The Disparity of Sacrifice: Irish Recruitment to the British Armed Forces, 1914-1918
During the First World War approximately 210,000 Irish men and a much smaller, but significant, number of Irish women served in the British armed forces. All were volunteers and a very high proportion were from Catholic and Nationalist communities. This book is the first comprehensive analysis of Irish recruitment between 1914 and 1918 for the island of Ireland as a whole. It makes extensive use of previously neglected internal British army recruiting returns held at The National Archives, Kew, along with other valuable archival and newspaper sources. There has been a tendency to discount the importance of political factors in Irish recruitment, but this book demonstrates that recruitment campaigns organised under the auspices of the Irish National Volunteers and Ulster Volunteer Force were the earliest and some of the most effective campaigns run throughout the war.
Timothy Bowman (School of History, University of Kent (United Kingdom)); William Butler (School of History, University of Kent (United Kingdom)); Michael Wheatley
- Liverpool University Press
- 9781802077858
- 312 pages
- €40.24
- Paperback
- United Kingdom
- First World War
