The Catholic Irish soldier in the First World War: the ‘racial environment’

Abstract

In recent years there has been a lively historical debate on English perceptions of the Irish. The growth and persistence of ‘racial’ stereotypes that go back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and which survive even today, have been traced. The Irish, the Catholic Irish above all, were usually perceived in England in an unfavourable or a downright hostile fashion, which reflected the often troubled colonial relationship between England and Ireland. The mass emigration from Ireland to England in the nineteenth century, which brought millions of Irish into direct contact with the English, intensified both the fear of the Irish and the patronising attitudes which accompanied that fear. Historical research has, undoubtedly, added considerably to our understanding of the complexity of anti-Irish feeling: how it depended on class as well as ethnic prejudice; and how it often existed alongside an idealised, sentimental picture of the Catholic Irish as a vigorous and ‘pure’ race, with a culture unsullied by the corrupting influence of modern industrial civilisation.