Ireland and the first media war: digestible, cultural engagements of the Crimean War 1854-6

The Crimean War was the first ‘media war’: an international conflict experienced, not simply through the press and journals, but through a variety of ‘cultural dimensions’, including poems and ballads, and not after events had transpired but often during their occurrence. Yet its cultural historiography remains heavily Anglo- (and London-) centric, despite the war culturally impacting the entire United Kingdom. Within that Anglophonic Ireland’s popular or public response to the conflict was a mixture of martial and oftentimes imperial enthusiasm, and local or national interest, with a minority strain of criticism, opposition and nationalism. By providing fresh analysis of the same, this essay serves to both illustrate the ambiguous nature of Irish identity in the 1850s (in the wake of the Famine) – within the union and as part of the empire – and epitomise the often elusive, contradictory and paradoxical nature of the same, while also demonstrating the interest Irish people showed in the war; how that was outwardly manifest; and where that fits within the broader contexts of Ireland’s war memorialisation/commemoration tradition and the cultural impacts and legacies of war.