Armed Forces

Debate between Lord Tyler and Viscount Bridgeman

Monday 5th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Bridgeman]

My Lords, I am most grateful to my noble friend Lord Astor of Hever for initiating this debate. I am particularly grateful for his reminder that this debate is wide-ranging, because what I am about to say is not in the mainstream of what has been discussed—so far, certainly.

I am a member of the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly. Three weeks ago, we undertook a fact-finding visit to Belfast in connection with the decade of commemoration of the centenary of seminal events that took place in Ireland between 1912 and 1922. In the course of this visit we in the group were impressed by the growing interest on both sides of the border in the contribution of the Irish regiments in the Great War. The history of the 36th Ulster Division is well known and commemorated by the Ulster Tower on the Somme battlefield. Of the two divisions raised in southern Ireland—the 10th and the 16th—much less is known. It became clear in the course of our inquiries that for many nationalist families until very recently the service of great-grandfathers and great-great-grandfathers in the British Army in the First World War has been treated as a guilty secret never to be discussed and to be airbrushed out of the family history.

My honourable friend Conor Burns, Member of Parliament for Bournemouth West, is a Roman Catholic who was born in Belfast and raised largely in Great Britain. He is a colleague on the British-Irish parliamentary group and kindly agreed that I could quote his family as an example of the ignorance in which younger generations were kept, until very recently, about the service in the British Army of their forbears—in his case, his grandmother’s family, several of whom served in the Army.

However, in the recent past, there has been a perceptible change of attitude. What has caused this? Certainly, the internet has played a part. Records in places such as the National Archives in Kew and Dublin have become more readily accessible, and with the various ancestry search programmes there has been increasing curiosity about family histories, including regarding some aspects previously regarded as taboo. There continues to be research particularly on the five Irish regiments that were disbanded in 1922. In some cases, this has extended to individual battalions. For example, the 6th Connaught Rangers, a Kitchener or New Army battalion, was raised in Catholic west Belfast, and its recruits would have been almost to a man Redmond nationalists. The battalion fought on the Somme with the 16th Irish Division. Its history is the subject of a meticulously researched and well produced book, which in its appendix lists the careers and ultimate destinations of every member of the battalion, many of them sadly killed in action. This is but one of a number of initiatives of this nature in Northern Ireland and the Republic.

This significant change of attitude to a subject treated hitherto as an embarrassment by many an Irish family is part of the transformation of British-Irish relations in recent years. Much credit for this must go to the leadership shown by two successive Presidents of the Republic, Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese, and continued by President O’Higgins. It of course culminated with the visit to the Republic by Her Majesty the Queen in 2010, the impact of which on the people of Ireland is even now not fully appreciated on this side of the Irish Sea. Tangible evidence of this new outlook is the increase in the number of visitors from the Irish Republic to the battlefields of France and Flanders, in many cases to visit the graves of forbears of whose military history they were previously unaware. The defining moment of the Irish contribution in the Great War came with the Battle of Messines in 1917, when for the first time the 36th Ulster Division and the 16th Irish Division fought alongside in an action that many military historians regard as the most significant tactical victory in the whole of the Great War.

In the time available, I have not been able to research the detailed statistics of those who served and were killed in the First World War, but about 149,000 volunteered from the whole of Ireland, and just under 30,000 were killed. It is difficult to break down the figures of the war dead from the various provinces, but when one considers that there were one Ulster division and two Irish divisions, it is clear that the suffering must have been fairly widespread throughout the whole of Ireland.

[Lord Tyler]

I am very moved by what my noble friend is saying. It so happens that just a few weeks ago I visited the Somme—as I mentioned to him the other day—and was struck by the fact that Irishmen from both sides of what is now the border were standing side by side, with great courage and tenacity, particularly in the July Somme attack, as well as later in the 1914-1918 war. I visited a number of cemeteries because my three uncles were killed during the war, and I was moved when I met young people from both sides of the current Irish border who came together in coachloads to see some of these cemeteries. I entirely endorse what my noble friend is saying, and I am very pleased to be in the House to hear him.

[Viscount Bridgeman]

I am extremely grateful to my noble friend Lord Tyler for that intervention.

I should also mention that a large number of Irishmen, particularly from the south-east seaboard counties of what is now the Republic, would have served in the Royal Navy. It is against the background of all this that I should say that there was no conscription in any part of the island in either of the two world wars.

This debate, initiated by my noble friend, is timely, coming as it does on the week before Remembrance Sunday. I suggest that it is appropriate, within this debate, to place on record the contribution and sacrifice of so many Irishmen in the Great War, which for far too long has remained largely overlooked. The noble Baroness, Lady Dean, mentioned the phrase, “Lest we forget”. It is particularly comforting that this increasingly embraces the families of many of our friends in the Republic of Ireland at this time.