‘We were all Paddys’: the Irish Experience of the British Forces

Abstract

Thanks to a shared language and a long tradition of emigration Irish people moving to Britain after southern Ireland’s secession from the United Kingdom did not experience significant difficulties integrating. Crucially, secession did not lead to legal restrictions on the movement of labour between the two islands and nor did it provoke a drastic policy change on Irish recruitment, which continued throughout the interwar period and most markedly during the Second World War. Yet given the way in which Ireland left the United Kingdom, after a violent guerrilla war against Crown forces, one could assume that the Services would have been weary of accepting Irish recruits. After all, such recruits would be joining British institutions that by their very nature emphasised national and patriotic values. In reality however, Irish people in the British forces were generally treated no differently from other recruits: they had no difficulty in joining up and during their service few recalled experiencing any problems due to their nationality. On the contrary, the themes that emerge from the testimonies of former officers and official records are the close friendship between Service personnel from the north and south of Ireland, the British army’s successful merging of both these elements into an all-Ireland identity with the formation of the Irish Brigade and the provision for and encouragement of Catholic worship within the forces.