Ireland in the Great War

1914 - 1918: Around 200,000 Irishmen served and some 35,000 died, and for most of a century afterwards nobody talked about it.

When the war began, John Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party and of a Home Rule bill just placed on the statute book and suspended, told the Irish Volunteers to enlist. His reasoning was that a demonstration of loyalty would make Home Rule impossible to refuse afterwards.

Somewhere around 206,000 to 210,000 Irishmen served in British forces during the war. Of those, roughly 58,000 were already soldiers or sailors when it broke out and about 130,000 joined during it. Something near 35,000 died. The figures differ between historians, and none of them are small.

Redmond's own movement answered less readily than the story suggests. Of a National Volunteer membership of about 150,000, only some 24,000 enlisted, and recruiting slowed after the first rush. Conscription was never applied in Ireland, though the threat of it in 1918 did more to destroy the Irish Party than anything that happened at the front.

Then the Rising came in 1916, the executions followed, and within three years the country was at war with the same army these men had fought for. Their service became something awkward to the new state and painful to their own families. Memorials went unbuilt or unvisited, veterans kept quiet, and a generation of Irish dead went largely unspoken of at home for the better part of eighty years. Redmond, who had been the most powerful Irish politician of his day, is barely remembered, and what he is remembered for is that call to enlist.