In 1919 the National University of Ireland published a Roll of Honour of its students, staff and alumni who served in what would become known as the first World War.
The names on the roll reflect the commitment of middle-class Irish Catholics to the British war effort. The Queen’s University Colleges of Cork, Galway and Belfast were created in 1845 “to afford a university education of members of all religious denominations” in Ireland and as an alternative to the Church of Ireland-administered Trinity College Dublin.
The National University of Ireland, as originally constituted in 1908, saw the coming together of University College Dublin (UCD), University College Cork (UCC) and University College Galway (UCG). Maynooth College, then the national seminary for the Catholic Church, became an affiliated college of the NUI in 1910. Queen’s University Belfast decided to remain unaffiliated.
The men listed in the Roll of Honour were the sons and grandsons of prosperous Irish businessmen, doctors and solicitors. They were from the class that Irish revolutionary CS “Tod” Andrews described as at “the top of the heap in terms of worldly goods and social status”.
He described them as “the medical specialists, fashionable dentists, barristers, solicitors, wholesale tea and wine merchants, owners of large drapery stores and a very few owners or directors of large business firms”.
These also included Dr William Lombard Murphy, the son of one of Ireland’s most successful businessmen, William Martin Murphy, and Dr John Donal (JD) Carroll from the famous cigarette dynasty.
Many were from the vanished tribe of Catholic “loyalists” who saw no contradiction between their faith, their desire for Home Rule for Ireland and their loyalty both to the United Kingdom in time of war and the British Empire.
The motivations of the Irish who served in the first World War were complicated, but those listed in this Roll of Honour were not all compelled by “economic conscription”, to use James Connolly’s famous phrase, to go and fight. Some had everything to lose from participation in the war and 80 of them lost their lives.
Charles Casey, who served in the 7th Leinsters during the war and later became attorney-general, wrote years later to “dispel the myth that all who fought and died in the Great War came from the ranks of the unemployed, uneducated and deprived”.
A large number of Irish doctors and medical students served in the war – 3,336 in total – of whom 261 died, according to the book Irish Doctors in the first World War by Patrick Casey, Kevin Cullen, and Joe Duignan. Some 808 Irish-born doctors already had commissions in the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) before the war. They represented 20 per cent of serving officers in the RAMC, though Ireland accounted for just 10 per cent of the population of the United Kingdom at the time.
Some 60 chaplains from St Patrick’s College in Maynooth served. They include Fr Francis Gleeson, who was the subject of the famous painting by Italian artist Fortunino Matania. Another noteworthy priest is Fr Thomas Duggan who served in the British army in both world wars and for whom a bridge in Kinsale is named.
He later recalled the ambiguities and competing loyalties of the time: “My generation in Maynooth embraced the ideals of Easter Week 1916 with 100 per cent fervour. That did not prevent us from become chaplains in the British army. Hence, when in 1917, Cardinal Logue issued a special appeal for Irish chaplains, I volunteered. And I went off to France with the blessing and the encouragement of every friend I had in advanced Sinn Féin circles in Dublin.”
Multiple members of the same family often served in the war. Emily Anderson, the subject of the book Queen of Codes by Dr Jackie Uí Chionna, joined the Foreign Office and worked as a codebreaker in the Middle East. She was the daughter of Alexander Anderson, President of University College Galway. Her brother, Alex Jr, was reported missing in November 1916, and remained a prisoner until the end of the war.
Higher education was still a relatively new phenomenon for Irish women at the time of the outbreak of the war in 1914. By 1895 all NUI colleges were made available to women, nine years ahead of Trinity . Some of the women graduates also played a notable role in the war effort, according to Fionnuala Walsh author of Irish Women and the Great War.
Iris Cummins, the daughter of a UCC professor, took up munitions work in the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich in London, a factory which employed many Irish women over the course of the war. Another UCC woman student, Ellen Casey, was awarded a war degree (a BSc) in 1917 as she was serving as scientific assistant in the Munitions Department.
NUI women were among those engaged on the home front. Mary Donovan O’Sullivan, who was appointed the first professor of history at University College Galway, chaired the Galway Ladies Recruitment Committee. Alice Perry graduated from Queen’s College Galway in 1906 with a Bachelor in Engineering, the first woman in Ireland or Britain to qualify as an engineer. Perry spent the war in England and Scotland serving as a factory inspector.
[ Ireland’s first World War veterans: Shunned, ostracised, murderedOpens in new window ]
The NUI’s decision to republish this Roll of Honour is an act of remembrance extended to those Irish who served in the first World War in British uniforms. It is a timely reminder that all those Irishmen who fought were volunteers. They joined for different reasons.
Some of them had agency and they exercised it in the belief that they were doing the right thing, even if it is hard for us at more than a century’s remove to understand the motivations of men who fought.
As the Irish Party MP and volunteer Stephen Gwynn, the father of journalist and historian Denis, wrote: “It is very difficult now, after all that has crowded in upon us, to reconstitute the frame of mind in which we passed those days”.
The National University of Ireland Centenary Roll of Honour and Essays, edited by Ronan McGreevy and Dr Emer Purcell, with associate editor Tom Burnell, is published by the National University of Ireland and Four Courts Press. It is the fifth volume in the NUI’s Decade of Centenaries publication series.
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