Ireland and the Great War

Gallagher investigates Catholic responses to the war effort during the global conflict, doing so through a thorough analysis of the home front in Ireland. In this first ever-published social history of Ireland and the Great War, she argues that Catholic Ireland supported the British and Allied war effort, therefore questioning the anti-war picture often projected onto Catholic Ireland and challenging the view that the Great War was not Ireland’s war. In this, she distances herself from Charles Townshend (and many other historians) who contended that the Irish had adopted a ‘mental neutrality’ during the conflict (Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion. London: Penguin Books, 2005). The book opens (Chapters 1 and 2) with a concise historiographical account of how Irish (and British) narratives have engaged with Irish society in its relation to the Great War. Gallagher signals that vocal anti-recruiting activities of advanced nationalists during the conflict, coupled with the outcome of the 1918 general elections, were (wrongly) seen as evidence that Catholic Ireland had not supported the war effort. Chapter 3 illustrates how Catholic and Protestant middle-class women mobilized and organized war-relief associations on the home front. From knitting socks to running support homes, ordinary people took the lead in organizing moral and humanitarian support, cared for injured personnel in local hospitals and volunteered to accommodate Belgium refugees in October 1914. Chapter 4 (certainly the most valuable in the book) powerfully demonstrates that the German naval campaign had a profound impact on Irish life. As Gallagher reveals, the year 1915 is central as the Irish gradually measured the direct consequences of the conflict. Following the sinking of the RMS Lusitania in May 1915 local newspapers printed images of dead passengers washed up on the Irish shores, laid out in their coffins, thus heightening the visibility of the conflict in Ireland. (On this point, it must be stressed that the incorporation of a series of harrowing photographs greatly contributes to the reader’s visualization of what local populations knew about this dramatic event.) This, with the loss of the 10th Division at Gallipoli during the summer 1915, heavily contributed to the portrayal of Germany as ‘a menace that had to be defeated’ (p. 90), while boosting support for the Allies. In Chapter 5, Gallagher shows that in the minds of diasporic nationalist communities living in the British Dominions the conviction that Germany was threatening civil liberties was a sufficient incentive to convince them of Britain’s jus ad bellum and spur them to ‘rally the Empire’s defence’ (p. 105). Chapter 6 highlights that in Ireland people from all social and religious backgrounds supported the Allied war effort from August 1914 onwards through humanitarian initiatives, fundraising and a general moral support

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