First World War

First World War (1914–18). At the beginning of the war the threat of civil conflict in the summer of 1914 was defused when both John Redmond and Edward Carson pledged their respective followers to support the British imperial war effort. Redmond's call to nationalists to support gallant (and Catholic) ‘little Belgium’ was rejected only by a small minority of the Irish Volunteers. Many thousands of Volunteers joined the two predominantly Catholic and nationalist Irish divisions: the 10th and the 16th. In the north, 30,000 UVF men joined up virtually en masse to form the 36th (Ulster) Division. After an initial surge at the start of the war, enlistments fell off sharply, though Irishmen continued to join up until the very end—almost 10,000 men, for example, in the last three months of the conflict. Although Protestants recruited in greater numbers proportionately than Catholics, men—Catholics and Protestants—in industrialized Ulster as a whole were more likely to enlist than those from the rest of Ireland. Urban areas returned more soldiers than rural, and the poorest recruiting area was Mayo. In all some 206,000 men from Ireland served during the war, of whom about 30,000 died. Even taking into account the very many emigrant Irish who joined up in England and elsewhere estimates of up to 500,000 Irish recruits are grossly inflated.

The most enduring legacy of the Irish military involvement in the war came from the Ulster Division's part in the battle of the Somme, which began on 1 July 1916. In the first two days of the battle the division suffered over 5,000 casualties, a ‘blood sacrifice’ which came to represent for unionists a conclusive demonstration of Ulster's unshakeable loyalty to the Union. The 16th (Irish) Division also fought on the Somme, though not until September 1916, and both divisions remained on the western front in France for the remainder of the war. The 10th Division saw action at Gallipoli, where it sufferd heavy losses at Suvla Bay (August 1915), and later went on to serve in Salonika and Palestine.

At home the First World War provided the opportunity for the republican rising of 1916, as well as a suitably violent model for political action. Wartime pressures also help to explain the draconian government response to the rising, which contributed to the subsequent emergence of Sinn Féin. When, in response to a manpower crisis on the western front, London threatened to impose conscription on Ireland in 1918, a broad popular coalition of nationalists and the Catholic church combined to resist it. In doing so Sinn Féin emerged as the leading nationalist political party. The war in general stimulated the Irish economy. There was a heightened demand for agricultural products—food for troops and forage for animals—which brought considerable prosperity to the farming community, and in turn contributed to the relative unwillingness of young men in rural areas to enlist. The textile industry in the north was kept busy supplying military needs, as were shipbuilding and engineering concerns. Activity in some luxury trades and ‘non‐essential’ Irish industries, such as brewing and distilling, fell away during the war. The absence of conscription in Ireland meant that a large pool of male labour remained available throughout and that, unlike in Great Britain, comparatively few women were drawn into general employment. Some females, nevertheless, found jobs in Belfast engineering works, and there was increased employment in the textile sector and in more traditional female occupations such as nursing.

Bibliography

Bartlett, T., and Jeffery, K. (eds.), A Military History of Ireland (1996)

Keith Jeffery