‘We were an unwanted surplus’: Irish Medical Emigration and the British Forces

Abstract

Since the eighteenth century the enlisted ranks of the British armed forces had always attracted a significant number of impoverished Irishmen with few other prospects of employment, particularly those from the urban slums of Dublin.¹ In the 1930s, as the effects of the Great Depression began to be felt in the Irish Free State, the pattern of emigration and for some, enlistment, took hold once again: between 1936 and 1946 189,942 people left the country (mainly for Britain) and during the war emigration reduced Irish unemployment figures from 15 per cent in 1939 to 10 per cent in 1945.² But unlike the Irish rank and file, those Irish people who became commissioned officers generally did not need to join the armed forces to provide for a family or for lack of any other employment. Most came from families with a comfortable standard of living and having completed their secondary education they had some degree of choice about the type of career they could pursue. When they did take the king’s commission, a family tradition, a feeling of loyalty or a yearning for adventure usually trumped pecuniary considerations. However, there was one segment of Irish officers who generally joined for a more pragmatic reason.