For ‘Common Christianity’: War, Peace and the Campaign of the Irish Recruiting Council, 1918

Abstract

Abstract Established towards the end of the Great War, the Irish Recruiting Council was responsible for one of the largest military recruitment campaigns ever waged on Irish soil. Tasked with raising 50,000 volunteers, it produced a wide array of promotional material which included posters, newspaper advertisements and a fortnightly magazine entitled The Irish Soldier. Its work has attracted a measure of scholarly attention, but little is known about its origins, its dealings with authorities in Westminster and Dublin Castle, and the operational difficulties it encountered when attempting to mobilise the public. Even less is known about its newspaper campaign and the reasons behind the continuation of the body in peacetime, when the need for recruits had apparently subsided. This paper addresses these shortcomings by examining the IRC in more detail than has hitherto been achieved in the historiography. In so doing, it calls for a revision of existing understandings of the Council, suggesting that it was not just a recruiting body per se, but a major propaganda agency which portrayed enlistment as a means of uniting a divided country and encouraged Irishmen to mobilise to help resolve long-standing tensions between nationalists and unionists.