By visiting two different national war memorials, the Queen is recognising Ireland's complex relationship to the British army There were Irish soldiers in English armies at Calais and Agincourt in the 14th century The national narrative . . . found no room for those who had donned the British uniform.
MAY I begin with a few details of my family history? In 1915 my grandfather, Thomas Bartlett, a stone-cutter in the employ of Belfast corporation, enlisted in the Royal Garrison Artillery and was posted to the western front. Subsequently injured - family lore has it that he was gassed - he died from his wounds at a Red Cross hospital in Winchester, England, in July 1918. He is commemorated, along with other corporation employees who died fighting for king and country, on a plaque in Belfast City Hall.
In April 1919, his son, my father, also called Thomas Bartlett, joined the IRA as a volunteer in A company, second battalion, Belfast brigade,
3rd northern division. In 1921, he was seriously injured in a "firebug" arson attack on Belfast. Subsequently forced to go "on the run", he was smuggled south to the Curragh military camp, recently vacated by the British army. There he recuperated from his wounds. He then enlisted in the newly formed National Army and served throughout the Civil War as a dispatch rider in the army signal corps.
His brother Charles later became a civilian employee of the British army, and two of Charles's sons became career soldiers in the British army.
All are now dead. The experience of my family cannot be considered unique and, with variations and emphases, has to have been replicated in very many others throughout the island of Ireland.
More than 200,000 Irishmen served in the British armed forces in the Great War, and perhaps 30,000 died. A further 50,000 took on a combat role in the second World War (including about 5,000 men who, seeking combat, deserted from the Irish Army), and very many tens of thousands - men and women - did "war work" in Britain, in factories, on farms and in hospitals. Thousands more had fought in the War of Independence, confronting the British army, and in the ensuing Civil War Irishmen fought one another. It was not unusual for families to be divided in allegiance, nor was it at all unknown for the same person to serve in units that later were opposed to one another.
James Connolly, the Easter Week commander of the Irish Citizen Army, had served as a soldier of the queen in the 1880s, possibly in India and probably in Ireland. Tom Barry, who later distinguished himself as the leader of an IRA flying column in the War of Independence, may have learned his craft (and certainly earned his "mention in dispatches") while serving with the British army in the near east, far east, France and Italy.
Divided loyalties and conflicts of allegiance among the Irish only appear unusual if measured against the apparently serene and unruffled British experience (at least since the English civil war of the 1640s). To put matters in some sort of context, thousands of Poles, willingly or unwillingly, fought for Germany and for Russia in the first World War, and so, too, did thousands of Czechs. The second World War saw many Russians and French on both sides. And in an earlier conflict, the American civil war, the 150th anniversary of which is this year, there were any number of divided families, and very many Irish on both sides.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that the history of Ireland is not, however we might wish it to be otherwise, the story of an untroubled progress towards national independence with a linear progression towards sovereignty, unity and exclusivity.
Irish history has its complexities and no single story can encompass them. Those Irishmen and women who served in the two world wars have until recently received scant official recognition of their participation, much less their sacrifices. The national narrative forged in the fires of Easter Week 1916 and the War of Independence of 1919 to 1921 found no room for those who had donned the British uniform, and it was to be some 70 years after the guns fell silent in November 1918 that their actions began to be commemorated in a public and official manner in the Irish Republic. The wreath-laying by Queen Elizabeth at both the Garden of Remembrance (dedicated to the patriot dead from 1798 to 1921) and the Irish National War Memorial (dedicated to the memory of Irish soldiers killed in all wars) is both a continuance of that process and a recognition of the tangled nature of Ireland's relationship with the British army over the centuries.
The first recorded mention of British soldiers in Ireland comes from the pen of none other than St Patrick, who in cAD450 denounced "bloodthirsty" soldiers led by Coroticus, a British general, for their murderous assault on recently baptised Irish converts to Christianity. Thereafter, for the next 1,000 years and more, it was to be Irish soldiers who were most often described as ferocious, implacable and pitiless as they plied their trade throughout the wars in Ireland and in continental Europe. Thus, there were Irish soldiers on both sides during the English invasion of the 12th century, there were Irish soldiers in the English royal armies at Calais and Agincourt in the 14th century and the German artist Albrecht Dürer depicted Irish warriors in Germany in the 16th century.
These soldiers may have been called Irish, but this has to be regarded as a reference to their geographical origins and to their "style" of warfare (beheading prisoners rather than ransoming them was one attribute) rather than as an expression of their national identity.
With the implementation of the Protestant Reformation and the completion of the English conquest in the 16th century, Irish and Catholic became synonymous with disloyal, at least in the eyes of Protestant England and its government in Dublin Castle. Irish soldiers, on account of their Catholicism, became objects of fear, even terror. The bloody confessional wars of the 1640s and 1650s, and especially the defeat of James II and his followers in the Williamite war, did nothing to alter this perception. From the 1690s, it was against the law to recruit Irishmen into the ranks of the armed forces of the crown. This law applied to Irish Protestants and Presbyterians as well as Catholics: the fears here were that it might damage the "Protestant interest" in Ireland to recruit Irish Protestants (and even that the wily Papists would pass themselves off as Protestants in order to gain admission to the ranks): best therefore to bar all Irish from enlisting. Officially excluded from the British army (and navy), those Catholic Irish who wished to serve as soldiers had little option but to enlist in continental armies, notably those of France, and to a lesser extent Spain and Austria. In all, perhaps 30,000 Irish served in the French royal army up to the 1740s when recruiting into the rank and file began to decline.
The motives of these Irish recruits joining up in foreign armies can be guessed at. For some, loyalty to the Stuart cause was a spur, for many harsh economic necessity was the driver, for others it was a mixture of both, along with a thirst for adventure and camaraderie, that led them to a soldier's life. And yet, it is clear that the ban on Irish recruitment to the British armed forces was very imperfectly observed, with many reports of English recruiting officers, in their desperate attempts to make up their numbers, turning a blind eye to Irish Catholic recruits.
In the 1750s, Irish recruitment to French service had fallen away: and as Britain's overseas empire expanded enormously, Irish recruitment into the British forces rose dramatically. By then, the East India Company's army had very many Irish, and so too had the Royal Marines, the Royal Navy and the Royal Artillery. In the 1790s Irish Catholics were, in effect, conscripted into defending Ireland and Britain against the threat posed by revolutionary France. By the end of the Napoleonic wars, perhaps 200,000 Irish may have served in the British army and navy. During the Crimean War more than 40 per cent of the rank and file of the British army were Irish Catholics, and the first two recipients of the Victoria Cross were Irish servicemen.
The Irish proportion in the British army declined throughout the later 19th century as the ravages of the Great Famine and the resulting mass emigration greatly reduced the Irish population base. However, despite a growing campaign against Irish recruitment led by Maud Gonne and James Connolly ("enlisting in the English army is treason to Ireland") by 1901 Irish soldiers still made up 13.5 per cent of the British army even though they comprised only 12 per cent of the overall population.
The heroic exploits of Irish soldiers in the South African war won them many accolades and honours. Irish soldiers were similarly over-represented in 1914 when the Great War began and Irish recruitment continued at a respectable level throughout that conflict. The Easter Rising of 1916 had no discernible impact on Irish recruiting, which actually increased during 1918.
Following independence in 1921, Irish infantry regiments with a southern base were disbanded. However, military recruiters resisted any attempt to remove the designation "Irish" (and replace it with "Ulster") from all the surviving Irish regiments, lest it hamper future recruitment from independent Ireland to the Irish Fusiliers or the Irish Guards. These regiments continued to recruit from all over Ireland during the interwar period with the proportion of Irish-born in the British army hovering about 6 per cent, though the figures for individual regiments were much higher.
In the late 1950s, for example, the proportion of officers in the Royal Irish Fusiliers with addresses in the Republic of Ireland stood at 25 per cent: the figure for the rank and file was 40 per cent. In recent years, out of a British army of about 110,000 men, some 240 in 2009 and 290 in 2010 were listed as from the Republic of Ireland.
Relationships between Ireland and the British army have not been at all harmonious during the 30-year uprising by Northern Catholics against unionist rule in Northern Ireland. However, apologies by British prime minister David Cameron for Bloody Sunday (Coroticus revisited?) and for the shooting of Majella O'Hare have helped clear the air.
Currently, co-operation between the Irish and British armies is at a very high level. The Irish Army, with its long experience of dealing with bombs or improvised explosive devices, has put its unique expertise at the disposal of the British and other armies serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
One poignant consequence of this co-operation was the attendance by members of the Irish Army in full uniform - a first - at the funeral in Britain of Capt Lisa Head a month ago. She was killed in Afghanistan but had earlier undertaken a training course with Irish Army bomb experts. Their attendance at her funeral mirrored that by members of the Irish Guards in Dublin - again a first - at the funeral of Guardsman Ian Malone, killed in Iraq in 2003. On a happier note, Prince William wore the uniform of the Irish Guards at his wedding last month.
So, would my father, an IRA veteran, or my grandfather, who died a member of the British army, approve of Queen Elizabeth's visit to the two national gardens of remembrance? I have no idea, and I think the answer is unknowable. But we who are living today must command the present and move forward. The visit by Queen Elizabeth to our national sites of mourning helps render the complexities of Irish history just that little bit less complex.
Tom Bartlett is professor of Irish history at the University of Aberdeen. His most recent book is Ireland: A History.