Kildea, Jeff. Anzacs and Ireland. UNSW Press, 2008. RRP $39.95
Just over four years ago, a memorial plaque was unveiled at Belvedere College, the Jesuit school in Dublin. It honoured all former students who died as victims of war. It therefore honoured men whose beliefs took them in quite different directions.
Many Irishmen volunteered to fight for Britain and the Empire in the First World War. Others took part in the 1916 Easter Rising and in the subsequent struggle against Britain for Irish independence. A third group, whose members painfully divided the Irish people, were those who died in the civil war of 1922-3.
Jeff Kildea's book, Anzacs and Ireland, goes some way towards explaining to a new readership why the gesture of reconciliation — not just at Belvedere but nearly everywhere else — was so long in coming about.
His central focus is the Irish and Australian forces who fought side by side at Gallipoli. He rightly deplores the fact that to have fought in what is seen as the 'wrong war' is to be an embarrassment, best forgotten. The 'Great Oblivion', as Irish historian FX Martin described the mood of denial, obscured the part played by nationalists as well as Empire loyalists in the war against Germany.
Some thought that by showing solidarity with Britain, they would hasten home rule for Ireland. Others saw Ireland's future within the Empire. For Irish-Australians, the same tensions existed, though from a different perspective.
In April 1916, just one year after the Gallipoli disaster, the problem of divided loyalties was made more acute by the Easter Rising in Dublin. Doomed to fail, it became, like Gallipoli, a legend more powerful than a military success could have been. The Irish men and women who raised the republican flag might have been dismissed as dreamers or fanatics — if the savagery of the British response had not made them all heroes.
Although Kildea aims at even-handedness, his account of the background of the Rising is curiously confused and muffled. The Irish who fought at Gallipoli, he says, did so 'with a similar mix of motives that inspired their cousins down under; they enlisted to serve Ireland, recently granted home rule, as much as the empire'. To suggest that Ireland already had home rule is quite mistaken. When Britain decided to defer home rule until the end of the war, the Irish had good reason