Irish Volunteers
During the 1913 Dublin strike and lockout, unlike other contemporary middle-class commentators, he supported the striking workers and published a series of articles which revealed the terrible living and working conditions of Dublin’s poor, and was involved in the formation of a peace committee which endeavoured to negotiate a settlement between workers and employers.
At the same time he became deeply involved with the nationalist Irish Volunteers which he joined in 1913 spurned by Unionist resistance to Home Rule and their formation of the militant Ulster Volunteers. Kettle was sent by the Volunteers in 1914 on an arms raising mission to continental Europe where he witnessed at first hand the outbreak of World War I. He changed his assignment to being a war correspondent for the Daily News (London). Travelling through France and Belgium in August and September, he was horrified by the German atrocities against the local civilian population, warning against the dire threat to Europe of Prussian militarism.
| “ | The outbreak of war caught me in Belgium, where I was running arms for the National Volunteers, and on the 6 of August 1914, I wrote from Brussels in the Daily News that it was a war of "civilisation against barbarians". I assisted for many weeks in the agony of the valiant Belgian nation | ” |
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Famous quotes containing the words irish and/or volunteers:
“I went to a very militantly Republican grammar school and, under its influence, began to revolt against the Establishment, on the simple rule of thumb, highly satisfying to a ten-year-old, that Irish equals good, English equals bad.”
—Bernadette Devlin (b. 1947)
“Friendship is but another name for an alliance with the follies and the misfortunes of others. Our own share of miseries is sufficient: why enter then as volunteers into those of another?”
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