As a contribution to the Decade of Remembrance I sent the piece below to THE IRISH EXAMINER, which it was kind enough to publish on 28 December 2013 (my 72nd Birthday.)
Two of my Mother’s 4 brothers served in the British Forces in that conflict.. Jack, aged 16 was wounded serving on HMS Princess Royal in May 1916 off Jutland, and Ned was gassed in Flanders during the great German counter offensive in Spring 1918. They were in and out of hospital frequently until their deaths in their early 60s in 1963.
“Although the most celebrated recruiting posters in World War 1 feature the Listowel -born Herbert Kitchener, it appears they didn’t feature prominently in Kerry or Ireland generally, and it seems Kitchener did not regard the Irish as his country men and 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 to have been widely featured on the posters.
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 postcard risked giving Schmaltz 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 in College Green. The gossoons were surely on more than one promise. All they had to do was fight the Central Powers and they would return to claim the colleens and Ireland would have her own parliament.
When the Central Powers were beaten and a saluting base was erected by the old Parliament and on 11 November 1919 there trundled past it a phalanx of British Tanks, as hard and cold 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.
But that was long ago. Can anyone now living remember seeing British Armour on Irish Streets?
Can the Chair of Any History Faculty in Ireland even imagine it?
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