Supplementary History: Recruiting the Irish

   Even with various anti-imperialists, from radical republicans to moderatenationalists, uniting under the banner of the Irish Transvaal Committeeand devoting a good deal of their energy to an intensive anti-recruitingcampaign, Dublin furnished a disproportionate number of Irish recruits.In "Eumaeus" Bloom is "only too conscious of the casualties invariablyresulting from propaganda . . . and the misery and suffering it entailed. . . chiefly, destruction of the fittest" (16.1599-1602). Although radicalwriters tried to explain away the enlistment on ideological grounds, JosephO'Brien has probably hit closer to home: "Idle hands and empty stomachsare a powerful antidote to patriotic idealism . . . and there were moreof these in Dublin than in any other part of the country.⁽¹⁾The years following the Boer War saw the gradual consolidation, acceleratedby World War I, of a resistant national consciousness that expanded whathad been the relatively restricted influence of various nationalist factions.Despite the existence in 1903 of such nationalist cultural formations asthe Gaelic League and the Irish Literary Revival, most of Dublin linedthe streets to cheer Edward VII's visit even as the Dublin Corporationrefused to honor him with a municipal address. From 1914 to 1918, some150,000 Irishmen enlisted, yet British recruiting also evoked a varietyof anti-recruiting responses, including pungent satires in the radicalweeklies, one of which cast Irish Parliamentary Party Leader John Redmond,whose face had appeared on recruiting posters, as the betraying priest-- now a khaki-clad recruiting officer -- in the rebel ballad "The CroppyBoy."⁽²⁾

    Duringthe Boer War recruiting and anti-recruiting materials consisted mainlyof small typeset exhortations. The Irish recruiting poster might read,"Your king and Country need another 100,000 men," andan anti-recruiting counterpart might call for citizens to "Remember Ninety-Eight"(referring to the failed rebellion of 1798 and the martyrdom of Wolfe Tone).With the onset of the Great War England continued to use purely verbalposters, primarily to hammer away at the supposed economic benefits ofjoining the army, but early in 1915 the government campaign began to exploitthe pictorial strategies that had been developed for commercial purposesby Ireland's leading advertising firms: M'Caw, Stevenson, and Orr, Ltd.;James Walker; David Allen and Sons, Ltd.; Hely's Ltd.; and Alexander Thom.Initially the same images, such as a dramatic rendering of the sinking Lusitania,were used in England and Ireland, with only the captions altered; otherposters could be used without changes of any kind. Yet in the most intensiverecruiting years, 1915 and 1918, posters in Ireland exploited a varietyof techniques and images targeted at specific segments of the Irish population.Propagandists realized that in a country whose citizens might react skepticallyto patriotic appeals -- witness Bloom in response to sentimental nationalistrhetoric in "Aeolus": "Whose land?" (7.273) -- recruiting efforts wouldhave to aim at the widest possible range of motivations for enlistment.Not surprisingly, virtually all Irish poster artists, unlike some quitewell-known English painters who contributed to the war effort, chose toremain anonymous.

    TheBillposter claimed in celebration of the recruiting campaign that "suchan illustration of poster power has been given as no country and no ageever saw before": "the poster held before the whole nation a conceptionof duty, a vision of Britannia in her might . . . a living omnipresentsense of the price of citizenship and of the right and justice and libertyfor which the nation is struggling."⁽³⁾ Evenanti-recruiting forces, when sufficient resources were available, exploitedthe "living omnipresent sense" attributed to visual images: during theBoer War, the Nation, a nationalist newspaper, "erected an outdoorprojection screen in College Green on which was flashed nightly the newsof the Boer successes, giving the assembled crowd the opportunity to cheerBoer generals and groan at British politicians when their likenesses appearedon the screen."⁽⁴⁾

1.O'Brien, "Dear, Dirty Dublin": A City in Distress, 1899-1916, 243-44.The ideological arguments: high recruitment was a consequence of Irishinfantilization owing to English education, a "damnable conspiracy againstIrish manhood"; others claimed that many recruits were members of the Anglo-IrishAscendancy, who hated Ireland, or members of the middle class, who wanteda commission.
 

2.See The Spark, May 2, 1915, which prints the complete ballad,reworked. Evidence suggests that economic, social, and political factors(such as the 1916 Rising) probably influenced enlistment more than anyparticular recruiting technique. See Patrick Callan, "Recruiting for theBritish Army in Ireland during the First World War," The Irish Sword,Vol. 17, No. 66 (Summer 1987).
 

3.Quoted by Allen, History of a Family Firm, 220.