Thomas Michael Kettle (9 February 1880 – 9 September 1916) was an Irish economist, journalist, barrister, writer, war poet, soldier and Home Rule politician.

He joined the Irish Volunteers in 1913, then on the outbreak of World War I in 1914 enlisted for service in the British Army, with which he was killed in action on the Western Front in the Autumn of 1916.

He was a much admired old comrade of James Joyce,[1] who considered him to be his best friend in Ireland,[2] as well as the likes of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, Oliver St. John Gogarty and Robert Wilson Lynd.

He was one of the leading figures of the generation who at the turn of the twentieth century gave new intellectual life to Irish party politics, and to the constitutional movement towards All-Ireland Home Rule.

Andrew Kettle influenced his son considerably through his political activities, having been involved from an early age in the constitutional movement to achieve Home Rule.

[9] Tom Kettle distributed pro-Boer leaflets during the early months of the South African Second Boer War, and protested against the Irish Literary Theatre production of Yeats' The Countess Cathleen in 1899 over its irreligious story of an unlikely kind-hearted aristocrat who sells her soul to save her tenants.

The paper pursued an extreme pro-Irish Party line, at the same time reflecting Kettle's liberal and often controversial views on a wide range of topics, education, women's rights, the Irish Literary Revival.

He won the seat by a narrow majority of 18 votes, becoming one of the few young men to gain admission to the aging Irish Party in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, during the first two decades of the twentieth century.

Even though out of parliament he remained an active IPP member publishing a number of essays reiterating his support for attaining Home Rule by constitutional means.

In July 1914 he left Dublin and travelled to Belgium on behalf of the Irish Volunteers seeking to purchase rifles and ammunition for the organization's armoury.

Travelling throughout Flanders in August and September 1914, he became increasingly alarmed by the punitive measures that he witnessed being implemented against the Belgian civilian population by the Imperial German Army against even the lightest civil resistance to the passage of its troop columns moving through that country heading into France.

On arrival back home he sided with the National Volunteers in a split within the Irish Volunteers nationalist militia's ranks between those for whom Irish independence was all, and were increasingly eying the possibility an armed confrontation with the British Government (with the threat of an armed insurrection against Irish Nationalism from Ulster having abated with the Ulster Volunteers having enlisted en masse into the British Army to fight in World War I), and those who followed John Redmond's constitutional lead in accepting the Government of the United Kingdom's public undertaking of a restoration of self-government to Ireland in its domestic affairs, temporarily deferred until the war's end, and who were also concerned about matters beyond Ireland's shores with Europe's future in the 20th Century now being decided.

He asserted that "Having broken like an armed burglar into Belgium, Germany was thereby guilty of a systematic campaign of murder, pillage, outrage, and destruction, planned and ordered by her military and intellectual leaders.

"[17] By 1916 Kettle had published more than ten books and pamphlets, contributed numerous articles to journals and newspapers on Irish politics, literary reviews, poetry and essays, philosophical treatises and translations from German and French.

Although at times melancholy at the war's immense escalating intensity across Europe, consuming ever more men and causing destruction to its nations, he continued to apply to be sent to the Western Front on active service, until, with his health somewhat improved, he received a commission into the 9th Battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, amidst the 16th (Irish) Division, which in early 1916 he went to France with, serving alongside Emmet Dalton, a 19-year-old subaltern, whose family Kettle had known and frequented the Dublin home of pre-war.

[18][19] The conditions in the trenches of the Western Front broke his health again, and he returned to Dublin shortly after the failure of the abortive Easter Revolution on sick leave, seeing the wreckage of the city's centre caused by the fighting that had occurred there.

"[24] Kettle was killed in action with 'B' Company of the 9th Battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers in an attack on German lines on 9 September 1916, near the village of Ginchy during the Battle of the Somme.

[27] The erection of a commemorative bronze bust of Kettle in Dublin, commissioned from the sculptor Albert Power and finished in 1921,[28] was beset for almost twenty years by controversy and bureaucratic obstruction due to the antipathy of the State authorities post-Independence towards Irishmen who had fought in World War I.

[31][32] A further act of commemoration came with the unveiling in 1932 of a manuscript-style illuminated book of remembrance for the House of Commons, which includes a short biographical account of the life and death of Kettle.

Notable recipients include Professor Joseph Stiglitz, Irish Central Bank Governor Patrick Honohan, and Peter Sutherland, former Director-General of The World Trade Organization.

At the time of his death a tribute to him appeared in the French journal L'Opinion: All parties bowed in sorrow over his grave, for in the last analysis they were all Irish, and they knew that in losing him, whether he was friend or enemy, they had lost a true son of Ireland.

The last lines are an answer to those who criticised Irishmen for fighting in the British Armed Forces saying that they "Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor/But for a dream, born in a herdsman's shed/and for the secret Scripture of the poor.