Tom Kettle, an Irish nationalist who lost his life during the battle of the Somme

Tom Kettle was killed on the 9th of September 1916 at Ginchy during the horrendous 160-day battle of the Somme. He was one of up to 50,000 Irishmen who perished during the 4 years of the First World War. Kettle was one of the best-known figures among those Irish victims of that terrible conflict, having been a prominent public figure in the decade before the war. His story offers an invaluable insight into the difficult choices that confronted the Irishmen and women of that era, with its tangled histories that run through Dublin's General Post Office, on the one hand, and the battlefields and cemeteries of the Western Front on the other.

Tom Kettle came from a staunchly Irish nationalist background. His father, Andrew, was one of the founders of the Irish Land League, which sought to secure land ownership for Irish tenant farmers. Andrew Kettle was also a devoted acolyte of the late-19th century Irish parliamentary leader, Charles Stewart Parnell. 

The younger Kettle was a contemporary of James Joyce's at school and university. He was viewed as a star performer with a bright future in what seemed set, sooner or later, to become a self-governing Ireland. This was especially so after the Liberal Party, traditional supporters of Home Rule for Ireland, came back to power in London in 1906. 

After completing his studies, Kettle briefly edited a nationalist periodical whose aim was to bring fresh dynamism to the Irish Parliamentary Party, most of whose leading figures had by then enjoyed an extended political innings stretching back to the 1880s. Kettle married Mary Sheehy, daughter of a nationalist MP, and sister of the radical suffragette and pacifist, Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington, whose activist husband, Frank, features as McCann in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Kettle was progressive in his politics, favouring votes for women which many Irish MPs at Westminster opposed. 

When Kettle was elected in 1906 as MP for East Tyrone, this seemed to confirm his potential as a future leader of the Irish Party who could help boost its appeal to a rising generation of Irish nationalists who were being tempted by movements with more radical aspirations. Kettle stepped down in 1910 in order to pursue a career in academia, but continued to be an important voice in nationalist Ireland as Home Rule became an immediate prospect after the General Election of December 1910 as the Liberal Government was now dependant on the Irish Party for its majority in parliament.

Kettle was drawn back into heart of nationalist politics when the Home Rule crisis of 1912-1914 brought about the creation of the nationalist Irish Volunteers in opposition to the Ulster Volunteers, which had been set up to resist Home Rule. Kettle was among those who sought to ensure that the Volunteers would remain under the control of the moderate Irish Party and its leader, John Redmond. In 1913, he was supportive of the workers during the Dublin lock-out when he sought unsuccessfully to broker a settlement. 

Coincidentally, Kettle was in Belgium in early August 1914, purchasing weapons for the Irish Volunteers, and witnessed first-hand the German invasion of Belgium, which convinced him that the struggle against Germany was one in which Irish nationalists needed to become fully involved. He returned to Ireland and threw himself wholeheartedly into an effort to encourage men from nationalist Ireland to enlist for service in defence of Catholic Belgium. 

Looking back, it is clear that the outbreak of war in 1914 was one of the great watersheds in Irish history. It divided nationalist Ireland and split the Irish Volunteers, a majority of whom heeded John Redmond's advice to support the war effort. A minority refused to comply and this group came ultimately under the control of the Irish Republican Brotherhood which engineered the Easter Rising of 1916. 

Tom Kettle had his own family connection with the events of 1916 when his brother-in-law, Frank Sheehy-Skefington, was summarily executed by a deranged British officer during Easter week, even though he had taken no part in the Rising. Kettle must have gone to the front in the aftermath of the Easter Rising with a heavy heart. He confessed to a realisation that those who had fought in Dublin would come to be regarded as heroes and martyrs, while he would be remembered, if at all, as 'a bloody British officer.' 

Nevertheless, Kettle maintained an idealistic stance on the war to the very end of his life. He saw the conflict as a battle to save European civilisation and wanted Ireland to become more European in its orientation. Although in poor health on account of his excessive drinking, he insisted on being sent to the front in the summer of 1916. He hoped that the participation of Irishmen of all creeds in the war would be a prelude to two reconciliations, between Britain and Ireland and between unionist Ulster and nationalist Ireland. In his last days, the extremity of his predicament drew from him a fine poem that can stand comparison with any war poetry in the English language. It was written for his daughter, Betty, and aimed to convince her of the nobility of the cause for which he had been willing to sacrifice his life. 

Know that we fools who lie with the foolish dead

Died not for flag, nor King nor Emperor

But for a dream born in a herdsman's shed

And for the secret scripture of the poor.

The poet George Russell (AE) wrote that Kettle deserved his place alongside the leaders of the Easter Rising:

Equal your sacrifice may weigh,

Dear Kettle, of the generous heart.'

The reconciliation Kettle dreamed of was a long time in coming. In a way the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 does for a different time, and in different circumstances, what Kettle aspired to when he went to war in 1916.

Walking through Dublin's St. Stephen's Green, I invariably think of Tom Kettle as I pass the monument erected there in his memory. When I do so, I cannot help noticing that his neighbouring plinth contains a bust of Constance Markievicz, a leading participant in the Easter Rising, who, in the coinage of Ireland in 1916, occupies the reverse side from Kettle. A century on from those troubled times, we remember a single, well-worn patchwork of history and its legacy.

 

Daniel Mulhall is Ireland's Ambassador in London.