A chara, - Garret FitzGereld (Irish Times, November 14th) echoed a point implicitly made by much of the recent coverage of the Armistice Day celebrations, namely, that: "in 1914 the Irish people, nationalist as well as unionist, had in fact overwhelmingly supported the allied cause and that Irishmen of both traditions had in fact joined the British army in massive numbers."
However, when one compares Irish participation to that of Britain and the "white" dominions over the entire wartime period, the impression is of relative disengagement from the war effort. After 1918, national and imperial rates of enlistment were officially calculated and it was found that the percentage of the male population (or of the co-called "white" population in the dominions) represented by enlistments was as follows: England, 24 per cent; Scotland, 24 per cent; Wales, 22 per cent; New Zealand, 19 per cent; Australia, 13 per cent; Canada, 13 per cent; South Africa, 11 per cent; Ireland, 6 per cent.
One cannot make direct comparisons because Britain and New Zealand introduced conscription in 1916 and Canada did so in 1917, but based on these figures Keith Jeffrey concluded in his contribution to An Irish Empire: Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire (Manchester, 1996) that "the Irish response over the whole war was low." Even South Africa's "white" population with its large Boer component contributed nearly twice as much manpower, in relative terms, as Ireland.
It is debatable whether this apathetic response was due to nationalist political alienation; the disproportionately heavy recruitment from Protestant Ireland suggests that this may have been a factor, albeit a minor one. More important, perhaps, was the wartime fillip to farm prices which increased the demand for agricultural labour. It is no accident that the response to recruitment in what would become the Free State was strongest among the working classes of the larger cities, who did not enjoy the fruits of this boom.
Whatever the explanation, it would seem that Irish disengagement from the first World War is not simply a fiction propagated by subsequent nationalist myth-making. - Is mise, Patraig Lenihan,
Dept of Government and Society, University of Limerick.