Home Rule crisis and threat of civil war (in 1914) that evolved into wartime political flashpoints, most notably Irish resistance to the introduction of conscription. Ireland as an anomaly – relative to Britain, at least – created its own logic of historiographical separatism. Second, the historiography of early 20th-century Ireland was restricted until recently by Ireland’s fraught relationship with the First World War. Many scholars were in denial about nationalist Ireland’s involvement with the war. Instead, the Easter Rising of 1916 was the central military struggle toward national liberation.

The historic breakthrough in the Northern Ireland peace process of the 1990s created a new space to consider how the First World War was, in fact, a part of nationalist Irish history. Significant research has been done on a plethora of aspects of Ireland’s involvement in the war and new work is appearing all the time. A quick glance at the reading list reveals research into Irish involvement in the war, ranging from military to home front experiences and from macro-level political organisation to micro-historical local studies, with many more in between. Important syntheses exist, such as Keith Jeffery’s Ireland and the Great War (2000), in which he argues that the First World War was the single most central experience in 20th-century Ireland. Our War, edited by John Horne (2008), together with Gregory and Senia Pašeta’s edited volume, Ireland and the Great War, explores the lasting impact the war had on personal, social, economic and political aspects of Irish life. The recent volume, Towards Commemoration, edited by Horne and Madigan (reviewed right), makes a unique contribution to debates surrounding Ireland’s centenary decade (1912-23), of which the war is central. Nuala C. Johnson and Catherine Swizter have both made pioneering contributions to the historiography of Irish commemoration of the war. There is still more research to be done, particularly in relation to the role and experience of women in the story of the foundation of modern Ireland. Perhaps the most important contribution to recent scholarship on Ireland and the war is the expansion of the traditional chronological parameters of 1914-18 to acknowledge the uncomfortable reality that the end of the Great War did not immediately bring peace. The outbreak of revolutions, counter-revolutions, wars of independence and fratricidal conflict were not unique to Ireland but are an important part of the legacy of the First World War. Robert Gerwarth and John Horne’s edited volume War in Peace (2012) is the starting point for anyone interested in this aspect of the historiography. Anne Dolan’s Commemorating the Irish Civil War (2003) explores the tensions between memory and national amnesia in Ireland between 1923 and 2000 in order to highlight that forgetting is a key feature of Irish remembrance.

Many historians are already expressing concerns that the forthcoming centenary commemorations may be little more than an exercise in national navel-gazing. The centenary provides a once-in-a-generation opportunity to situate national experiences of the war within broader European and global contexts. For British historiography an important first step would be genuinely to integrate Ireland into analyses of the war. Certainly the recent visit of the Queen to Ireland in May 2011 (the first royal visit to Ireland in a hundred years) and the reciprocal visit of the Irish President Michael D. Higgins to Britain in April 2014 suggest that the time is ripe for the two nations to look collectively at the experience and implications of the history of the First World War. However, in line with the latest academic research, such scholarship would be deficient if it did not situate the analysis within a wider transnational framework. Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert’s two-volume Capital Cities at War (1997 and 2007) still remains on the somewhat unobtainable pedestal of comparative, historical analysis; but one that First World War historians – including those of Britain and Ireland – should continue to strive towards.

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