Soldiers who fought for the British during the first world war gained a reputation for bravery, so why were so many executed, ask John Burns and Scott Millar

Nowadays we would say Private Bernard McGeehan had special needs. In his own day he would have been called a bit simple. His commanding officer in the first world war found the Derry man “inclined to be rather stupid”.

For a while that saved his life. Instead of getting a frontline role, McGeehan was given a job in transport. But his superiors there found him “useless”, and he was sent to the trenches.

It was a miserable experience. “Ever since I joined, all the men have made fun of me, and I didn’t know what I was doing when I went away,” the former telegraph messenger in Derry post office said at his court martial.

“Every time I go in the trenches they throw stones at me and pretend it is shrapnel, and they call me all sorts of names. I have been out here 18 months and had no leave.”

McGeehan went missing from his unit on September 20, 1916. After walking for a week, he turned up near Montreuil begging for something to eat and drink. Under interrogation, he said he had got lost “coming out of the trenches”.

The handwritten account of his trial runs to just two pages. One officer testified that McGeehan was constantly afraid in the trenches “and appeared incapable of understanding orders”. Lt Colonel H Leech added: “He seems of weak intellect and is worthless as a soldier.”

Julian Putkowski, a historian who has studied his case, says he was executed because officers had no further use for him as a soldier, “other than as a source of grisly propaganda with which to intimidate his fellow soldiers”.

McGeehan was shot at dawn, 6.16am, on November 2, 1916. He was one of 25 Irish soldiers executed during the first world war while serving in the British Army. Now Dermot Ahern, the minister for foreign affairs, has asked the British government to pardon them.

“We require them (the British) to make some move in this respect,” Ahern said pointedly on Friday.

GERALD ORAM first studied first world war death sentences in order to prove a theory: that soldiers from the north of England were shot in proportionately greater numbers. Soon into his studies, however, the Birmingham University research fellow found a different trend. He detected a “statistical anomaly” indicating that Irish troops were up to four times more likely to be condemned to death by courts martial than were troops from other parts of Britain and the Commonwealth.

“While comprising a mere 2% of the total British Army, Irish troops accounted for 8% of all death sentences and a similar proportion of executions,” says Oram. “No other national group experienced such a disparity.

“According to official statistics, 134,202 men were recruited in Ireland. The number of executions is comparable with the Canadian force (24 and 25). Yet Canadian recruitment was roughly 3˝ times that of the Irish.” Was this because Irish troops were concentrated in the infantry? Oram says not; they were more likely to be condemned than other British troops serving in the same divisions. “Only two men in the prestigious Guards Division were executed,” he says. “Both were Irish.”

It was not a religious bias either. The number of condemnations in the “loyalist” 36th (Ulster) division was the same as other Irish units. Nor was it a backlash against the Easter Rising; Irish executions tailed off after 1916.

Instead, Oram says British commanders viewed the Irish as good fighters, but undisciplined. A great asset if you could control them, Irish troops needed strong handling. Several of the Irish soldiers were executed as an example to others.

Ahern and the Department of Foreign Affairs have accepted Oram’s analysis in full. The minister said last week that the courts martial files “proved conclusively that if you were Irish you were four times more likely to be executed”.

He claims the Ministry of Defence (MoD) should reopen the cases because “the evidence shows that there were different types of justice meted out”.

But are Oram’s calculations correct? Are the 25 soldiers on whose behalf Ahern is campaigning all Irish? At least one isn’t, according to Gerald Morgan, a fellow of Trinity College Dublin. Albert Rickman is listed as being from Kildare, but Morgan has discovered he was from Hampshire.

Oram insists he has been cautious in his calculations. “There were 239 condemnations in Irish units,” he says. “Not all of them were Irish, but there would have been Irish soldiers in other units who were condemned. We haven’t counted them. So the real figure is higher.”

But any suggestion that these Irish lads were sent to their deaths by ruthless British toffs with doubled-barrelled names is wrong.

The most poignant case among the 25 is that of Patrick Downey, a 19-year-old from Limerick, who lied about his age to join the Leinster Regiment. During the Balkan campaign he was punished by being tied to the wheel of a gun carriage, crucifixion-style, for two hours a day in what was known as field punishment No 1.

He was arrested for disobeying an officer on three occasions. The third time he had refused to put on his cap. Not realising that he was charged with a capital offence, the undefended Downey pleaded guilty. It was tantamount to suicide. On learning that he was to be shot, he said: “That is a good joke. You let me enlist and then bring me out here and shoot me.”

The officer commanding the British force in Greece was Irish. Lt-Gen Bernard Mahon was instrumental in the decision to execute Downey. “The condition of discipline in the battalion is such as to render an exemplary punishment highly desirable, and I therefore hope that the commander-in-chief will see fit to approve the sentence of death,” said Mahon.

The theme behind these death sentences is class, not race, according to Morgan. “A lot of the Irish officers, Trinity-educated and clearly better off, were part of this as well,” he said. “I would hate this to be a source of division between the Irish and the English, Scots and Welsh when what was really happening was a class thing.”

Sir Anthony Farrar-Hockley, a former commander of the Parachute Regiment, agrees that there is no evidence of anti-Irish prejudice within the British Army. Sick soldiers were examined by psychiatrists, he says, and if there was prejudice against Irish soldiers you would expect this to show up in the records.

He cautions against using 21st-century morals to judge the first world war, and doesn’t “see any point in this exercise” of pursuing pardons.

“Once you start this business of changing what is permissible policy, where do you stop? Do you start going back through all the files of the people deported to Australia for stealing a loaf of bread?”

EILEEN HINKEN, a London school teacher and housewife, is appalled by this military establishment view. “That was then,” she agrees. “It still was wrong.”

Hinken is the great-niece of James Templeton, a 20-year-old soldier from Belfast who was executed in 1916. Yesterday she and her mother, Sadie Malin, 80, accompanied by Peter Mulvany, the head of the Irish Shot at Dawn campaign, handed in a petition to 10 Downing Street asking that he be pardoned.

It was only two years ago that Hinken found out about Templeton, seeing his name in parliamentary papers. She assumed “he had done something really bad” to merit being executed. On finding out why exactly he was shot, “I was flabbergasted; I couldn’t believe it”.

Templeton had a history of missing parades. When he went Awol for a day in February 1916, he expected another routine punishment. This time a harsher view was taken. Brigadier General Withycombe recommended “that the extreme penalty . . . be carried out as a deterrent to other men committing a similar offence”.

Like all Irish soldiers in the great war, Templeton was a volunteer. Hinken has learnt that he had an apprenticeship in a mill, so he hadn’t even joined the army for economic reasons. “He gave his life for the British Army when he didn’t have to. The passage of time doesn’t make it right.”

Hinken wants his name, and those of the others, to be put on the memorial stones with those killed in battle. “It’s time the British Army accept that they were barbarous in their treatment of people.”

The MoD says it is considering the dossier submitted by the Irish government, but will give no indication as to when it will respond. Given that Tony Blair has already apologised for the great famine, in the interests of the peace process, a concession to the Shot at Dawn campaign is possible.

The difficulty for the MoD is that any concession on the Irish cases will mean more pressure from campaigners in England and Scotland to pardon the rest of the soldiers who were shot.

“I’m very sure the MoD is going to put up a very stout defence,” said Morgan. “The question of financial compensation may arise, because when these men were shot their pensions were stopped and many families were left destitute.”

What might sway the decision is that all sides of political opinion in Ireland, north and south, are united behind the appeal. It is a rare issue that unites the Irish government, Ian Paisley and Sinn Fein. And the fact that Irish men fighting in the British Army are a target of compassionate campaigning rather than revulsion is itself a sign of maturing political attitudes.

Michael Copeland, a unionist councillor for east Belfast, said: “The island of Ireland contributed thousands of volunteers in the first world war. As a northern unionist I am warmed by the attention that is now being paid by people in the Irish republic to that contribution.”