A Different Kind of War: The Great War in Ireland

Although Ireland during the War years was still undivided and part of the United Kingdom, the War experience here differed sharply from that across the Irish Sea. For the Northern Protestants it was the 1916 Battle of the Somme, where thousands of young soldiers from the 36th (Ulster) Division were killed or wounded, that overshadowed all other events and became the basis for a long-lasting patriotic myth, while in the South the independence movement that began soon after the War, triggered off by the unsuccessful 1916 Easter Rising, made the role of Irish soldiers in the British Army in retrospect appear as questionable if not downright treasonable, and for many years to come the wartime allegiance was passed over in silence, except where it was belittled, denigrated or treated with outright contempt. This sharply divided attitude to the Irish share in the war effort is also reflected in Irish drama. It took Irish dramatists, for obvious political reasons, more than 60 years to come to terms with the First World War. 57 To say so is to set aside for the moment those Irish writers who viewed the War in the context of the British situation, as did Desmond, Munro, Ervine, Hoffe, MacGill, and also Shaw in most of his plays, whereas the specific Wartime conditions in Ireland found little recognition in the theatre as elsewhere. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.