The Irish Soldier

In Peacetime and at War, at Home and Abroad, from Earliest Times to the Present

Thomas Bartlett, editor

This edited volume presents some thirty chapters by a team of international scholars reviewing the Irish military experience throughout the world over the past 1000 years with each chapter seeking to address the question of whether or not there was anything distinctive about ‘The Irish soldier’. 

Contents: Thomas Bartlett, Introduction; Catherine Swift, Irish fighting men in the era of Brian Boru; Caitlin Ellis, Viking armies in Ireland; Simon Egan, Warfare in later medieval Ireland; Ruth A. Canning, Elizabeth I’s Irish soldiers; James O’Neill, Hugh O’Neill and the Irish military revolution; Pádraig Lenihan, The Irish soldier, 1641–1702; Declan Downey, Irish soldiery in the armies of Spain and Austria, sixteenth to eighteenth centuries; Tim Fanning, Irish soldiers on the frontiers of Spanish America; Pierre-Louis Coudray, The Irish military experience in France, 1690–1800; Samuel K. Fisher, The Irish soldier in the American Revolution; Andrew Dorman, The Irish soldier in eighteenth-century Ireland; Suzanne Forbes and Charles I. McGrath, The barracks network in Ireland and the Irish soldier in the British Army; Caitriona Kennedy, Wellington’s Irish soldiers; Andrew MacKillop, Irish military identities in the English East India Company, c.1740–c.1820; Chandra Manning, Irish soldiers in the US Civil War; Paul Huddie, The Irish soldier in the Crimean War; Aoife Bhreatnach, Irish women in the nineteenth century British Army; Tony Gaynor, Irish soldiers in Ireland, 1800–1914; Nicholas Perry, The Irish landed class and the British Army, c.1770–1920; Mark McGowan, Canada’s Irish Catholic soldiers and the wars of Empire, 1899–1945; Jeff Kildea, The Irish soldier in Australia in the twentieth century; Patrick McCarthy, The Irish soldier in the First World War; Edward Burke, Paramilitarism and the state in modern Ireland; Eve Morrison, The IRA at war: biography of a movement; Mary McAuliffe, The soldiers of Cumann na mBan: women, militancy, and the revolutionary wars of 1919–22; Fionnuala Walsh, Irish women and the British military in the two world wars; Jack Kavanagh, Building an army for the Irish Free State; Lar Joye, A social and political history of An Fórsa Cosanta Áitiúil, 1946–2005; Eunan O’Halpin, Neutral soldiers amid global wars in the Emergency Army, 1939–45; Steven O’Connor, The Irish in the British Armed Forces during the Second World War; Seán Gannon, Irish soldiers and soldier-policemen: defending the British Empire, 1900–60; Michael Kennedy, The Irish soldier in Congo: ONUC, 1960–4; Eoin Kinsella, Women in the Irish Army.

Thomas Bartlett MRIA, professor emeritus of Irish history at the University of Aberdeen, has published widely on Irish history and most recently was the general editor for the 4-volume Cambridge History of Ireland (Cambridge, 2018).