Tom Kettle Irish Volunteers in World War One

Irish Forums Member Location: Mayo. Ireland

Pat your good post
British Crown Betrayal of The Irish Volunteer of WW1 1914 -2014
The mention of Tom Kettle.
He was a very complex Irish man, one a bit ahead of his time.

Thought you might like these poems of Tom Kettle, which highlights some of the points in your post of the Irish Volunteers in World War One

Clear from Kettles own words that history is being perverted today by those in power to present BS selective history to appease the brit so called royals and hangers on.
Unfortunately for the perverse and ignorant, The words of Irish Volunteers make it clear they did not volunteer for any British union jack flag rag or any of their mafia royals, royals who are of the same saxe coburg family as the Kaiser, that supposed royal and the british and the Russian supposed royals were all fist cousins and of the same German rooted organised crime family that made the Corleones look like cheap street hoods.

human slavery to drug trafficking to murder to terrorism to torture to extortion. Every human exploitation crime in the book is how these so called royals got their original money.

These modern day parasites that fools look up to without question, are nothing but descendants of big time organised crime. Organised criminals who made it to the top.
Like looking up to the granddaughter of Al Capone had he made it!

WW1 was in essence a organized crime family feud, unfortunately on a massive scale.

Kettle's best known poem is a sonnet,
"To My Daughter Betty, the Gift of God", written just days before his death. The last lines are an answer to those who criticized Irishmen for fighting in the British army saying that they "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."

Thomas Michael "Tom" Kettle (9 February 1880 – 9 September 1916)
born Co. Dublin; he was a Irish nationalist, economist and poet.
Thomas Kettle was the seventh of twelve children of Andrew J. Kettle (1833–1916) a progressive farmer, and founder of the Irish Land League, and his wife, Margaret, daughter of Laurence McCourt of St. Margaret’s Finglas, north co. Dublin, and was born in Clontarf, Dublin.
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His father was an exacting stern man, demanding and stubborn, influencing his son Thomas considerably through his political activities, having been involved from an early age in the constitutional movement to achieve Irish Home Rule. Andrew J. joined Michael Davitt in the foundation of the Irish Land League and was one of the signatories of the "No Rent Manifesto". He adhered to Parnell in his crisis of 1890, and stood for election as a nationalist candidate on several occasions.

He was the first president of the Young Ireland Branch of United Irish League (Home Rule), associated with W. P. Ryan in the attempt to bring ‘a fresh greenness to the trunk of obstructionism’. He was elected Nationalist MP for East Tyrone, 25th Aug. 1906, increasing his majority in the second election, 1910. He joined the board of the Theatre of Ireland with Edward Martyn, Thomas MacDonagh, Patrick Pearse, and others.
He resigned from Parliament, 1910, for whole-time professorship, ‘to formulate an economic idea fitted to express the self-realisation of a nation which is resolute to realise itself’. He established and chaired the Peace Committee during the Lock-Out Strike of 1913, with Joseph Plunkett and Tom Dillon as co-secretaries.
Co-founding the Irish Volunteers in 1913, he purchased guns for Volunteers in Belgium. In explaining the seeming contradiction between his nationalism and serving in the British army, he said that England ‘could not fight for liberty in Europe and Junkerdom in Ireland’. He was a war correspondent for the Daily News then joined the Dublin Fusiliers in 1914 (‘Army of Freedom’). Returning from the front in 1914 he toured Ireland and made 200 recruiting speeches appearing in uniform at an anti-recruitment meeting in Dublin he was booed by the audience (as Yeats noted). Shortly after he requested to be sent to the front; feeling his usefulness as a recruiter was over. He died with conspicuous gallantry in the attack on Ginchy at the battle of the Somme.
A memorial bust by Francis W. Doyle-Jones (d.1938) in St. Stephen’s Green bears the last lines from To My Daughter Betty..:
‘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.’

Tom Kettle wrote a poem neglected in the anthologies and ignored by his biographer J. B. Lyons. It was called Reason in Rhyme, composed in answer to an English plea to forget the past. According to Tom Kettle's friend, Robert Lynd, writing on hearing of Kettle's death at Ginchy on the Somme in 1916, the poem represents Kettle's statement to England, and expressed his mood to the last.
Source: Wikipedia

Reason in Rhyme
by Thomas Michael Kettle

"Bond from the toil of bate we may not cease:
Free we are to be your friend.
And when you make your banquet, and we come,
soldier with equal soldier must we sit
Closing a battle, not forgetting it.
With not a name to hide
This mate and mother of valiant "rebels" dead
Must come with all her history on her head.
We keep the past for pride:
No deepest peace shall strike our poets dumb
No rawest squad of all Death’s volunteers
No rudest man who died
To tear your flag down in the bitter years
But shall have praise and three times thrice again
When at that table men shall drink with men’.

To My Daughter Betty, The Gift of God
by Thomas Michael Kettle
dated ‘In the field, before Guillemont, Somme, Sept. 4, 1916’.

In wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown
To beauty proud as was your mother's prime,
In that desired, delayed, incredible time,
You'll ask why I abandoned you, my own,
And the dear heart that was your baby throne,
To dice with death. And oh! they'll give you rhyme
And reason: some will call the thing sublime,
And some decry it in a knowing tone.
So here, while the mad guns curse overhead,
And tired men sigh with mud for couch and floor,
Know that we fools, now 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.

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In other words he and they, the Irish, fought and died in WW1 for Ireland, as Irish men for a better Ireland.

Not for Britain or any of the European Crowns.

As your post mentioned about the essence of ww1. Too many of the minority of Irish who take any interest are all too readily convinced by pro unionists and bias journalists like myers or bias and selectively simplistic politicians like mary ann o'brien and a few others.
They want the world to believe in their own rewriting of the Irish in WW1 and WW2. Myers and others would have all Irish of WW1 aand before and after as serving King and Britain, if not devout loyalists.

Unfortunately for the bias, History does no come better than first hand reference!
Kettles, who (unlike armchair colonel myers or any other current bias British unionist) were involved in the war.
It terms of understanding this bit of Irish History and the general motivations of Irish volunteers, Kettles' word is more important.

Because of Kettle and others, there is no credible rewriting of the Irish volunteer reasons to go to war, because Kettle was one of the main recruiters for Irish call to arms for World War One. Tom Kettle was the main recruiter of Irish World war one volunteers, so when he says clearly.

Know that we fools, now 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.

We can take it (and as you state, the essence) as the real history.
They fought as Irishmen for Ireland and not for Britain or any British so called royal, the reality of all such are = descendants of or personally active in organised crimes.

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Tom Kettle Irish Volunteers in World War One