Irish Brigade (World War I)

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The "Irish Brigade" was an attempt by Sir Roger Casement to form an Irish nationalist military unit during World War I, among Irishmen who had served in the British Army and had become prisoners of war (POWs) in Germany. Casement sought to send a well-equipped and well-organized Irish unit to Ireland, to fight against Britain, in the aim of achieving independence for Ireland. Such an action was to be concurrent with the ongoing war between Britain and Germany, thereby providing indirect aid to the German cause, without the ex-POWs fighting in the Imperial Germany Army itself.

Casement was a former British diplomat, who had devoted himself to the cause of Irish independence. He was inspired by John MacBride's success in forming the Irish Transvaal Brigade, during the Boer War. Casement traveled to Germany by way of the United States, shortly after the outbreak of World War I, with the aid of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Clan na Gael.

On December 27, 1914, Casement signed an agreement in Berlin, authorizing the brigade, with German Secretary of State Arthur Zimmermann. Only 52 Irishmen volunteered and they were brought together at a POW camp at Limburg an der Lahn.

Casement eventually became disillusioned with the German government. Contrary to German promises, the brigade received no training in the use of machine guns, and were not provided with trained German officers. Casement came to believe that the Germans saw the brigade only as a potential diversion, assisting the Central Powers, and that they did not take Irish independence seriously. When he discovered that German material aid for the planned Easter Rising of 1916 was less substantial than expected, he abandoned the brigade and returned to Ireland, in an effort to persuade the Irish Volunteers to cancel the rising. Shortly after his arrival on the coast of County Kerry, Casement was arrested, and later charged with treason and executed. By the time the Easter Rising took place, the Irish Brigade was defunct.