It may be appropriate that the first of Great Britain's imperial projects was the also first to begin the imperial dissolution process. Despite the oft-discussed dissolution plans for Ireland at the turn of the last century, Dublin was still very much the second city of the British Empire.Footnote 1 With the United Kingdom's entry into the First World War in 1914 and the Irish nationalist Easter Rising two years later, however, the imperial bonds began to fray. The aftermath of the First World War saw the outbreak of the Anglo-Irish War in 1919, followed by the treaty that eventually partitioned Ireland in 1921.Footnote 2 A subsequent intra-Irish civil war between 1922 and 1923 over the terms of that treaty finalised the split. By the late 1930s, the Irish Free State, making up the southern part of the island, was transformed into the nationalist and independent Republic of Ireland.Footnote 3
That the entire island of Ireland has seen much violence in the last century is undeniable. That the state and government that emerged from the Irish Free State and ultimately the Republic of Ireland have been strong, stable, effective, liberal and democratic – unlike so many other post-imperial projects – is also clear. How did this successful state building project work?
Many discussions have been had, of course, over what constitutes a state and state building, particularly in a post-colonial context.Footnote 4 We have only to look to the current debates over the EU and the euro to see a contemporary example of the complexity of building a state (or supra-state), and it is impossible to survey the history of most African states since independence and not see how much more difficult the process is when a colonial legacy permeates both institutions and political cultures.Footnote 5 In the Irish context, the Great War, in which many Irish participated, intervened between the pre-war promise of Home Rule and the creation of the Irish Free State and eventually the Republic of Ireland, vastly complicating state building. There is a considerable literature on how rebellion and civil war affected Irish state building, with particular attention paid to the challenge of building a functioning democracy in a setting marked by an insurgent challenge and the liberal use of emergency powers used to meet it.Footnote 6 Tom Garvin has particularly argued that establishment of independent Irish democracy was a close-run thing in his explanation of the development of the democratic Free State during the civil war period, noting the threat to the stability of the state and of Irish democracy posed by both sides in the Irish Civil War.Footnote 7 This is a question that Eunan O’Halpin has also taken up in his book Defending Ireland: The Irish State and its Enemies since 1922.Footnote 8 O’Halpin focuses on internal and external security policy and the development of civil security institutions, and argues that while the development of the Free State has involved a series of ironic uses of highly illiberal policies to ostensibly protect a liberal democracy, the combination of pragmatism and a willingness to institute harsh measures and then gradually let them ebb has characterised the successful construction of the Free State since 1922.Footnote 9
To frame this question primarily around the pro- and anti-Treaty factions of the civil war and the latent militant republicanism that survived it, however, is to examine only one stratum of competing identities involved in building the democratic inter-war Irish Free State. A focus strictly on the parties to the intra-Irish civil war misses the broader post-civil war context of the former imperial metropole of the United Kingdom. The legacy of the British Empire was key to Free State institutions and also to Free State culture. As Garvin has noted, the Irish Free State was able to take advantage not only of completely co-opting the extant British institutions in Ireland, but also of the existence of at least a generation of native Irish civil servants – something Michael Kennedy has illustrated was painfully lacking as the Free State worked to establish its own Foreign Service and that O’Halpin has also addressed in terms of the legacy of violent repression of political opponents of the state.Footnote 10
This imperial legacy of state building is not only reflected in parliaments, civil servants and state institutions. Imperial legacies make up part of the bedrock of social structure and culture as well. This is a foundation that cannot be set aside during the state building project, for state building requires the construction of a popular culture of legitimacy – also known as the necessary element of internal state control.Footnote 11 It is worth noting, then, the pluralistic nature of Irish culture in this period – despite a long-lamented decline of the Anglo-Irish Ascendency as well as the strength of less grand and affluent southern Protestants, what became the Free State was not a purely Catholic and republican enterprise, even in Michael Collins’ Cork.Footnote 12 Imperial legacies were not only institutional, but also embedded in the very population of the newly independent and democratic Free State. Nor were these imperial legacies cut-and-dry mirrors of religious or political affiliation, as James Loughlin has illustrated with his study on the popular reception of the monarchy in Ireland from 1800 through the twentieth century.Footnote 13 As Michael Kennedy has neatly shown in his study of the Irish diplomatic service, one effective way to examine this non-institutional process of state building is not through segments of government bureaucracy, but rather through critical elements of the general population.Footnote 14
In the Irish Free State, the experience of one group of individuals personifies the post-imperial development of the state: First World War ex-servicemen.Footnote 15 Around the figure of the ex-serviceman collect the beliefs, myths and entitlements of both population and state.Footnote 16 In the case of the Free State, the experience was intensified as the population broke from the British Empire and moved toward independence. These ex-servicemen reflect a series of complex identities and legacies that coloured not only their own lives, but also the life and shape of the newly established Irish Free State.
At the outbreak of the First World War, the much-debated Home Rule bill for Ireland was shelved. John Redmond, the Irish parliamentarian and would-be national leader, called for Irishmen to join the British Army and fight for Catholic Belgium and the freedom of small nations. He also argued that the Irish should be given expanded political freedom after the war in exchange for their loyalty in the trenches.Footnote 17 Irishmen answered Redmond's call: conservative estimates of Irish participation in the war place about 210,000 men in the British military during the conflict.Footnote 18 Unionist support and sacrifice for the Crown became legendary in the north of Ireland after the Battle of the Somme, and loyalists among the southern Irish population would have been well represented as well.Footnote 19 As representatives of Ireland's last fully imperial project, they fought as a full member of the British Empire in the trenches.
The legacy of the Easter Rising and the establishment of the Free State put these ex-servicemen in a sensitive position. They had fought for their state, and in some cases for their hoped-for nation, on the Continent, only to return to a very different political situation after the war. Indeed, certain research on these men in the post-war period, particularly by Jane Leonard, has focused on how some of them were targeted by the IRA in certain areas.Footnote 20 But this was by no means the most common reception of these men – plenty were IRA members themselves, valued for their military skill – and this over-emphasis on a competition between the claims of the nationalists and the claims of the legacies of the British state belies the slow transition which arguably made the ultimate state-building project in the south of Ireland so successful. While popular memory, especially given the legacy of the headline-dominating Troubles, focuses on the heroism of the rebels of the Rising and of the subsequent war against Great Britain, the impression of an immediate shift from a loyal imperial partner to a fully nationalist, separate and independent state is oversimplified. The imperial legacy was simply too strong for this to have been the case. As the popular Irish writer novelist, playwright and poet Dermot Bolger has noted, ‘far more Irish families were connected with the events in Flanders and France than with those in O’Connell Street or the Four Courts [during the Rising]’.Footnote 21
The transitional experience of ex-servicemen in the nascent Irish Free State provides a vehicle for examining the process of forging the new Free State, both in terms of changing culture and in terms of developing governmental capacity. Members of what eventually became two separate cultures and two separate states, these ex-servicemen represented parallel traditions as well as parallel state claims. Their identities and claims were non-competitive when they joined up to fight in France, and came to be seen as exclusionary (or at least contested) only slowly and over time. Indeed, evidence suggests that Irish imperial participation and its resulting cultural impact was actually much stronger than previously expected, and suppression of this memory quite recent.Footnote 22 The narrative of ex-servicemen's popular support, both charitable and celebratory, as well as their legal and monetary claims on their new government, personifies an intermediate development period as the Free State moved from post-imperial infancy to a more defined independent (and nationalist) state – a development whose gradual nature may well have contributed to the stability of the nascent Free State and subsequent Republic.
Wartime participation and the deep imperial legacy
The imperial connections of Irish ex-servicemen were strengthened by their military service, and these connections filtered into the rest of Irish society. One logical way to analyse these imperial ties and their impact in Ireland is through the participation rates of Irish soldiers in the First World War itself. Unfortunately, this analysis is complicated by the nature of the imperial military. While there were three army divisions raised in Ireland as a whole (both north and south) – the 10th, 16th and 36th (Ulster), they were not made up entirely of Irishmen. Historian David Fitzpatrick estimates the Irish component of these divisions at around 71%.Footnote 23 Furthermore, not all Irish soldiers were placed into these three divisions; thousands presumably would have joined up in the rest of the British Isles, as well as the Dominions and even the United States. For the purpose of establishing specifically Irish imperial participation and its post-war impact on the Free State, the analysis is limited here to Irish-born members of the Commonwealth armed forces participating in the war.
Assumptions of total Irish participation in the war have varied, with figures ranging from 100,000 in 1936 to half a million in the 1960s.Footnote 24 The best argument thus far comes from Fitzpatrick, who limits his analysis to the three standard Irish divisions.Footnote 25 Fitzpatrick argues that the most likely aggregate contribution to the imperial armed forces from the island was 210,000 men.Footnote 26 This, however, only counts Irish recruits in Ireland; Fitzpatrick, like many historians working on the participation question, is primarily interested in the effect of the Easter Rising and the rising tide of Irish nationalism on recruiting during the war itself, and not the slower, transitional aftermath of participation. Nationalist politics are often linked to discussions over the fact that Ireland's rates of participation, even when accounting for a more rural, agrarian population that needed young men for the farms, were lower than that of the rest of the British Isles.Footnote 27 Fitzpatrick has more recently noted that less than a quarter of Irishmen with non-agricultural professions joined up; population-wise, Ireland lost 7 dead out of every 1,000, a much lower rate than Great Britain (16), France (34) and Germany (30), all which had much larger populations, and still lower than similarly-sized non-conscriptor Australia, at 12 dead per 1,000.Footnote 28 Regardless of Commonwealth comparison figures, however, 210,000 is not a small number for an island with a population of approximately 4.4 million during the war.Footnote 29 Both Fitzpatrick and John Horne have noted that regardless of comparative join-up rates and losses, more Irishmen participated in the First World War than in any other war in the island's history – and far more than the 1,600 men of the Rising.Footnote 30
These considerations, however, still exclude an important and traditional factor of Irish life up until the naval blockades of 1915: the emigration from Ireland of young, military-aged men. Fitzpatrick's 210,000 estimate is thus too low because it excludes the Irish-born outside of Ireland. The Irish, as one of the world's primary diasporas, had young men working across the Commonwealth, and many joined up overseas. There are a variety of arguments that can be made for excluding these men from a national and domestic ‘Irish soldier’ count, but there are few good arguments for excluding them from considerations of the war's cultural impact on the island during and after the war. A Cork family, for example, who lost a son, brother, or father in the trenches felt no less sorrow if he was serving with the Canadian army than with the 16th division; he was an imperial loss either way. Given this, we must add Irish-born soldiers from the Canadian, Australian and New Zealand armed forces to Fitzpatrick's total. Attestation records show that approximately 18,000 soldiers in the Canadian army were Irish born, or approximately 3% of Canada's total contribution of 600,000 to the war effort.Footnote 31 From Australia we must add another 4,731 and from New Zealand approximately 1,200.Footnote 32 This brings us to an additional 25,000 participants, or a 235,000 total for the entire island using Fitzpatrick's figures as a foundation. The addition of these 25,000 may initially seem small, but it is a significant sum when one takes into account the fact that a ‘200,000’ approximate has become common among scholars; counting the Commonwealth attestations raises Fitzpatrick's figure by a not-insignificant 12.5%.Footnote 33
While these numbers remain imperfect approximations, they allow the establishment of a baseline impact of Irish ex-servicemen's wartime experience on the Free State's cultural milieu after 1923.Footnote 34 As Fitzpatrick writes, ‘Few of the survivors escaped physical or psychological mutilation; and few Irish families were untouched by the excitement, anxiety and often personal loss aroused by the enlistment of a father, son, brother, cousin or husband.’Footnote 35 In weighing cultural impact, it is also important to remember that contemporary perception is just as important as the cold numerical reality sketched above. In 1927, Irish MP William Archer Redmond, son of John Redmond and an ex-serviceman himself, argued in the Irish Dáil (Parliament) that there were at least 150,000 to 200,000 ex-servicemen living in the Irish Free State at the time.Footnote 36 Using a conservative estimate of three dependents per ex-serviceman, he calculated that there were nearly half a million Free State citizens directly impacted by these men – or about 11% of the entire population.Footnote 37 Two years later, the 1929 committee report on the experience of ex-servicemen in the Free State claimed that the number of resident ex-servicemen was closer to Redmond's lower estimate of 150,000.Footnote 38 While contemporary discussions in the press of Irish losses in the war are higher than historians currently accept – they were regularly listed in newspaper articles at 50,000, while the actual number was likely closer to 28,000 – perception does matter.Footnote 39 The impression and cultural memory of a large population of soldiers participating in the war, and large Irish losses, had an impact on the public reception and treatment of the ex-servicemen who returned home during the inter-war period.
Public financing and public performance
Establishing these baseline numbers is necessary to emphasise the depth of the war's cultural impact on Ireland. This is particularly important because of the way that the British government handled post-war care for ex-servicemen. Financing relied heavily on charitable donations generated by popular acknowledgement of soldiers’ sacrifices, rather than resting exclusively on governmental revenues.Footnote 40 In Great Britain, governmental care for ex-servicemen, such as pensions, was extremely limited; this was a sharp contrast, for example, to the more generous system of Weimar Germany.Footnote 41 The system of care for ex-servicemen, disabled and non-disabled, was mostly voluntary and charitable; pensions were limited and spartan. The British government was reluctant to initiate an open-ended spending commitment and was also ideologically wary of involving itself in ex-servicemen's post-war challenges, such as high unemployment, which was viewed at the time as a social problem rather than a political one.Footnote 42 Such minimal government support led to the rise of several ex-servicemen's charitable organisations in Great Britain, four of which coalesced into the famous British Legion in 1921.Footnote 43 In Ireland the system remained slightly different: the Irish League of Ex-Service Men remained an independent entity until 1925, when it requested to formally join the British Legion.Footnote 44 In the Free State as in Great Britain, however, popular support for ex-servicemen was strong, and it increased over time.
In the Free State one of the most famous, visible, public and participatory charitable events for ex-servicemen was its annual Poppy Day Appeal, established by Earl Haig in 1921. The Irish League of Ex-Service Men sold poppies for the appeal even before its formal joining of the Legion four years later. Held on Remembrance Day (or Remembrance Sunday, depending on the calendar), the poppy appeal sold constructed lapel poppies in order to raise funds for the care of ex-servicemen.
The annual poppy appeal was a highly public showcase for the cultural transition generated by these ‘British ex-servicemen’, as the Irish who served in the imperial uniform came to be called. While earlier works have focused on developing Irish nationalism and unionism (and have emphasised isolated extremist acts such as poppy snatching on Remembrance Day), these arguments neglect to recognise the public performance of Remembrance Day as an evolving and even transnational moment in Irish history.Footnote 45 Even after the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the birth of the Irish Free State, support for the British Legion's poppy appeal was strong. In fact, Irish support for the poppy appeal actually increased over the course of the 1920s and even into the 1930s. Rather than an abrupt post-civil war rejection of all things imperial, popular support for and celebration of ex-servicemen served as an evolutionary moment for the Irish population: a period of popular support that grew, rather than waned, over time, before evolving into a more national era in the mid and late 1930s.
The annual appeal and associated ceremonies was a big event, and not one that could be ignored by the general public. The British Legion ran a formal appeal in the papers every year. It was consistently printed, for example, both by the Irish Times and the Irish Independent, two of the largest papers, and always explained the purpose of the appeal and the charity work of the British Legion.
Poppy appeal sales and donations rose consistently in the Free State throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, rising from £3,645 in 1924 to approximately £9,000 in 1929 – a growth of over 145%.Footnote 46 The money flowing back into the Free State was even more significant: by 1935 British Legion officials could argue that Irish contributions were receiving a four-to-one return on their money.Footnote 47 Legion investment in the Free State rose from about £7,000 in 1928 to up to £30,000 in 1935 and to £45,000 in 1938.Footnote 48 The trajectory is the most important indicator. Rather than forgetting about ex-servicemen and their imperial participation as memories of the war faded and the veterans aged, the Irish population was both increasing its own contributions for the care of their fellow citizens and receiving more in return.
This trajectory, of course, was not open-ended. Its eventual decline was closely linked to the changing nature of the domestic Irish political landscape and the associated shift from a transitional moment to a nationalist era. Free State contributions to the appeal began to decline in the early 1930s. By 1936, the Free State contribution had dropped to just £7,417, ironically just as British Legion investment into the Free State was accelerating.Footnote 49 This decline in contributions – and, as we will see shortly, a similar effect in the attendance at formal Remembrance Day events – was closely linked to rising political nationalism. By 1927, Eamon de Valera, perhaps the most famous surviving leader of the 1916 Easter Rising and a backer of Sinn Fein, had founded a new political party, Fianna Fail, with the aim of establishing a fully independent, national Irish Republic via the formal parliamentary political process.Footnote 50 The rising tide of nationalism that de Valera and his party mustered generated electoral success in 1932, when they ousted the Cosgrave administration. De Valera ascended to the head of the Free State government. Along with charitable donations, the formal and public celebrations of Remembrance Day during this period also illustrate the shift to a more nationalist era.
Remembrance Day in the Free State
Poppy Day in the Free State was not just about financing the support of ex-servicemen. It was a day for commemoration, for mourning and for comradeship. While Remembrance Day in the current Republic is currently a politically sensitive topic (despite a bit of a thaw in the last decade or so), this was not so in the Free State of the early 1920s, even despite the earlier Anglo-Irish War. In 1923, the final year of the Irish Civil War, the Irish Times reported that not only were there ‘large congregations’ attending memorial services in Dublin, but that there was a ‘brisk business’ in poppy sales and that the flowers were ‘being worn by thousands in the streets of Dublin’.Footnote 51 Into the mid 1920s, the Irish Times and the Irish Independent were running ads that encouraged readers to wear a ‘Flanders poppy’ along with announcements for the annual ceremonies. Remembrance Day parades and ceremonies received annual coverage in the papers. By 1925, there were 85,000 poppies sold in the city of Dublin, with an additional 35,000 sold in the city's suburbs.Footnote 52 Poppy sales and contributions made headlines, and the Irish Times consistently ran breakouts of the sales by country area, county, or parish, depending on the year and the reporting (provoking no little neighbourly competition, one suspects); more generalised accounting could be found in other Irish papers as well.
Remembrance Day celebrations, like poppy appeal contributions, followed a similar trajectory of expansion into the late 1920s. Even in 1927, nearly a decade after the war, the Irish Times could write that, ‘the celebration in Dublin was the largest since the war, and it was also the quietest’.Footnote 53 The Irish Independent reported that a massive parade of 18,000 servicemen marched to that year's ceremony in Phoenix Park and noted that poppies were ‘generally worn’ in the city and were even more numerous than usual in large urban centres across the country.Footnote 54 Remembrance Day was not solely a Dublin celebration; the Irish Times and the Irish Independent often ran reports of celebrations elsewhere in the country, in towns from Cork to Tralee, into the early 1930s.Footnote 55 Newspapers reported requiem masses for the souls of those who fell in the war being held in towns across the country as late as 1929 – hardly a representation of a Catholic republican rejection of all things associated with Great Britain.Footnote 56
Like the poppy appeal, the universality of celebrations on Remembrance Day began to decline with the rise of Fianna Fail's republican nationalism and the 1932 election of the de Valera government. The papers begin to report rumblings of trouble on Remembrance Day in the mid and late 1920s, though the systematic extent of the trouble is difficult to gauge. There were passing references to opposition to the parades beginning in 1925, though that year's report also notes that there were higher poppy sales in spite of (or perhaps because of) the opposition; incidents were reported along with the massive 1927 parade as well.Footnote 57 Some poppy wearers placed razor blades in their poppies to prevent snatching.Footnote 58 Also in 1927, a judge hearing a case for a man arrested over a Remembrance Day incident referred to the poppy as a ‘party emblem’, indicating reference to a more widespread public debate over the role of the poppy and Remembrance Day in national life.Footnote 59 By 1929, the British Legion was forced to explicitly stress in its annual appeal for the poppy fund that it was a charitable, not a political, organisation.Footnote 60 Tensions continued into the 1930s, with British Legion meeting minutes in Dublin specifically noting that the Legion and the Remembrance Day parades were being charged with displays of ‘imperialism’ and generating nostalgia for the former British rule of the Free State; the Legion took advantage of this discussion to have the meeting notes printed in the Times along with a specific comment arguing that, ‘These ceremonies were only held for the purpose of remembering the death of their comrades, and there was nothing un-Irish or anti-national in that.’Footnote 61 The republican side was not the only source of tensions for the Legion. Their own members and parade participants caused trouble by taking their own hard line regarding the display of flags and imperial symbols. The Legion was forced to ban extra flags and emblems in parades in 1933, stating that they ‘desired to avoid anything provocative and calculated to give offence’.Footnote 62 The 1933 parade in Dublin was significantly smaller than the one six years earlier. The Irish Independent reported a parade of just 3,000 ex-servicemen that year.Footnote 63
Challenges rose not just for those parading, but for those selling the poppies as well. Women were chosen to sell poppies in the Free State, rather than ex-servicemen themselves, because they were seen as less likely to be harassed.Footnote 64 During the pre-sale meeting in 1935, Legion officials specifically thanked the female poppy sellers for their ‘courage and enthusiasm’ in the implied face of adversity, after women selling poppies had been intimidated in previous years, including one County Down girl whose wrist was slashed by a knife-wielding man attempting to steal her receipts box during the 1933 sales.Footnote 65 In 1936, the Irish government quit its formal attendance at the Remembrance Day ceremonies and in 1939, with the outbreak of the Second World War and the declaration of the Irish Emergency, the parades ceased.Footnote 66
The arc of public support for Remembrance Day, like the arc of financial support shown via the poppy appeal, illustrates not only the complex and shifting perception of what these ex-servicemen represented in the 1920s and 1930s, but what the new state and new culture that they lived in would represent as well. Rather than dismissing them as unwelcome reminders of the imperial past, popular support for these men tracked the slow development of the new state and its new culture, one perhaps buttressed by its measured progression.
Despite certain IRA or nationalist opposition, Remembrance Day ceremonies were certainly not under-the-radar events; a parade of 18,000 – or even 3,000 – uniformed men is hard to miss. Changing Free State political circumstances began to colour the general public perception of Remembrance Day and the public role of honouring soldiers and fallen comrades in the late 1920s and certainly into the 1930s, but Remembrance Day did not simply fade away with the election of the de Valera government or even with the new Irish constitution of 1937. Even in heavily republican Cork in 1937, Protestant and Catholic ex-servicemen could march peacefully in Remembrance Day parades, attend the church memorial of their respective faiths and join up again to march together to the city's cenotaph, representing a blend not just of religion but likely of political background as well.Footnote 67 Remembrance Day was not a black and white (or imperial versus nationalist) issue, and the ex-serviceman was a living personification of this post-imperial process of building a new country in the interwar period. Perhaps the most eloquent example of the tensions of this process comes from an ex-serviceman himself, who wrote to the Irish Times in 1930 expressing his dissatisfaction with the politicisation of Remembrance Day. He argues that he would wear the poppy and:
salute, not only the memory of fallen comrades, but also the memories of some of the most vivid years of my life, and parts of myself that I seem to have left behind with them. In token of this, too, I shall wear the poppy, somewhat self-consciously, perhaps, like a ‘lance’ with his first stripe. I shall not be deterred by the fact that a small group of us will be led by a still smaller group into giving it a political appearance, but it is, indeed, bitter that they should be actually aided in this by the ‘hostile activities’ of a league, some merely mischief-makers, but others sincere Republicans, who so behave from a lack of sympathetic understanding. This will give us a seeming defiance which many of us very much regret, but, conscious that we love Ireland as truly and devotedly as any of those who on this day make themselves our opponents, we will not be denied the opportunity of commemorating the most active, and in many cases the only, services which we have been privileged to offer to our own country.Footnote 68
Even in 1930, this ex-serviceman's definition of the word ‘country’, and what it meant in the context of the history of the preceding sixteen years, was quite fluid and inclusive: Ireland and Great Britain, empire and nation. Post-imperial culture in the Free State was neither exclusive nor immediately nationalist, as the charitable support and popular celebration of these ex-servicemen shows. Post-imperial government in the Free State, however, was more limited in the size of its tent and the basic capacity of its services, forcing a sharper distinction around the rights and claims of former imperial soldiers in a newly national state.
The Irish Free State and ‘British Ex-Servicemen’: Built and political landscapes
Charitable donations and public performance were not the only mediums through which ex-servicemen personified the Free State's complex transition from colony to successful nationalist state-builder. While the support system for First World War ex-servicemen was mostly voluntary in Great Britain and the Free State, ex-servicemen did make claims on their state, and governments were indeed involved in supporting them and in trying, despite strained budgetary and infrastructural circumstances, to treat them fairly. In the Free State, government involvement was most notable in the establishment and work of the Irish Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Land Trust (ISSLT), as well as in a prominent 1929 Irish governmental committee report on the status of ex-servicemen in the Free State.Footnote 69 Both generated public expression of popular support for the ex-servicemen, while allowing the government entities in question to further define and develop the powers of the nascent Free State, particularly in relation to Great Britain.
In 1929, the Irish government published an independent report on the ‘claims of British ex-servicemen’.Footnote 70 Commissioned after debate in the Dáil, the committee was tasked with investigating whether the difficulties reported by some ex-servicemen, particularly in housing and employment, were due to intentional prejudice and mistreatment, or were rather a symptom of wider troubles in the Irish economy at the time.Footnote 71 After a series of eighteen meetings in Dublin and the solicitation of material and comment from across the Free State, the committee held that the difficulties faced by ‘British ex-servicemen’ in the Free State were not specific to them as a class.Footnote 72 In doing so, the report fully incorporated the ex-servicemen into the Free State by considering them as members of a broader Irish community and not as a specifically underprivileged class, or even as men associated with (if not always part of) the formerly powerful Protestant minority. They were simply to be Irish. They were not to be singled out by the Free State government for either positive or negative special treatment, a balanced stance that likely strengthened the government in this developmental period.
The committee held that British ex-servicemen's challenges were ‘common to all members of the particular class being dealt with’ and were ‘in no way peculiar to British ex-Servicemen, but were the result of the setting up of the Free State as a distinct entity’.Footnote 73 In other words, any financial difficulties that the ex-servicemen found themselves in because they were now citizens of a different state from the one for which they had fought were not the responsibility of the Free State. The report criticized different non-Free State entities, particularly the British War Pensions Office, the British military and even the ISSLT, for failing to fulfil what the committee saw as their own respective duties, rather than Free State duties, in relation to the ex-servicemen. The committee, and the government for which it reported, thus explicitly used the report as a way to define the boundaries and responsibilities of the Irish Free State, both in relation to its citizens and to the former imperial metropole. The new Free State could not pay for the imperial experiences of these men (namely, pensions). However, the dual nature of the ex-serviceman's experience – first as a British citizen in British uniform, and now as a Free State citizen and foreign veteran – functioned as a tool for the committee to define its own nascent national state.
Not everyone agreed with the technocratic decision. The old guard Irish Times published a scathing commentary on the report's publication, calling it a ‘disappointing production’.Footnote 74 A similar tension between popular support and government capacity was seen in the coverage of the 1933 Supreme Court case over the rents of ex-servicemen due to the inter-governmental ISSLT. At issue was not only the question of rents, but also the question of what the appropriate reward for volunteering to defend a state in wartime should be – and who, in the aftermath of independence, should pay for it. As with the 1929 report, the question was raised again: whose responsibility and whose burden, should these men be?
The ISSLT was a unique inter-governmental organisation developed as a partnership between the governments of the Irish Free State, Northern Ireland and Great Britain. It was formally established in 1922 by individual acts of the three governments for the purpose of providing housing in Ireland for Irish ex-servicemen.Footnote 75 Consisting of five members, three appointed by the British government and one from each of the Irish governments, the trust was charged with the purchase of land, construction of houses, selection of tenants and maintenance of the properties. The ISSLT picked up where the Local Government Board of Ireland – a British government institution establishment when the Free State was still a part of the Union – left off; there had already been in 1919 a British Act of Parliament empowering the government to buy land and provide houses for ex-servicemen.Footnote 76 Though building was initiated under the Local Government Boards, the ISSLT took over control after the Free State's establishment of governmental independence in 1921.Footnote 77 The ISSLT eventually built over 4,000 houses in Ireland (north and south) in the 1920s and 1930s.Footnote 78
The ISSLT was charged with building houses as a service to the war veterans, which was both a resolution to a severe housing shortage in Ireland and a way to alleviate some of the stresses of post-war reintegration, especially given Ireland's high level of unemployment during the 1920s and 1930s. Housing built by the ISSLT was primarily situated near cities and towns, so as to give the ex-servicemen dwelling in them a higher chance of being able to find local work – though there were a few rural establishments as well.Footnote 79 One of the largest ISSLT estates was in Killester, outside of Dublin. These estates and the nature of their origin were in no way hidden; well built, clearly labelled and close to major urban areas, they were a very public display of the work of a unique organisation for the post-imperial ex-servicemen in the Free State. Rather than ignoring ex-servicemen as the 1920s and 1930s progressed, the ISSLT was literally building them and their service into the landscape of the country.
Though the ISSLT was an inter-governmental organisation, Irish government officials preferred to stress that it was a British-initiated organisation, funded primarily by the British government, for ex-servicemen who had fought in the British armed services during the war.Footnote 80 The Irish government did eventually lend its own modest financial support to the ISSLT, however, including a £45 contribution per cottage funded by the 1930 Housing Act, or approximately 9% of the average cost to build an ISSLT cottage.Footnote 81 While the offer of housing was popular – the Local Government Board had received 7,702 applications by March 31st of 1920, and the ISSLT reportedly had over 18,000 applications on file by 1929 – the ISSLT did not always run smoothly.Footnote 82 Like the arc of the poppy appeal and Remembrance Day ceremonies, the challenges faced by the ISSLT illustrate the shift from a transitional moment to an era of Free State nationalism.
Rent collection was an issue for the ISSLT, even if it was more of an occasional challenge than a constant one. The ISSLT saw organised and semi-organised rent strikes in its largest estate at Killester in 1924 and 1925.Footnote 83 The pricing of the rents was often a problem; while the ISSLT aimed to charge rates that were lower than the market and only designed to fund the building of more cottages, the cottages were often more generous in size (and hence more expensive) than the ex-servicemen wanted or needed. Furthermore, ex-servicemen began to claim that they should be paying no rent at all on the basis of the announcement made by Lord French, the former viceroy of Ireland, in 1918 promising housing for returned ex-servicemen in exchange for more volunteers (Ireland, unlike Great Britain, was never placed under conscription for fear of revolt).Footnote 84
While the ISSLT board continued to argue that it charged rents only so that it might provide more cottages for more ex-servicemen (and seemed to feel somewhat misunderstood in the process), the dispute eventually landed in the Free State courts.Footnote 85 A final Supreme Court ruling found in favour of the ex-servicemen in August of 1933 and declared that the establishment of the ISSLT provided the organisation with no legal authority to charge rents; rather, it was only legally sanctioned to build cottages and select ex-servicemen for them.Footnote 86 No rents for ex-servicemen in ISSLT cottages! This was front-page news in the Free State; the Irish Times dedicated the front page as well as a longer full-page analysis inside the paper to the final court decision.Footnote 87
While the total number of houses built paled in comparison to need, the ISSLT's work exhibited a desire on part of both the Irish government and people to publicly participate in supporting ex-servicemen as a class even after the decline in popularity of Remembrance Day and the poppy appeal. While one might have expected a case heard by the young Supreme Court just a year after the nationalist Fianna Fail government's election to be hostile to such prominent examples of former British imperialism begging for legal redress (and free housing), this was clearly not the case. Eamon de Valera himself even called for a round table discussion with the ISSLT after the ruling in order to find a way for the organisation to continue its work in the absence of its traditional funding source.Footnote 88 Nor were the ex-servicemen themselves maligned in the findings, as one also might expect: instead, the judge actually referred to them as ‘victims of the Great War’ in his decision.Footnote 89 Aside from popular support, however, the tension of state responsibility remained. The Free State courts held positively for those ex-servicemen who already had ISSLT housing, but in doing so condemned those without it, as it guaranteed the elimination of sufficient funding for more new houses, something the Free State government would not (and probably could not) pay for.
The use of new Free State governmental institutions such as the Supreme Court to publicly support the case of these ex-servicemen is a curious example of leveraging rising Irish nationalism and pride to aid, rather than shame, veterans of the imperial First World War forces. In finding that the ISSLT had no legal rights to charge rents, seven years after a Free State government report laid responsibility for the care of ex-servicemen on British and not Irish institutions, the Supreme Court was leveraging a technical legal means to address the unfulfilled promise of Lord French, even if it could only satisfy a fraction of ex-servicemen in the Free State. An organ of the Irish government had once again drawn the boundary line between the state responsibilities of the British and Irish governments. While the ex-servicemen themselves remained dual elements in this moment, caught between British and Free State institutions and their guarantees, the shift from the 1920s’ still poppy-lapelled post-imperialism to a more conservative, and more combative, political nationalism was clearly beginning to solidify. It was not, however, beginning to destabilise the state. In treating ex-servicemen well under the law, if only emotionally and not monetarily, the state also neutralised a potentially disruptive element of the population. That ex-servicemen included both old loyalists and republicans, and both Catholics and Protestants, allowed this decision to be inclusive rather than exclusive.
Conclusion
The inter-war journey of First World War ex-servicemen in the Irish Free State personified the experience of the new state's transitional culture and politics during the first decades of separation from the British Empire. While the Free State political climate hardened into more popular political nationalism with the new constitution of 1937 and the outbreak of war in 1939, exclusive nationalism was not the default setting in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, and the unhurried nature of this transition may well have contributed to overall stability as the new state expanded its capacities. Ex-servicemen and their imperial legacies were neither invisible nor categorically maligned during the period between the end of the Irish Civil War in 1923 and the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. Rather, they were a visible and public presence in the Free State, operating with popular support and positive publicity, albeit not support to an amount that could alleviate the serious unemployment faced by the entire country during the difficult inter-war period. Despite a swiftly changing political dynamic in the post-independence period, ex-servicemen participated alongside fellow citizens in a post-imperial moment that preceded an era of rising nationalism in southern Ireland. Despite demonstrated nationalist opposition, ex-servicemen were publicly honoured and commemorated across the country with Remembrance Day ceremonies and parades, and the public dramatically increased its charitable donations to the British Legion's annual appeal for these ex-servicemen into the late 1920s and early 1930s. Significantly more money flowed the other way in the form of investment and support from the British Legion. Attendance at annual commemoration ceremonies was in no way meagre, and poppies were widely worn even in the late 1920s, after the establishment of the nationalist Fianna Fail party. The ISSLT's housing construction literally built the ex-servicemen and their imperial experiences into the landscape of the Free State, in close proximity to some of the country's most significant cities. In two highly public cases, institutions of the Free State government co-opted ex-servicemen into the state and worked to protect them, even as those institutions used ex-servicemen to define the boundaries of the new national state.
Rather than being swiftly ignored and culturally buried in the inter-war period, ex-servicemen and the multifaceted imperial allegiances that they had once represented, were full participants in Irish national life. Their parades were well-attended, their travails made headlines, and the memory of their experiences was kept alive in Irish public and cultural life well into the newly nationalist 1930s. Their quest for support personified the transition to a nationalist state that took much longer than popular received memory today might allow for. Deeply Republican Cork's 1937 joint Protestant-Catholic Remembrance Day procession was not out of place in its time: that political development would have to wait for the post-war period.
