Session 3: Battlefronts
Chair: Dr Adrian Gregory (Pembroke College, Oxford)

This talk examined two battle fronts experienced by Irish regiments during the Great War and the ways in which those very different realms of armed conflict have been given significance or else diminished within Irish public remembrance.
There was an account of the experience of the 36th Ulster Division on the Western Front, in particular the encounter of this unit with the enemy at the Battle of the Somme. Then there was an account of the experiences of the 10th Irish Division in the Eastern Mediterranean theatre of war, especially when fighting at Gallipoli. Both units suffered terrible losses and tens of thousands of Irishmen fought in their ranks. Reasons were given why the 36th’s battle-front experiences have become ever more emblematically powerful within Unionist consciousness while the experiences of the 10th Division remained somewhat in the shadows within Irish public memory, both north and south, even in a time of renewed interest in the Great War.

The commemorative fate of these Great War battlefronts and those who served there were seen as ultimately determined by a range of salient geopolitical factors, both in Ireland and further afield. The talk concluded by arguing that the process of trying to retrieve the story of the 10th Division’s battlefront experiences involved the kind of morally and politically complex negotiations that are needed as we handle the events of the second decade of the 20th century.

Prof Eunan O’Halpin (Trinity College Dublin)
The Missing Dead of Ireland, 1919-1921

The First World War occasioned concerted and long-sustained efforts by the western belligerents to catalogue and to honour the fallen. There was an explicit compact with the servicemen and their families to identify, to locate and where possible to re-inter and honour those who died in arms. This required a considerable degree of practical cooperation between belligerents even during the war, and in the succeeding years.

The Irish War of Independence presents something of a contrast.

This paper discussed attempts to locate and recover the bodies of persons missing and believed killed during the War of Independence and its immediate aftermath. Because of the nature of the conflict, this was almost entirely a matter of attempts by relatives to determine the fate and/or to locate the remains of policemen, soldiers or civilians believed killed by the IRA – in only a few instances did Crown forces attempt to dispose of or hide the remains of people whom they had killed illegally, and such efforts always proved fruitless.

The paper also discussed a related matter. This is the phenomenon of people who were killed and whose graves were never disclosed. These were most likely British army deserters or suspected spies, of whom various IRA units claimed to have killed a number in 1920-1 and to have disposed of the bodies. The available records indicate that, while at headquarters level there was a willingness to cooperate with requests from the British government and from families for information and assisance, in many instances the local IRA and their supporters were unwilling to say where the remains of their victims lay or even to confirm their deaths.

These matters have a contemporary resonance. As part of the Northern Ireland peace process, the IRA is committed to assisting in the search for seventeen missing individuals whom it killed during the Troubles. Despite years of negotiation and a great many painstaking searches, only nine of these bodies have so far been recovered.

To be continued