British military justice backfired in the case of Irish ‘Tommies’
By Brian Flanagan
School history teaches that World War I’s causes were complex: Nationalism, Militarism, Imperial ambition and decline. Sometimes the slogans were simpler: ‘the shot heard around the world’, ‘over by Christmas’, and ‘the war to end war’. New research into the Irish experience reveals just how precarious the whole edifice of war, including the State’s monopoly on violence, then was.
Over 130,000 Irishmen, Catholic and Protestant alike, volunteered to fight for the then United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland. However, as the war dragged on, Britain’s heavy-handed suppression of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin — a rebellion timed to exploit Britain’s military commitments overseas — transformed Irish perceptions of British rule.
New research reveals just how precarious the edifice of war, including the State’s monopoly on violence, was
Disregarding warnings by Irish parliamentarians, the British authorities executed — by firing squad — the Rising’s leaders. These included the grievously injured James Connolly, himself a British army veteran, whom they tied to a chair. A backlash to these tactics ushered in the War of Independence, through which, by 1921, most of Ireland would exit British rule entirely. A study of the attitudes of Irish WWI volunteers, by Professor Daniel Chen to be published in the Journal of Law, Economics and Organization, in July 2025, shows how decisively Britain’s actions eroded its standing as Ireland’s source of law and order.
The British army lost over 700,000 men in Europe’s trench warfare. And there was no escape from the Western Front. Soldiers who fled the fighting were almost invariably caught within a fortnight, court-martialled, convicted and sentenced to death. A decision was then taken — on a seemingly random basis — on whether to implement or commute the soldier’s sentence.
Through subjecting the convicts to this ‘pitiless lottery’, British commanders unwittingly created the conditions for a natural experiment by which the deterrent effect of capital punishment could be tested in roughly the same way medical trials test the prophylactic effect of a vaccine.
Analysing the impact of executions and commutations on the army’s Irish contingent, Professor Daniel Chen of Harvard University made a remarkable discovery — one which runs counter to historical research that downplays the Rising’s effect on Irish morale.
The harshness of British military justice seems to have had the desired effect of deterring indiscipline — in general. On the army’s Irish soldiers, in contrast, it had the opposite effect.
Before the Easter Rising, about 17 percent of the unauthorised absences that followed the execution of an Irish soldier involved another Irishman — five points (12 percent) higher than when the soldier’s death sentence was commuted after the Rising, however, the share of absences that followed executions jumped to 23 percent, while that following commutations remained at 12 percent, widening the gap to over double.
It appears irrational to be more open to committing a crime if you’ve seen someone else punished, let alone executed, for it. No government expects its people to react in this way. But this was precisely how Britain’s Irish soldiers increasingly came to view the offence of deserting their unit. Self-interest offers little explanation. In refusing to continue to fight for the Crown abroad, a judgement of its legitimacy at home was at work.
Sometimes, an execution is just a killing — sometimes, a criminal punishment is just violence. In responding to the executions of their countrymen not with greater compliance but rather with risky defiance, Britain’s Irish volunteers demonstrated the difference—and how quickly one can seem to change into the other.
Initially supportive of Britain’s war aims, the Irish poet Francis Ledwidge wrote, “I joined the British Army because she stood between Ireland and an enemy common to our civilisation”.
By the time of his death in the Battle of Passchendaele in July 1917, Ledwidge’s confidence had vanished: “If someone were to tell me now that the Germans were coming over our back wall, I wouldn’t lift a finger to stop them. They could come!”. This stark shift was mirrored widely: after the Rising, Irish military recruitment collapsed, and subsequent British attempts to impose conscription faltered. What Chen discovered is that, on the Western Front, Britain’s punishment of Irish revolutionaries at home had the effect of inverting the whole concept of British punishment as a deterrent.
The experience of the Irish ‘Tommy’ remind us that the distinction between a legitimate government and a vigilante is always provisional
We object to vigilante justice not because the punishment does not fit the crime but because of the punisher’s illegitimacy. We insist, instead, on the rule of law. The Irish volunteers’ reaction to the British punishment of militant republicans tells us that official justice is fragile. The tendency of even the severest punishment to positively encourage disobedience vividly illustrates how swiftly a State’s moral authority can unravel.
With Britain’s seeming violation of the implicit trust that had sent Irishmen willingly into battle, desertion became as much an act of political resistance as a military crime. The experience of the Irish ‘Tommy’ reminds us that the distinction between a legitimate government and a vigilante is always provisional.
Brian Flanagan is Associate Professor in the School of Law and Criminology at Maynooth University