Ireland and the Great War

This book gives a unified picture of Ireland's experience of the First World War.

Keith Jeffery (Author)

9780521292634, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 16 June 2011

224 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.3 cm, 0.34 kg

Review of the hardback: '… important new book … It is the first book on Ireland and the Great War which can meaningfully serve as an undergraduate textbook or a guide to Ireland's experience of the war for the interested general reader … sure to remain the standard work on Ireland and the Great War for many years to come.' War in History

This book explores the impact, both immediate and in its longer historical perspective, of the First World War upon Ireland across the broadest range of experience - nationalist, unionist, Catholic, Protestant - and in civilian social, economic and cultural terms, as well as purely military. Underscoring the work is a belief that the Great War is the single most central experience in twentieth-century Ireland and that the events of the war years, whether at home in Dublin during the Easter Rising or at the European battlefront, constitute a 'seamless robe' of Irish experience. The book also explores cultural responses to the war and its commemoration since 1918, up to the dedication of the Irish 'Peace Tower' in Belgium in November 1998. It argues that identifying and exploring the Irish Great War experience can contribute to the contemporary Irish peace process.

Introduction
1. Obligation: 'Irishmen remember Belgium'
2. Participation: Suvla Bay, the Somme and the Easter Rising: the military experience of the war, abroad and at home
3. Imagination: onlookers in France: Irish cultural responses to the war
4. Commemoration: 'Turning the 11th November into the 12th July': Irish politics and the collective memory of war
Bibliographical essay.

Subject Areas: 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], British & Irish history [HBJD1]