Anti-national propagandists in the British-inspired Irish media, academia, and government have long peddled the falsehood that the war unleashed by Britain, France and Tsarist Russia on Germany, Austro-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire was Ireland’s War. But they have never plausibly explained what Irish interest was involved. Too many Irishmen fell for and died for a fool’s bargain – that their sacrifice in England’s interest would be rewarded by a Mickey Mouse measure of devolved Government under the ultimate control of their English enemies. A promise England had no intention of honouring.
So far as I know the Irish Catholic hierarchy was collectively content to trust the pact between John Redmond and John Bull. But Bishop O’Dwyer was driven to denounce it strongly by events in Liverpoo, in a letter to the Munster News in 1915:
“Sir
The treatment which the poor Irish emigrant lads have received in Liverpool is enough to make any Irishman’s blood boil with anger and indignation. What wrong have they done to receive insult and outrage at the hands of a brutal English mob? They do not want to be forced into the English Army and sent to fight battles in some part of the world. Is not that their right? They are supposed to think they are freemen, but they are made to feel they are prisoners, who may be compelled to lay down their lives for a cause that is not worth ‘three rows of pins’ to them. It is very probable that these poor Connaught peasants know little or nothing of the meaning of the war .Their blood is not stirred by the memories of Kosovo and thy have no burning desire to fight for Servia. They would much more prefer to till their own potato gardens in peace in Connemara. Small nationalities and the wrongs of Belgium and Rheims Cathedral, and all the other cosmopolitan concerns of the Irish Party, but do not get recruits in England, are far too high-flying for uneducated peasants, and it seems a cruel wrong to attack them because they cannot rise to the disinterested Imperialism of Mr.T.P. O’Connor and the rest of the New Brigade.
But for all the shame and humiliation of this disgraceful episode, what angers one most is that there is no one’ not even one of their own countrymen, to stand up and defend them. Their crime is that they are not ready to die for England. Why should they? What have they or their forebears ever got from England that they should die for her? Mr Redmond will say a Home Rule Act on the Statute Book. But any intelligent Irishman will say a simulacrum of Home Rule, with an express notice that it is never to come into operation. This war may be just or unjust, but any fair-minded man will admit that it is England’s war, not Ireland’s. When it is over, if England wins she will be a dominant power in the world, and her manufactures and commerce will increase by leaps and bounds. Win or lose, Ireland will go on in her own round of misgovernment, intensified by a grinding poverty which will make life intolerable. Yet the poor fellows who do not see the advantage of dying for such a cause are to be insulted as “shirkers” and “cowards” and the men they have raised to power and influence have not one word to say on their behalf. If there is to be conscription, let it be enforced all round; but it seems to be the very intensity of injustice to leave English shirkers by the millions to go free, and to coerce the small remnant of the Irish race into a war they do not understand, and which, if it is right or wrong, has but a secondary interest to them.
I am , dear Sir, your obedient servant.
Edward Thomas O’Dwyer
Bishop of Limerick
November 10 1915
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