The names on the roll reflect the commitment of middle-class Irish Catholics to the British war effort. The Queen’s University Colleges of Cork , Galway and Belfast were created in 1845 “to afford a university education of members of all religious denominations” in Ireland and as an alternative to the Church of Ireland -administered Trinity College Dublin . The National University of Ireland, as originally constituted in 1908, saw the coming together of University College Dublin (UCD), University College Cork (UCC) and University College Galway (UCG).
Maynooth College, then the national seminary for the Catholic Church, became an affiliated college of the NUI in 1910. Queen’s University Belfast decided to remain unaffiliated. The men listed in the Roll of Honour were the sons and grandsons of prosperous Irish businessmen, doctors and solicitors.
They were from the class that Irish revolutionary CS “Tod” Andrews described as at “the top of the heap in terms of worldly goods and social status”. He described them as “the medical specialists, fashionable dentists, barristers, solicitors, wholesale tea and wine merchants, owners of large drapery stores and a very few owners or directors of large business firms”. These also included Dr William Lombard Murphy, the son of one of Ireland’s most successful businessmen, William Martin Murphy, and Dr John Donal (JD) Carroll from the famous cigarette dynasty.
Many were from the vanished tribe of Catholic “loyalists.
