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IRELAND & THE WAR: DOWNLOAD TEXT - IMPACT

The war broke out on the 4th of August 1914, and both the Ulster and Irish Volunteers agreed to postpone their differences until after the war, which they thought would only last until Christmas. Economically, Dublin was ill prepared for war. The economy of Dublin was built upon beer, biscuits and bread. The poverty and squalor of much of Dublin in the early years of the twentieth century appalled all who encountered it. A government report issued in 1914 assessed, that of a Dublin population of 304,000, some 194,000 or approximately 63% could be reckoned as working class. The majority of these working class lived in tenement houses, almost half of them with no more than one room per family. 37% of the entire working class of Dublin lived at a density of more than six persons per room, 14% lived in houses declared unfit for human habitation.

The only water supply for houses that sometimes contained as many as ninety people was often a single tap in the outside yard. ‘We cannot conceive,’ wrote the committee who presented the report, ‘how any self-respecting male or female could be expected to use accommodation such as we have seen’. Of the non-tenement houses in which the rest of the working class population lived, the report stated that some ‘scarcely deserve the name house, and could be more aptly described as shelters.’ The death rate in Dublin was higher than many other large centres of population in the United Kingdom, being the highest of all in Wexford, Galway and Cork  respectively. The same report reproached Dublin Corporation over its housing commitments. It was against this background that the recruiting sergeants of the British Army at the outbreak of war went to work However, it would be wrong to assume that from such areas of social deprivation in Dublin, Kitchener filled his new army battalions. Bad and all as it was to live in squalor in Dublin, actually dying in squalor in Flanders was something totally different.

As a recruiting area, Dublin was a safe bet. It has been calculated that between the years 1910 and 1913, recruiting into the regimental area of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers was double the national average, far exceeding Belfast and Cork. Between the years of the Great War, out of a population of 304,000, approx. 30,000 men joined the Colours. Between 1917 and 1918, a further 8,400 went to work in the shipyards and munitions factories in England. In the first week of September 1914, recruitment in Dublin was on a par with Belfast i.e., an average of 150 men joined up every day. By the end of October, it is estimated that approx. 5,500 men had joined up in Dublin alone, the majority of them from Dublin and the surrounding towns. By March 1915, out of a male population of 226,364 approximately 8,758 men enlisted in Dublin.