Although the most celebrated recruiting posters of World War 1 featured the Listowel-born Herbert Kitchener, it seems they didn’t feature prominently in Kerry or Ireland generally. It seems too that Kitchener did not regard the Irish as his countrymen or women.
From what I can gather, a different approach was adopted by the “United Kingdom’s ” recruiting agents in Ireland, “God Save The King” does not seem to have widely featured on the posters. Trams in Dublin were festooned with the exhortation to fight for Ireland, a concept generally considered honourable then, and apparently consistent with slaughtering Turks, Austrians and Germans, people, who, whatever their faults, never harmed or intended to harm Ireland or her people. Truly,the past is another country!
The “United Kingdom’s” Irish agents conscripted, or invoked, all the heroes,legends, icons, sentiments, and, indeed, sentimentality of Nationalist Ireland in pursuit of Imperial war. One poster boldly proclaimed that Robert Emmet died for Ireland and urged Irishmen to join the forces that killed him.
Another, inspired by the “Nationalist” MP, Joe Devlin, urged men to join an “Irish Brigade” of the British Army to emulated the old Irish Brigade in the French Service, first recruited after the (broken) Treaty of Limerick.
Perhaps the most cruel, cynical,and unforgivable recruiting propaganda was not that which distorted the past but that which distorted the future. One postcard risked giving schamlz a bad name and looked like the cover of a chocolate box. It featured fresh-faced virgin gossoons, marching in khaki uniforms, cheered on by winsome, rosy-cheeked, virginal colleens with a backdrop of the old Irish Parliament. The gossoons were clearly on more than one promise. All they had to do was to fight and defeat the Central Powers and the Ottoman Empireand they could return home and claim the colleens and Ireland would again have her own Parliament.
But, as I said, the past is another country, entirely.
Not all the gossoons who so cheerfully flocked to the British colours returned to claim their colleens. For some their lonely graves “are by Suvla’s waves and the shores of the great North Sea.”
But they played their part in the collapse of three Empires, those of Germany, Austro-Hungary and Turkey, and the acquisition by two Empires, those of Britain and France, of vast territories in the Middle East, east and south-west Africa, some of which haven’t seen a day’s peace since.
On November 11 1919, one year after the signing of the Armistice in the Forest of Compiegne, the British army celebrated its Empire’s triumph in the Great War with a parade through Dublin. A saluting base was erected by the old Parliament Building, and there trundled past it a phalanx of Britishtanks, as hard, cold, and overbearing as the British Government itself.
On that very day, the Clerk of Dail Eireann and a number of TDs were arrested by British agents. They were subsequently sentenced to prison terms for conducting “an illegal assembly” – the first democratically-elected Irish Parliament in history.
But that was long ago. Can anyone now living remember seeing British armour on Irish streets, witnessed the distortion of history by politicians, or the betrayal of promises made by them to generous, gallant and gullible youth?
They used (and continue to use) similar tactics on the Scottish. England supressed the bag pipes and the kilt and then used it to recruit Scotsmen to the army. I would be very offended by the English appropriation of these considering the violence they used to remove them from Scottish culture.