Exploring British Ex-Servicemen in the National Army

The question of ex-British military servicemen serving in the National Army is one of the few areas of the military which has been the subject of research to date, which reflects the often politicised nature of the discourse surrounding the role of ex-servicemen and ‘loyalists’ in the newly established Irish Free State. In recent studies of ex-servicemen and loyalists in Southern Ireland, the impact of ex-servicemen upon the performance of the National Army has been accepted with limited interrogation. There is a simplistic analysis which takes the existence of military veterans as evidence of future victories and general performance. There is also the issue of sustained Republican propaganda on this topic, which has utilised ex-servicemen as a proxy for ‘foreign’ influences and as an explanation for the defeat of anti-Treaty Irish Republican Army (IRA) forces during the Irish civil war. This chapter examines ex-British servicemen who enlisted in the National Army, a series of headline claims about this group that have been repeated throughout the discourse and the attempts to hire ex-servicemen as military instructors in July–August 1922 and the claims of Liam Tobin and the ‘Old’ IRA faction of the National Army on the supposed preferential treatment of ex-servicemen in the military.