During the First World War
approximately 210,000 Irish men and a much smaller, but significant,
number of Irish women served in the British
armed forces. All were volunteers and a very high proportion were from Catholic
and Nationalist communities. This book is the first comprehensive analysis of
Irish recruitment between 1914 and 1918 for the island of Ireland as a
whole. It makes extensive use of previously neglected internal British
army recruiting returns held at The National Archives, Kew, along with other valuable
archival and newspaper sources.

There has been a tendency to
discount the importance of political factors in Irish recruitment, but this
book demonstrates that recruitment campaigns organised under the auspices of
the Irish National Volunteers and Ulster Volunteer Force were the earliest and
some of the most effective campaigns run throughout the war. The British
government conspicuously failed to create an effective recruiting organisation
or to mobilise civic society in Ireland. While the military mobilisation which
occurred between 1914 and 1918 was the largest in Irish history, British officials
persistently characterised it as inadequate, threatening to introduce
conscription in 1918.

This book also reflects on the disparity of sacrifice between
North-East Ulster and the rest of Ireland, urban and rural Ireland, and Ireland
and Great Britain.