Portal:British Army/Selected unit/4
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The Irish Guards is a regiment of the British Army, which is part of the Guards Division. As of 2006, it is one of only two purely Irish regiments remaining in the British Army. (The other being the Royal Irish Regiment.) It recruits Catholics and Protestants alike in Northern Ireland, the Irish neighbourhoods of major British cities, and (unofficially) the Republic of Ireland. (The latter permits its citizens to enlist in the British forces, but forbids active recruiting.) More recently, the regiment has seen some truly "non-traditional" recruits, notably Zimbabwean Christopher Muzvuru, who qualified as a piper before becoming one of the regiment's two fatal casualties in Iraq in 2003.
Irish Guards officers tend to be drawn from the ranks of graduates of elite British public schools, particularly those with a Roman Catholic affiliation, such as Ampleforth College and Stonyhurst College. Catholic foreign royals or aristocrats, even those with no Irish connection, have often found a home in the Irish Guards. (Jean, Grand Duke of Luxembourg, for example.)
One way to distinguish between the regiments of Foot Guards is the spacing of buttons on the tunic. The Irish Guards have buttons arranged in groups of four. They also have a prominent blue plume on the right side of their bear skins.
