A time of confusion and conflict in Irish history

Country Living with Francis Farragher

IT has taken a long time – at least a few generations and the best part of a century – for this country to acknowledge and commemorate the loss of life, the blood spilt and the devastation of families brought about by the Great War of 1914 to 1918. As another Armistice Day passed on Sunday last (November 11), there is a growing appreciation of what thousands of young Irishmen went through on the trenches of Europe for the so-called defence of small nations.

An estimated 200,000 soldiers from Ireland, North and South, fought in the Great War with total casualties estimated to be in the 35,000 to 50,000 bracket but for the ones who came home in the Winter of 1918, they arrived back to a totally different country to the one they had left in the years previous to the 1916 Rising.

So, imagine the scenario for a young Irish soldier returning after surviving years of hell in the rat infested and drenched trenches of Europe expecting to come home to a hero’s welcome after the defeat of the so-called imperialistic Germans.

But everything had changed in Ireland over the course of the first World War. Instead of being seen as men who had rallied to the cause of defending small nations, the returning soldiers were now regarded as enemies of nationalism and as symbols of British imperialism.

Some of the ex-British soldiers like Tom Barry went down the road of utilising their military skills for the cause of the Republican movement but there were others too, who joined the Black-and-Tans and were tarred with the brush of atrocity for crimes against the Irish people.

That legacy of hate, bitterness and division meant that for generations, there was always a reluctance to celebrate or commemorate Armistice Day in Ireland.

Wearing the poppy would still be something of an anathema to many Irish people as most clearly shown in recent times by the refusal of Irish and Stoke soccer player James McClean to adhere to the custom: his ‘abstinence’ caused a huge outcry even amongst his home fans in the Midlands city so the divisions from the Great War do still live on.

As a young child of the 1960s, I would often hear little stories of local ‘old soldiers’ who had fought in the Great War, but there were spoken of in slightly hushed tones. They were regarded as different, as not being really part of the local community, and as children, we often wondered what they had done wrong to earn this kind of semi-isolation status.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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