This book offers a fresh perspective on Irish military history by examining the continuing appeal of the British armed forces after the foundation of the Irish Free State, and by concentrating on commissioned officers. Despite the title, officers from Northern Ireland only occasionally appear by way of comparison, leaving unresolved the degree to which Home Rule weakened the imperial connection (as suggested by the Northern Ireland state’s low wartime enlistment rates). The focus on officers is not always consistent, and the interesting final chapter on responses to British servicemen and recruitment in southern Ireland relates almost entirely to the rank and file. O’Connor exhibits little interest in the military experience and performance of Irish officers, even during the Second World War. His primary concerns, explored in successive chapters, are with the social profile of officers commissioned before and during that war; the importance of family military traditions (particularly as exhibited in the Great War); the persistent encouragement provided by élite Catholic as well as Protestant schools in the Free State; and the particular appeal of the Royal Army Medical Corps.
O’Connor takes pains to demonstrate the ecumenical attraction of the officer corps, the widespread acceptance in the Free State of service in the British forces despite the rhetoric of republican politicians, and the failure of Éire’s neutrality to restrict intake of Irish officers after 1939. He seems surprised by the magnitude of pre-war intake, even though the Free State’s dominion status raised no constitutional impediment to service in the forces of the monarch. Fianna Fáil, though often deploring British enlistment, took no legal steps to restrict it until 1939, when flaunting uniforms other than those of the state forces was banned under the Emergency Powers Act. O’Connor concludes that ‘ultimately it was 1945 rather than 1922 that represented a significant break with the British military connection’ (p. 188). This speculation, unsupported by evidence, will surely provoke some future scholar to document the extent to which the southern Irish have continued ever since to join the British military forces. O’Connor’s analysis is based on quite a wide variety of primary sources, including official archives of both governments, published and unpublished memoirs, about forty interviews of which eight were conducted by himself, and a good range of newspapers and periodicals, including several school magazines. This approach yields many interesting passages of personal testimony, illuminating the motives of those who sought commissions (often high-minded), and the degree to which they encountered national or sectarian discrimination or sneers when serving (seldom). These extracts are clearly presented with sufficient personal context but without excessive clutter.
Biographical information on about a thousand officers has been assembled as a database, often providing information on essential attributes such as birthplace, age, religion, father’s occupation, schooling, and military career. Unfortunately, this database has been misapplied to simulate a social profile of all Irish officers, as if it were a ‘sample’ of the total number commissioned between 1922 and 1945 (estimated, on very flimsy evidence, as 8,250). Like many recent students of the Irish ‘contribution’ to British military enterprises (so evident in local ‘rolls of honour’ for the Great War), O’Connor is understandably eager to maximise his ‘sample’ by including those born elsewhere of ‘Irish parents’, but mainly reared in southern Ireland (oddly including boys at British boarding schools who may have had Irish exposure during vacations). His laudable ecumenical impulse leads to ‘augmenting my sample’ through consultation of further Catholic school magazines, and to the late addition of Wesley College ‘to ensure a balanced representation of the two groups’ (pp 192–3). The outcome is a mixum-gatherum of diverse lists, selected for their accessibility and specification of nationality, which should not be regarded as even vaguely representative of the entire officer intake.
Little confidence, therefore, should be placed in O’Connor’s striking statistical findings.
These suggest that two-fifths of the officers were commissioned before the war; that the Catholic component exceeded one-third (rising after 1939, with higher proportions in the army than the navy); that the proportion with military fathers fell from two-fifths (1922–39) to one-quarter in wartime; that the proportion fathered by shopkeepers, tradesmen, and labourers trebled to 18 per cent; that over half attended boarding schools; and that one-third of the officers came from Dublin. These findings provide a useful epitome of O’Connor’s subjects, but not of Irish officers in general. Most proportions are crucially influenced by the selection of sources. The Catholic component would have been smaller but for the omission of Protestant schools with relevant records such as King’s Hospital, and (inexplicably) of Trinity College. If O’Connor had followed Nick Perry’s example by extracting references to military service in sources such as Burke’s Peerage, Landed gentry of Ireland, and Irish family records, the enduring influence of the ‘Anglo-Irish’ military tradition would have seemed even stronger.
In the absence of available officers’ service records for those commissioned after 1918, it is admittedly impossible to compile a thorough database for all officers born in Ireland, let alone those of multiple nationality such as most members of ‘Anglo-Irish’ families. Under these circumstances, it would have been wiser to confine statistical analysis to systematic subsets such as all officers of Irish birth in the army’s roll of honour (1939–45), or the 216 officers listed in a widely distributed propagandist bulletin entitled, Volunteers from Eire who have won distinctions serving with the British forces. These names, after collation with O’Connor’s other sources, would have yielded genuine samples permitting far more reliable estimates of the distribution of officers’ nativity, religion, parentage, and education. Let us hope that O’Connor will complement this work by extracting and publishing a rigorous statistical analysis of these and other subsets of his database. Meanwhile, his book should be welcomed as an original and imaginatively documented exploration of a neglected strand in Ireland’s military past.
