This book adds a major culture-based study to the field of Irish history. It addresses a topic and touches on themes that continue to be relevant and debated in contemporary Ireland. It makes a major contribution to the “New Military History” of Ireland and adds the memory of the First World War of one of the “small nations” that emerged in the wake of that conflict to the numerous memory studies that exist for the primary combatant nations (Britain, France, and Germany). This revised paperback version of the original monograph also includes illustrations of memorial sites in some detail.

One of the most useful aspects of book is that it gives life to the culture of a minority sub-community in Ireland and addresses the challenges this community faced in order to remain active, and the way that community interacted with the majority of Irish people throughout the twentieth, and into the twenty-first century. Therefore, this project is not simply a snapshot of a specific event in Irish history, but examines the way that the memory of the war and those who retained that memory changed and evolved over the course of a century.