Kitchener, kings and virginal colleens

Although the most celebrated recruiting posters of World War I featured the Listowel-born Herbert Kitchener, it seems they didn’t feature prominently in Kerry or Ireland generally and it seems that Kitchener did not regard the Irish as his countrymen and women.

From what I can gather, a different approach was adopted by the “United Kingdom’s” recruiting agents in Ireland.

“God Save the King” does not seem to have been widely featured on the posters. The trams in Dublin were festooned with the exhortation to fight for Ireland. Truly, the past is another country!.

The “United Kingdom’s” Irish agents conscripted or invoked all the heroes, legends, icons, sentiments, and, indeed sentimentality of nationalist Ireland in pursuit of Imperial war. One postcard risked giving Schmaltz a bad name and looked like the cover of a chocolate box. It featured fresh-faced virgin gossoons, marching in khaki uniforms, cheered on by winsome, rosy-cheeked, virginal colleens with a backdrop of the old Irish parliament in College Green. The gossoons were surely on more than one promise. All they had to do was fight the central powers and they would return to claim the colleens and Ireland would have her own parliament.

The Central Powers were beaten and a saluting base was erected by the old Parliament and on 11 November 1919 there trundled past it a phalanx of British Tanks, as hard and as cold as the British Government itself. On that very day the Clerk of Dáil Eireann and a number of TDs were arrested by British agents. They were subsequently sentenced to prison terms for conducting “an illegal assembly” — the first democratically elected Irish parliament.

But that was long ago. Can anyone living remember seeing British armour on Irish streets?

Donal Kennedy

Palmers Green

London N13

England