Dr Martin ManserghMartin Mansergh examines Irish attitudes to an ‘imperialist war’ that divided lives and changed the world forever.
Each year, on the Sunday closest to November 11, Armistice Day, when World War I ended in 1918, church services and ceremonies at war memorials are held to remember our fellow-countrymen who fell tragically in the prime of their youth. In Ireland, the tradition, though often low-key in the Republic, has been maintained unbroken in the Protestant churches, often these days with civic and inter-denominational participation.
Though a Mass was held in Dublin’s pro-cathedral in 2014 to mark the centenary of the outbreak of war, and all churches and religious groups participate in the National Day of Commemoration at Kilmainham, on the Sunday closest to the anniversary of the War of Independence truce on July 11, 1921, it would be fair to say that the Catholic Church has been more reticent about involvement in world war commemoration. This is so, even though the majority who fought in World War I from what is now the Republic were Catholic.
The historical reasons for the different attitudes of the Churches are well known. Protestants in Northern Ireland identify with Britain, and regard their sacrifices, particularly at the battle of the Somme, as a vindication of the Union. In the Republic, past British military service is regarded as part of the Irish Protestant tradition, albeit one of the factors that decimated their numbers between 1911 and 1926.
Aberration
For most Catholics, participation in World War I was long seen as a politically-led aberration, for which John Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, was largely blamed. It was rejected by Sinn Féin, and the attempt by the British to introduce conscription in 1918 successfully resisted by the Church and a united nationalist political front was one catalyst that led to a sweeping mandate for independence in the 1918 General Election.
While ex-servicemen were a significant presence in the inter-war years and not as rejected as is sometimes made out, later they were dismissed as unfortunate dupes, and certainly not as deserving of public approbation as those who fought for Irish freedom.
Since the mid-1980s, public attitudes have become more nuanced.
The Enniskillen bomb, which detonated during a ceremony at the war memorial killing 11 people, including Gordon Wilson’s daughter Marie, was deeply shocking, not least because of the poisonous hatred shown in targeting it. Initiatives were taken to restore the magnificent Lutyens-designed Irish War Memorial Gardens in Islandbridge and build on a cross-community basis the Messines Round Tower, opened jointly by President Mary McAleese, Queen Elizabeth II and Albert II, King of the Belgians in 1998.
In 2006, for the first time, the State commemorated the battle of the Somme on its 90th anniversary, and has since been represented at many war commemorations. Today, Irish people, regardless of background or party, willingly acknowledge relatives that fought and died in World War I.
It would be wrong to conclude that this aspect of our past has now become quite unproblematic. World War I was the first part of a European catastrophe that engulfed the world, only ending in 1945, having caused tens of millions of deaths and untold suffering.
An Australian historian, Christopher Clark, has called a book on the events and rivalries leading to the war, Sleepwalkers, with few statesmen having any inkling of the scale of the disaster to follow.
No one country was solely to blame, and indeed a lot of countries had been playing with fire. At the outset, there was much popular enthusiasm for the war, amidst a widespread belief that it would lead to moral regeneration. John Redmond committed nationalist Ireland to the war, believing that it would copper-fasten Home Rule, and more naively that fighting in the same cause would reconcile unionists to it.
Many Irish separatists welcomed the opportunity for a rising created by the war, so that Irish independence could be put on the negotiating table. If at first this was allied to hopes of a German victory, the decisive American intervention in the later stages of the war and the effective endorsement by President Wilson of the principle of national self-determination, even if he did not mean that to apply to Ireland, created a favourable international context for the eventual achievement of independence.
As an independent country, the Irish State managed to remain out of World War II, although a friendly neutral to the Allies to an extent not understood till recently. In general, all powers, whether members of an alliance or not, have become very cautious about engaging in anything beyond limited wars, because of the danger in a worst case scenario of nuclear annihilation, which was only narrowly avoided.
Pope Benedict XV tried to stop World War I, which was a war of attrition. Apart from the horrendous loss of life, he was concerned for the survival of the one remaining Catholic power, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Whereas much was made in Ireland about German maltreatment of Catholic Belgium, the Vatican was inclined to believe that Belgians should have allowed the German army to transit their country into France.
In Ireland, Bishop Edward O’Dwyer of Limerick backed the Pope, and criticised Redmond in 1915. In Britain and Germany, politicians and generals determined to win ensured that peace feelers from the Pope and others came to nothing.
Disintegration
What started out as an imperialist war ended with the disintegration of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires. France and Britain were weakened. There was some advance for democracy. It marked the arrival of the US on the world stage. The reshaping of the Middle East carved up by the British and French had disastrous consequences, continuing to the present day. The First World War gave birth to new tyrannies of Communism, and later Fascism and Nazism. There is much to ponder on soberly.
Limited wars in Iraq, Libya and Syria have created far more problems than they have solved, and in commemorating World War I most Irish people who are not unionist do not want to be interpreted as endorsing recent wars.