War Memorial Gardens, Islandbridge

The Parliament in London had said there would be Home Rule for
Ireland at the end of the war, therefore, said John Redmond, Ireland
was for the first time in seven hundred years in effect a country. So she
could go to war as a nation at last – nearly – in the sure and solemnly
given promise of self-rule. The British would keep their promise and
Ireland must shed her blood generously. Of course, the Ulstermen
joined up in the selfsame army for an opposite reason, and an opposite
end. Perhaps that was curious, but there it was. It was to prevent Home
Rule they joined – so his father said, with fervent approval. And many
to the south of them in those times felt the same. It was a deep, dark
maze of intentions, anyhow. (Barry, 2006, p.14-15)
The Great War transformed the Irish question. In 1914, the majority of
Irish Nationalists accepted that Irish self-government would be within
the United Kingdom; by the end of the war the majority of Nationalists
apparently supported the establishment of an Irish Republic outside
the
British Empire. (Hennessey, 1998, 236)
• Barry’s volunteers are, in the main, “loyal, unthinking and accepting
sort of men” (LLW, p.26)
• “to save Europe so that we might have the Home Rule in Ireland in
the upshot,” (LLW, p. 157)
• “I came out to fight for a country that doesn’t exist, and now […] it
never will. That’s an Ireland that maybe did exist two years ago as you
set out, but I doubt if it will much longer.” (LLW, p.157)
• “There’s many a man out here to be sending the few shillings home,
and that’s no crime either” (LLW, p.215).
• “there were women like her being killed by the Germans in Belgium,
and how could he let that happen?” (LLW, p.13)
• The sorrow he had felt at the death of his captain, and Williams and
Clancy, something had happened to that sorrow. It had gone rancid in
him, he thought; it had boiled down to something he didn’t
understand. The pith of sorrow was in the upshot a little seed of
death. (LLW, 59).
“They stripped to the waist and got black as desert Arabs. The white skins were
disappearing. Mayo, Wicklow, it didn’t matter. They might be Algerians now, some
other bit of the blessed Empire” (LLW, 54).

Sebastian Barry em entrevista ao jornal The Guardian:

I’m afraid of the damage that is caused by not speaking of people like so
many families’ old uncle Jacks who died in the First World War fighting
for England. I’m concerned these silences leave a gap in yourself which
then leaves a gap in your children and can ultimately lead to a hole in the
country’s sense of itself. Ireland’s history is so much more rich, exciting,
varied and complicated than we had realised. What I’m trying to do is gather
in as much as I can. It’s not to accuse, it is just to state that it is so. (Wroe, 2008, p.
13)
References:

BARRY, Sebastian. A Long, Long Way. New York: Viking Penguin, 2006.
HENNESSEY, Thomas. Dividing Ireland: World War I and Partition. London & New York: Routledge, 1998, p.
235.
O’TOOLE, Fintan. Introduction. In: BARRY, Sebastian. Plays: 1. London: Methuen Publishing Limited, 1997.
WHELAN, Yvonne. Reinventing Modern Dublin: Streetscape, Iconography and the Politics of Identity. Dublin:
UCD Press, 2003.
WROE, Nicholas. “A Life in Writing: Sebastian Barry.” Guardian Review, 11 October 2008, p. 12-13.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/oct/11/sebastian-barry-booker-prize. Accessed 04/08/2013.