Welcome to my new Website

I am a very proud Irishman. I was born in Ballina, Co Mayo, in the province of Connaught, on

the rugged West coast of Ireland. My Irish heritage means everything to me, as i am sure it does to many of you. It is only in the last few years that i really started looking into the history of my country, and the great achievments made by Irishmen who sadly left Ireland's shores either through starvation, poverty, desperation or even for adventure. The military achievments made by Irishmen is second to none. No others can match it, as this website will show. The bravery, courage and the natural ability of Irishmen to be excellent soldiers is beyond doubt which many who have served with them will testify to. They have earned a reputation which is unequalled.

They have produced some of the finest Field Marshals and Generals in history who have moulded the British Army into what it is today and have been the envy of the world and yet they have fought for every other cause but their own. It is indeed a proud thing to be Irish. This website is dedicated to all Irishmen who fought and made the ultimate sacrifice.

I have always been interested in everthing military. Ever since the day dot. I suppose i could say like most Irishmen ' it's in me blood ' I am also a military collector. Tragic circumstances took me back to Ireland when i was eight years old,

and it was here that i first heard of far off wars and places like India. I was always asking my Grandfather Tom Devers about his brothers, and which regiments they served in. He would just reply that they fought in France and that famous Irish Regiment the Connaught Rangers. ' The Devil's Own ' My mother would tell me about her Grandfather, who served and fought in India. Of a picture which used to hang in the house of a hansome young man in his khaki uniform sporting a handle bar moustache. How my Great Grandfather hid in a river from local tribesmen breathing through water reeds. My Great Great Uncle John Devers, born 1879, served in the Sligo Artillery before transferring to the 3rd Battalion Connaught Rangers in 1905. His son James Devers, private 32328, was in the 1st Battalion Connaught Rangers, and was at Solen, in India in 1920 when the Connaught Rangers mutiny broke out. He was classed as one of the leaders and received the death penalty for his involvemnet but this was commuted to Life imprisonment. That is a story in itself.

My Great Uncle John Joseph Devers, served with the 3rd Battalion Connaught Rangers prior to the Great War. He then joined the 10th Battalion Highland Light Infantry and won the Military Medal whilst serving in France. My Great Uncle Jimmy Devers served in the Irish Free State Army and another Great Uncle Ned Murtagh served for 13 years with the Leinster Regiment, and was discharged in 1915. A more tragic story is that of my cousin Paddy Murtagh. Paddy served at Dunkirk and was with the Royal Artillery throughout World War Two also seeing action in Burma and Italy. Then there was Fred, Paddy's brother, who served with the Australian 9th Infantry Division in New Guinea during World War Two.

In more modern times, Ireland has supplied 33,000 troops for United Nations peacekeeping operations in seventeen different countries. They have taken casualties at Niemba in the Congo where my cousin Kevin served during the 1960s Congo crisis and also in South Lebanon where my cousin John Moore served many tours, along with a host of other battle zones.Their courage, diplomacy and restraint were in stark and refreshing contrast to those legendary fighting qualities of their compatriots in foreign armies. Wherever Irishmen have served they have always been highly regarded.

Dispossessed and disenfranchised, disciplined and dedicated, courageous, loyal, doughty and audacious - the sentimental, and not exclusively native view of the Irish soldier fighting under a foreign flag. ' Low, vulgar men without one qualification to recommend them - more fir to carry the hod than the epaulette ' - an alternative and widely held opinion of that same ' universal ' warrior. There is nothing which uniquely qualifies the Irishman to be a soldier. He is of medium height and weight for a European, is not gifted with any superior stamina or powers of endurance, is no more accurate with a rifle, is not more or less self-disciplined than the average. So why, along with the German, is the Irishman burdened with a reputation for military brilliance, craft and daring sans pareil? If the Germans dominate the officer class of the transcendent army then the Irish must surely have provided most of the NCOs. Not only has Ireland produced great soldiers, but also some of the greatest Generals and Field Marshals.These include, the Duke of Wellington, Lord Roberts, Lord Kitchener and Bernard Montgomery, just to name a few. All have had an impact on world history.

Is the notion of the superhuman Irish fighting man a myth or is there a certain, almost spiritual, quality about an Irishman in uniform? That the mythology about the Irish soldier exists is curious in itself. Why should the Irish rifleman, lancer, fusilier or trooper be more aggressive or invincible than those around him? After all, the one thing which most Irish soldiers have had in common since the 1700s is that they have been fighting in someone else's army and prosecuting someone else's war. Only rarely has the Irishman fought for his own homeland. Periodically he might fight for his religion. But more often he risked his life, limb and liver for a foreign potenate who rewarded him by putting a roof over his head and bread on his table. Certainly, on occasion, he might respond with particular truculence to an army fighting under

the Union Jack, but he might, on those occasions, find himself opposed by another Irishman struggling no less enthusiastically in the British cause. It is not sufficient to dismiss such commonplace occurences with blithe references to antagonistic political or religious traditions on this island. More often than not those two adversaries were from the same tradition. Perhaps the real truth behind the idealised ' Fighting Irishman ' lies in the very nature of war itself. It is hardly a solitary pastime. Like the various sports which could be said to have replaced it as a focus of aggressive nationalism or ethnic territoriality, it is a group activity. The British establishment, though conscious of the potential dangers, had the wit to place the Irish soldier shoulder-to-shoulder with his fellow countryman in some of the most prestigious units in the army. The result was a soldier far more motivated than one fighting for his personal survival alongside strangers. Winston Churchill greatly admired the Irish soldier, and the bravery they displayed during the Gallipoli Campaign. He knew the importance of having an Irish Brigade during the Second World War, and although he met with opposition from the Northern Ireland Government at Stormont and John Andrews the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland he went ahead with the idea anyway. The idea of an Irish Brigade was nothing new. Irish Brigades were present in France, Mexico, the American Civil War, the Boer War and the Spanish Civil War.

It is hard to think of a major American or western European military engagement in the last 300 years which has not had at least one Irishman present. They have fought for every King and Queen of England, France, Spain and Austria. Irishmen have soldiered under George Washington, Simon Bolivar, the Duke of Wellington ( himself a Dubliner ) They have founded the navies of the USA ( John Barry ) Argentina ( William Brown ) and Austria ( John Forbes ) They have come under fire at Fort Sumter, Balaclava, Waterloo, Gettysburg, the Alamo,

Gettysburg, the Little Big Horn (A muster role of the 7th Cavalry in 1876 included 126 Irishmen out of a total of 822 members ) Rorke's Drift ( where more Irish than Welsh were present ) Mafeking, Jarmara, the Somme, Normandy, Arnhem, Korea and Vietnam. Why? Few of them if any were forced, coerced or compelled to be in any of those dangerous, deadly, disease-ridden places. So what were they doing there? Why did other people's fights become the Irishman's fight again and again? Quite often he had left the shores of his own land, in search of a better life. A simple case of survival. Earning money to feed and support his family. He had been subjected to either political exile or to terrible neglect, abuse, starvation and poverty by the British establishment. His own country had been torn apart at the very soul and could no longer support him. And Britain tapped into that never ending flow of Irish blood to fill the ranks of its army. General Sir John Hackett would write ' The door of the world was opened to him by the English Crown ' Those who did not join the forces of the crown, fled to the Continent. After the treaty of Limerick a huge body of Roman Catholic Irish soldiers, who had opposed the Protestant King William, left for France under Patrick Sarsfield, the Earl of Lucan. Many left with the hope of returning in the ranks of a larger French army to put King James II back on the throne. They and there successors who followed the same route throughout the Penal Law days of the 18th

century, were forlornly dubbed ' The Wild Geese ' Those early exiles entered the service of the King of France, the Catholic Louis XIV who was at war with most of Europe. For the next century, almost until the revolution, there would always be an Irish Brigade in the French Army. Sarsfield died in 1693 at the Battle of Landen, fighting for France in Flanders against the forces of William of Orange.

During that first conflict involving the ' Wild Geese ' - the war of the League of Ausburg - over 20,000 Irish soldiers died. A similar number fell in the ensuing War of the Spanish Succession. But within a relatively short period all realistic hopes of French intervention in Ireland had faded. It would be a mistake to see all the Irishmen recruited into the French forces from 1700 onwards as political exiles. The French tended to view them as mere mercenaries, which to some degree they were. Under the strict Penal laws, applied to Roman Catholics in 18th century Ireland, they were barred from serving in the British Army. If they wanted to persue a military career ( often as the only alternative to povery ) they had to do so on the European Continent.

The apotheosis of France's Irish Brigade came at the Battle of Fontenoy, fought in 1745 during the War of the Austrian Succession. Four thousand Irish troops, in six infantry and one cavalry regiments, were numbered among those in the 60,000 strong French army led by Merechal Maurice de Saxe. The French were opposed by a mainly British and Dutch force. De Saxe had chosen the ground over which the battle would be fought and he had chosen well. The Irish Brigade was on the left flank of the French lines and was not involved in early fighting during which de Saxe's main force crumbled under an intense and sustained attack led by 16,000 strong British troops under the Duke of Cumberland. Included in the ranks of this army would have been many Protestant Irish, not barred from enlistment by the Penal laws and who circumstances were almost as straitened as those of their Catholic fellow countrymen.

The Irish regiments bringing with them four cannon, were sent in to dislodge Cumberlands right flank and to help save the day for the French. Amid provocative roars of ' Remember Limerick ' the Irish Brigade ' sent the British reeling back ' according to a contemporary account. But they suffered serious losses in doing so; at 20 per cent they were proportionately higher than any other unit in the French Army. Thomas Davis, the young Irelander, in his suitable bombastic poem ' Fontenoy ' captured the inevitable racial element inherent in the ferocity of the Irish charge ' How fierce the look these exiles wear, who're wont be so gay - The treasured wrongs of fifty years are in their hearts today. '

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