In the course of the Great War many more men than those who actually died in the conflict suffered horrible degrees of injury. These ranged from life changing debilitating wounds and bodily part losses to that mental destruction known generally as ‘shell shock’. In all cases few came back from the war fronts of land or sea unscarred in some way. Following the foundation of the Irish Free State and a shift in historical emphasis most of the casualties, fatal and living survivors of the Great War were banished from the national historical record as if this catastrophic event had never occurred, all victims of official selective history. Why should this be? In the decades since 1921 participants in both the World Wars were subject to harsh criticism as to their motives, especially for their participation in the British Army and Royal Navy. What is to be remembered however, whatever we may now think, is that in the case of the 1914-18 Great War the reality was Ireland was an integral part of the United Kingdom, indeed until well after the 1916 Rebellion the overwhelming national sentiment was for Irishmen to fight Germans for the perceived preservation of Irish cultural and social values. The independence of small nations like Belgium too was also an important motivation and most persons in Ireland believed it was in Ireland’s best interests to support its freedom from German invasion. Following the third reading in Parliament of the Ireland Home Rule Bill the country was on the cusp of independent nationhood just like ‘gallant little Belgium’. It was believed that participation in the war would copper fasten 32 county Home Rule making England morally obliged to implement the Home Rule Bill without delay. However as it turned out Ireland’s volunteers into the army and navy, and it should be emphasised they were all volunteers, were victims of events beyond their ability to influence or control.

With the benefit of hindsight to history and current morality it was and is perhaps unjust and dishonest for contemporary society to pass judgement on why those who fought in the Great War and its bastard child the Second World War to act as they did and not to foresee the political and social future of their time. It also provokes the question for our society of who really knows what attitude any critical person alive now would have done if confronted by the choices of 1914 when nurtured in the attitudes of that time or as in 1939 in a Europe dominated by Nazism?. It is perhaps incumbent for our generation to put aside judgment and admonishment based on modern values and attitude and to remember the fallen of the Great War, now forgotten souls of our community, but once persons of flesh and blood who in the past walked our streets, socialised with our immediate ancestors, lived cheek by jowl with their neighbours and who lived unfulfilled life spans cut down by conflict or lost to the sea. Ireland has now matured and moved on and the greatest tribute to their memory for the centenary of the Great War and after is that these lost ones, whose graves are ‘Known only to God’, be reinstated back into the collective memory both on a national and local level.

© Pat Power November 2018