Irish in the British Armed Forces

Since partition in the early 1920s, Irish citizens from what is now the Republic of Ireland have continued to have the right to serve in the British Army, reaching its highest levels since the Second World War in the 1940s.

As far back as the High Middle Ages, following the Norman invasion of Ireland, some Gaels acted as mercenary ceithearnach recruited by Anglo-Norman lords to fight in their various feudal campaigns.

In his work on the Hundred Years' War, Desmond Seward mentions that the Earl of Ormond had raised Irish kern and Gallowglass to fight for Henry V Plantagenet, King of England, where they were present at the 1418 Siege of Rouen.

This was as part of the Lambert Simnel campaign, where the leading Yorkist figure the Earl of Lincoln was able to rise 5,000 Irish kerns, through his contacts with the FitzGerald family.

Figures such as Anthony St. Leger and Thomas Wolsey, as well as Henry VIII Tudor himself, favoured an assimilationist policy for Ireland of surrender and regrant, whereby the Gaelic Irish leaders would be brought into alliance with the English Crown, securing their lands on the condition of abandoning their customs.

[2] There was no standing army and so during this early period of Tudor Ireland, commissions and military matters were under the administration of a local county High Sheriff (often of Gaelic Irish or Old English stock).

A harsher and more aggressive policy under his offspring—Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I—whereby martial law would be implemented and New English settlers brought into the country to administrate military matters, made participation with crown forces more disreputable.

Many of the local Gaelic Irish and Old English were displaced from positions of power and previously friendly persons such as James FitzMaurice FitzGerald and Fiach Mac Aodha Ó Broin rose up in military revolt.

Due to the English having financial problems, James I Stuart offered a pardon to the participants of Tyrone's Rebellion along the lines of surrender and regrant in 1603, but neither side fully trusted the other.

These leaders of Ulster Gaeldom fled with the Flight of the Earls in 1607 in the hopes of militarily retaking their lands with the assistance of Spain (a goal which had little practical chance of success, due to the Treaty of London).

After the rebellion failed, in the same year, James I instigated the Plantation of Ulster, bringing in Scottish and English Protestants to be settled on confiscated Gaelic lands.

Irish Catholics were extremely hostile to the plantations and the confiscation of their land it entailed; bardic poets such as Lochlann Óg Ó Dálaigh captured the popular sentiment towards them in a poem: "Where have the Gaels gone?

The United Irishmen was created by radical liberals of Protestant background, such as Wolfe Tone, Edward FitzGerald and Henry Joy McCracken.

[10] Lord Castlereagh also secretly adopted a policy of supporting the newly formed Orange Order (successors of the Peep o' Day Boys) in Ulster, to dissuade Presbyterian United Irish membership.

[10] Despite the large number of deaths in the United Irish conflict, Irishmen; Catholic and Protestant; flocked to join the British Army and the Royal Navy with the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte in Europe.

"[14] At the other famous British victory of the Napoleonic Age a decade earlier; the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805; around a quarter of the Royal Navy crew present (3,573 people) were Irishmen.

Within the context of Ossianic romanticism, the writer Walter Scott had taken some of the Philo-Gaelic ideals of James Macpherson and produced a "British Isles nationalism" for the 19th century Victorian Age, within which Gaelic cultural motifs had something of a place (critics deride this tendency as "Balmoralism").

[22][23] The Troubles and the following Operation Banner taking place in Northern Ireland from 1969 to 2006 marked a new phase in the relationship between Irish people and the British Armed Forces.

Initially, the Irish nationalist community (which was mainly Catholic) in the North were glad that the British Army had been deployed with a remit to halt communal violence from Ulster loyalists.

Most of the Catholic community did not trust the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) to be impartial, due to perceptions of sectarian biases and the Irish Republican Army had stockpiled weapons, ostensibly to "defend their areas."

[24] The Scottish regiments which were deployed, such as the Black Watch, were perceived by Irish nationalists as being particularly sympathetic to Orangism and Ulster loyalism, due in part to a similar socio-political culture of sectarianism in Scotland.

Thousands of Irish people, mostly Ulster Protestants, have continued to find employment in all branches of the British Armed Forces and this trend has been increasing in recent years, especially since the economic implosion of the Celtic Tiger in 2008.

[33] This propensity for Irish servicemen to win a disproportionate amount of Victoria Crosses received satirical treatment from Dublin playwright George Bernard Shaw in his 1915 play O'Flaherty V.C., A Recruiting Pamphlet.

Within it Shaw tells the story of an Irishman from a nationalist family background who joins the British Army simply to escape the hum-drum existence of home life and to seek out adventure abroad.

Despite being a monument to people who fought in the British Army, it received cross-party support, partly because the likes of Major General William Hickie had been Home Rulers.

A number of men who later became prominent Irish republican militants had at some point served in the British Army, this includes; James Connolly, Tom Barry, Martin Doyle (a Victoria Cross winner), Emmet Dalton, Erskine Childers and in more recent times John Joe McGee.

Some of the best known of these include; Join the British Army, The Recruiting Sergeant, Foggy Dew, Come Out Ye Black and Tans, Who Is Ireland's Enemy?, Go On Home, among others.

'Twas England bade our Wild Geese go, that "small nations might be free",But their lonely graves are by Suvla's waves on the fringe of the great North Sea.

Thirteen years after its creation, the GAA enacted Rule 21 in 1897, which banned all members of the British Armed Forces and the police from participation; both in Ireland and Great Britain itself.

[43][44] Towards the end of the 17th century, a number of regiments began to develop which swore allegiance to the British interest; most of these derive from the Williamite War in Ireland.