Viscount Bridgeman
Main Page: Viscount Bridgeman (Conservative - Excepted Hereditary)
Viscount Bridgeman (Con)
My Lords, I, too, have been immensely moved by the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton, who is not in his place at the moment. As a newly arrived Peer, I, too, was privileged to hear Lord Houghton’s story of the duckboards and Passchendaele and, to close the record, Percy’s bus was a number 24. I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Gardiner for the huge amount of work he has done in co-ordinating the commemorations and for the masterly speech he made today.
My noble friend Lord Trimble has given a great account of the southern Irish divisions in the First World War, about which far too little has been known until recently. As he has told us, the 16th Division comprised overwhelmingly the five regiments which were going to be disbanded in 1922—the Royal Irish Regiment, the Leinster Regiment, the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, the Royal Munster Fusiliers and the Connaught Rangers.
The Connaught Rangers had an interesting and exceptional battalion—the 6th Battalion—which was raised in west Belfast and, to a man, consisted of Redmond Catholics. They were commanded by an Anglo-Irishman, Colonel Lenox-Conyngham from the Royal Irish Fusiliers, and the devotion they gave to him was immense. Indeed, he was killed at their head at the battle of Guillemont.
My noble friend also mentioned the significant battle of Messines. The order of battle reads like an imperial roll call. It consisted of the New Zealand Division, the 4th Australian Division and the 36th and 16th Divisions, about which he has spoken. The ironic thing about that battle is that it is regarded as one of the great tactical successes of the war. However, like so many of the others, it was sadly not exploited afterwards.
Following the end of the Great War, for the first 80 or so years after the formation of the Irish Republic—again, my noble friend has referred to this—the attitude of the state was to airbrush the Great War out of the national consciousness. The result was that many, mainly Catholic, families whose forebears had served in the war acquired a sense of guilt to the extent that their forebears were treated as skeletons in the cupboard and any connection with service in the British Army was not talked about. I have it on the authority of my honourable friend Conor Burns, the Member for Bournemouth West, who comes from a Catholic Belfast family, that his forebears—there were at least two—were never mentioned at all. Like many others, he is putting that right.
Of course, the relationship between the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic has, over the past 10 years, been transformed, starting with the Good Friday agreement and followed by the invaluable work done by the two Presidents, Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese, leading to a visit by Her Majesty the Queen in 2011 and followed by the recent successful visit of President Higgins to London this year.
Very much under the initiative of the last two presidents, the Garden of Remembrance in Dublin has been restored; there has been a significant increase in tourism from the Republic of Ireland to the France and Flanders war cemeteries; and in the Republic there has been an awakening of interest in the history of the five disbanded regiments.
Going back to the 6th Connaught Rangers, I should have said that the British-Irish Parliamentary Group took evidence from the newly created 6th Connaught Rangers Regimental Association, which has been mirrored among the other five regiments. It is significant that President Higgins paid a visit to St George’s Chapel Windsor in the course of his visit here, where the colours of those regiments are laid up.
Your Lordships will be aware that the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly, which meets annually in the Republic or the United Kingdom, the Isle of Man or the Channel Islands, will in September this year be meeting at Ashford in Kent, from where an expedition by Eurostar will be made to the Flanders battlefields.
What were the motives of the Irishmen who enlisted in the British Army in 1914? These differed between the north and the south. In the north the motive was clear: it was a determination to remain under the British Crown. What inspired the many volunteers from the south of Ireland is less straightforward. For some it was, undoubtedly, the opportunity to get away from the poverty of many families at that time. However, there was the emotional spur—again this has been referred to by my noble friend—that the Irish nationalists under the leadership of John Redmond had secured the passage of the Irish Home Rule Bill of July 1914, which excluded the counties of Ulster at that time as the exact number was still to be determined. The Home Rule Bill was effectively suspended for the duration of the war but there is little doubt that many of the volunteers who joined the colours in 1914 were inspired by Redmond’s leadership and encouragement and the perception of what he had achieved for Ireland as they saw it. One might almost say that Redmond represented the Irish version of “Your Country Needs You”.
Be that as it may, in the Great War, 310,000 men from the island of Ireland served in the British Army, of whom some 35,000 died, and probably at least half of those came from the south. We from both sides of the Irish Sea can take pride that in this and coming years there will be many Irish soldiers, whose bodies lie in France and Flanders, whose graves will be visited by their families for the first time in nearly 100 years.