The Irish people served in the British Armed Forces (including the British Army, the Royal Navy, the Royal Air Force and other elements). All of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom from January 1801 to December 1922, and during this time in particular many Irishmen fought in the British Army. Northern Ireland remains within the United Kingdom. Different social classes joined the military for various reasons, including the Anglo-Irish officers who thoroughly wished to support the "mother country", while others, typically poorer Irish Catholics, did so to support their families or seeking adventure.
Many Irishmen and members of the Irish diaspora in Britain and also Ulster-Scots served in both the First World War and the Second World War as part of the British forces. However, since most of Ireland gained independence in 1922 and, in particular, since the outbreak of The Troubles in 1969, the topic of enlistment in the British Armed Forces has been controversial for many Irish people, especially for those from an Irish Catholic background. 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.Number of Irish recruits joining British Army stable again following dissident republican death threats at www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk. Retrieved 13 Nov 2016. On the other hand, serving in the British Armed Forces remains a major tradition in the Ulster Protestant community.
History
Background and earlier contacts
Gaelic kerns fighting under the Normans
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. As various different forces grappled for control of land, some of the Gaelic factions joined with some of the Norman factions fighting side by side, either out of ad hoc self-interest or as a mercenary action. As part of this they fought not only in Ireland, but also in England during the Wars of the Roses and in France during the Hundred Years' War. 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.
During this time, with the exception of the Pale, much of Ireland was outside of the English Crown's direct control, but because of the close location to the Kingdom of England, whichever faction in the Wars of the Roses was currently out of favour; Yorkist or Lancastrian; could find refuge in Ireland, often attempting to raise an armed force. Only one full-scale battle took place in Ireland itself, between Yorkists (FitzGeralds) and Lancastrians (Butlers) at the Battle of Piltown in 1462, where Irish troops fought on both sides. This was part of the Butler–FitzGerald dispute between two of the leading Anglo-Norman families in Ireland. The most notable instance from this period is from the Battle of Stoke Field in 1487. 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.
Tudor military involvement with Ireland
The Tudor-era saw a new stage of military development in Ireland with the creation of the Kingdom of Ireland. 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. 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.
Pre-emptive martial law was introduced by Lord Deputy, the Earl of Sussex in 1556, during the reign of Mary Tudor, while she was colonising the lands of the Ó Mórdha as "Queen's County" and the Ó Conchubhair Fáilghe as "King's County". This allowed for persons suspected of oppositionist tendencies to be executed without trial, as well as against "tax offenders" and the displaced poor. This continued on during the Elizabethan period, with Henry Sidney and William FitzWilliam following suit. 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. Massacres by English forces, such as Rathlin, Clandeboye and Mullaghmast also turned the Irish against trusting the Crown and led to the development of a proto-Irish nationalism. Eventually, by 1585, Elizabeth had been advised to abandon martial law by the Earl of Ormond, Archbishop Adam Loftus and Sir Nicholas White. The works of Richard Beacon and Edmund Spenser encouraged the return of a harsher repression and following this threat, some Gaels such as Aodh Ruadh Ó Domhnaill and Aodh Mór Ó Néill joined rank militarily with Catholic Spain against the Protestant Tudor forces.
Stuart military involvement with Ireland
With the Christian sectarian division now a permanent fixture of Irish society, the Stuart period would see more religion-associated conflicts. 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). A year later, Sir Cathaoir Ó Dochartaigh, a previous supporter of the English forces against Ó Néill, rose up due to ill-treatment and goading at the hands of George Paulet with O'Doherty's Rebellion. 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? We have in their stead an arrogant, impure crowd of foreigners' blood. There are Saxons there and Scotch."
Ireland would have a significant role to play in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Throughout the realms under the Stuart monarchy, sectarian tensions bubbled away as the Crown attempted to erect Episcopalianism as the state religion. For Ireland, the tensions were doubled due to the specter of land-dispossession (continued under the Earl of Stafford) and the push to Anglicisation. Irish Catholics pressed for civil liberties known as The Graces: Stafford said they would be delivered if the Irish helped to suppress the Covenanters in Scotland during the Bishops Wars (enraging the English and Scottish Parliaments). The situation came to a head when the Irish Catholic gentry under Féilim Ó Néill attempted a desperate coup d'état with the Irish Rebellion of 1641. The rebellion was betrayed by spies and Ireland descended into chaos, including sectarian communal violence, until the Irish Confederation was established.
In 1644, in response to the threat of the Confederate Irish; nominally loyal to Charles I Stuart, but independent of the Royalist Army in Ireland; possibly sending troops to aid the embattled Stuart monarch in the English Civil War, the Long Parliament issued an ordinance of "no quarter to the Irish" fighting on English soil. A minority of the 8,000 troops sent by the Duke of Ormonde from Munster to fight for the king were native Irish and so the policy did see some application. The Parliamentarians under Thomas Mytton killed Irish prisoners of war at Shrewsbury in 1645. and Conway Castle in 1646. After the Battle of Naseby over 100 Welsh-speaking women were massacred by the Roundheads, who mistook them for Irish-speakers.
Regimentalisation and modern Army Papists Act 1778, Napoleonic and Victorian-eras
Some of the Penal Laws against Catholics were reversed with the Papists Act 1778, which was passed by the Parliaments of Great Britain and Ireland. This allowed for Catholics to own property, inherit land and join the British Army. The British Army needed soldiers to fight in the contemporary American Revolutionary War and had made some concessions to North American Catholics with the Quebec Act earlier in 1774. Despite ensuing ultra-Protestant riots in Scotland and also the Gordon Riots in London against reversing the ban, many Irish Catholics from this point on would use it as an opportunity for employment. It has been estimated that during the North American conflict, from the British Army 16% of the rank and file and 31% of the COs were Irishmen.. There were Irishmen fighting on both sides; a standout story from the diary of Sergeant Roger Lamb recalls how Patrick Maguire of the 9th Regiment of Foot spotted his own brother fighting on the side of the American Patriots during the Saratoga campaign. In following years, the Irish would swell the ranks to the extent that by 1813 the British Army's total manpower was "1/2 English, 1/6 Scottish and 1/3 Irish.".
In the aftermath of the French Revolution a new period of conflict arose. The United Irishmen was created by radical liberals of Protestant background, such as Wolfe Tone, Edward FitzGerald and Henry Joy McCracken. In collaboration with the French Republic, they sought to set up their own republic in Ireland; appealing to Irish Catholics (particularly elements of the Defenders) to be their sans-culottes. In 1793, the Volunteers was replaced with new government groups; the Militia and the Yeomanry. These latter organisations initially had a higher numbers of Irish Catholic members, and there was a short-lived Catholic Irish Brigade, but as the Irish Rebellion of 1798 gained ground in Wexford and the Wicklow Mountains, some Catholics were purged due to suspected United Irish sympathies. 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. Orangism then spread into the Yeomanry and Militia.