Who can join the
As of 2011, recruits from the Republic of Ireland together with Commonwealth recruits made up roughly 5% of annual recruitment to the British armed forces. During 2017 a recruit from the Republic of Ireland was signed up to the British armed forces every four and a half days.
From the 1780s, around a third of Army recruits were Irish. Between the 1820s and 1860s, this rose to around 40 percent. They were drawn in particular to serve in the European regiments of Britain's Indian Armies and played an important role in the building of the British Empire.
The Irish Guards – known affectionately throughout the Army as 'The Micks' – is an Irish Regiment which has proven its loyalty and grit on many tough operations. It's soldiers have the privilege of guarding the Royal Family. They recruit from the island of Ireland, United Kingdom and beyond.
The Irish Guards was raised by order of Queen Victoria in April 1900 in response to acts of gallantry by Irish units during the Boer War (1899-1902). The regiment was presented with its first Colours in May 1902 by King Edward VII.
In December 2022, it was announced that the Princess of Wales was to take over her husband's position as Colonel of the Irish Guards. Prince William has assumed the rank of Colonel of the Welsh Guards from his father, who today (6 May) was crowned in the decadent surroundings of Westminster Abbey.
Bloody Sunday
On Sunday 30 January 1972, a civil rights march in Derry became the focus of international attention when British troops killed 14 people and wounded another 13. The exact course of events was disputed for years, but in 1998 the British ordered a full-scale judicial inquiry.
The Northern Ireland–resident battalions of the Royal Irish Regiment – which grew out of the Ulster Defence Regiment – were stood down on 1 September 2006. The operation officially ended at midnight on 31 July 2007, making it the longest continuous deployment in the British Army's history, lasting over 37 years.
In the course of the war, an estimated 70,000 citizens of neutral Ireland served as volunteers in the British Armed Forces (and another estimated 50,000 from Northern Ireland, and this figure does not include Irish people who were resident in Britain before the war (though many used aliases).
18In spite of neutrality, as we have already seen, about 70,000 southern Irish volunteers joined the British armed forces during the Second World War.
Liverpool is widely known for having the strongest Irish heritage of any UK city - perhaps alongside Glasgow. This originates from the city's port being close to Ireland, which made it easy to reach for all those escaping the Great Famine between 1845 and 1849. More than 20% of Liverpool's population was Irish by 1851.
The Great Famine in the 1840s - a result of the potato disease that killed the crop most Irish depended on to survive - caused a million to leave Ireland, with many going to Britain and the USA.
The Irish would remain neutral throughout the war but were universally viewed as far more sympathetic and helpful to the Allies than the Axis. Despite their formal neutrality, the Irish experienced a number of aerial bomb attacks from German planes in 1940 and 1941.
Declan Rice, Jack Grealish, Kalvin Phillips Harry Maguire, and Harry Kane all boast significant ties to Ireland, with Rice and Grealish both representing Ireland earlier in their careers. All five players will likely play a part in England's upcoming World Cup campaign in Qatar.
In January 1922, the British military began its final withdrawal from the 26 counties of 'Southern Ireland' that would, in time, become the Irish Free State. The very real significance of this was not lost on contemporaries.
Ireland is ranked 90 of 145 out of the countries considered for the annual Global Firepower review. The nation holds a Power Index score of 1.8161 with a score of 0.0000 being considered exceptional in the GFP assessment.
To date, Ireland has not sought to join as a full NATO member due to its traditional policy of military neutrality, although there is an ongoing debate on whether they will join in the future after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The reasons for Irish neutrality during the Second World War are widely accepted: that any attempt to take an overtly pro-British line might have resulted in a replay of the Civil War; that Southern Ireland could make little material contribution to the Allied effort, while engagement without adequate defence would ...
The American war in Vietnam lasted over ten years and during the conflict three million Vietnamese and more than 60,000 US and foreign soldiers died. Emigrants with Green Cards in the US in the 1960s were eligible for conscription and it is estimated that around 2,000 Irish-born soldiers may have served in Vietnam.
2014 onwards: A squadron of SAS and Special Reconnaissance Regiment troopers have been secretly working in Northern Ireland for the past three years.
Several splinter groups have been formed as a result of splits within the IRA, including the Continuity IRA and the Real IRA, both of which are still active in the dissident Irish republican campaign.
In 1969 D Squadron, 22 SAS deployed to Northern Ireland for just over a month. The SAS returned in 1972 when small numbers of men were involved in intelligence gathering. The first squadron fully committed to the province was in 1976 and by 1977 two squadrons were operating in Northern Ireland.
618,000 deaths from fighting and disease out of a total pre-war population of c. 1.5 million, or 41 per cent of the population.
We lived as part of the English, and then British, Empire for over 700 years. The Normans first conquered Ireland in 1169 and aside from a brief decade of independence during the 1640s Ireland formed an integral part of the English imperial system, until 1922 and the foundation of modern state.
Resistance to British rule in Ireland had existed for hundreds of years. Irish nationalists, the majority of them Catholic, resisted this rule in a number of peaceful or violent ways up until the start of the First World War. Irish nationalists wanted Ireland to be independent from British control.