3 – Irish at the Somme
If the contributions of the Anzacs at Gallipoli has gone down in history as the moment at which Australia and New Zealand became nations, the same could not be said for the Irish at the Somme. In fact, the Irish soldiers of the Somme went all but forgotten for nearly a hundred years in their own nation.
The role of Ireland in the First World War is very complex, made even more so by the contemporaneous uprising against British rule and subsequent War of Independence that resulting in separation from the United Kingdom in 1922. When the war began, Ireland was part of the United Kingdom with representation in the parliament. Volunteers joined as gamely as anywhere else in the UK, and support for the war was consistent across both those who wanted independence and those who wished to remain British.
In 1916, however, the Easter Rising against British rule began and was swiftly and brutally put down by the authorities. While many had not supported the Rising – believing it ill-timed when many other Irishmen were away at war – the manner in which the participants were dealt with turned many against the British: the leaders were executed, thousands were interned and atrocities were committed across the island by British forces against those perceived as Republican sympathizers.
By the introduction of conscription in 1918, public opinion had changed drastically against the British. The Rising and its aftermath had had an effect, but so had the horrors that returned from Europe with the wounded soldiers. Irish regiments had been sent everywhere that British ones had gone, with particular losses suffered at the Somme: the 36th Ulster Division, formed from Protestants in the north of Ireland, lost 2,000 men on the first day of the battle alone.
While many nationalists would forego the memory of the Irishmen who died fighting for Britain in the First World War, the Unionist community in the North would form an identity around them, casting themselves as the British subjects who showed the utmost loyalty to the Crown while their Irish comrades further south rebelled against it.
The total casualties of Irishmen fighting for Britain in the First World War is estimated at around 35,000. Thousands more died in American units, representing the land to which they had earlier emigrated. After the war, the 100,000 veterans returned to a nation that WB Yeats described as “changed, changed utterly”. A further 70-80,000 chose not to return at all, fearing that the change of atmosphere and unfavourable economic conditions that had followed the Rising would leave them vulnerable.
The mood was expressed by the the folk song The Foggy Dew, written in 1919. The idea of joining the British in the war to help Belgium is skewered by the line: ‘”Twas England bade our wild geese go, that “small nations might be free”; Their lonely graves are by Suvla’s waves or the fringe of the great North Sea.”, referring the huge casualties at Suvla Bay in the Dardanelles and the Somme. It sums up the feeling held by many Irish at the end of the war: “Twas better to die ‘neath an Irish sky than at Suvla or Sud-El-Bar”.
Many of the returnees joined the police or stayed in the British Army, while others were shunned by newly nationalistic Ireland for having sworn an oath of allegiance to the British crown. In the War of Independence that followed, they fought other Irishmen. When independence came, the new authorities were more inclined to commemorate those who died fighting for the Republic above those who fought for Britain. Attempts to hold ceremonies were often marked by rioting between nationalists and unionists and the national memorial was built well away from Dublin city centre in Islandbridge. The first official, state-sanction commemoration came only in 2006, where the beginning of the Battle of the Somme was marked by the President and Prime Minister.