<P> According to historian David Fitzpatrick, "The proportion of eligible men who volunteered was well below that in Britain...even so the participation of 200,000 Irishmen was proportionately the greatest deployment of armed manpower in the history of Irish militarism" </P> <P> Of the Irish men who enlisted in the first year of the War, half were from what is now the Republic of Ireland; the other half were from what is now Northern Ireland . They joined new battalions of the eight regiments existing in Ireland . </P> <P> These battalions were assigned to brigades of the 8th Infantry Division, 10th (Irish) Division, the 16th (Irish) Division and the 36th (Ulster) Division of Kitchener's New Service Army, as well as to brigades of other United Kingdom Divisions during the course of the war . </P> <P> A proportion of the Irish National Volunteers (INV) enlisted with regiments of both the 10th and 16th Divisions, but were predominantly in the 16th division, members of the Ulster Volunteers (UVF), joined regiments of the 36th Division . Military historian Timothy Bowman states that' While Kitchener saw the UVF as an efficient military force and was prepared to offer concessions to secure the services of UVF personnel in the British army his view of the INV was very different . The INV were, even in comparison to the UVF, an inefficient military force in 1914, lacked trained officers, finances and equipment . Kitchener was certainly not inclined to, as he saw it, waste valuable officers and equipment on such a force which, at best, would relieve Territorial units from garrison duties and, at worst, would provide Irish Nationalists with the ability (by training them in the means of War) to enforce Home Rule (when they returned) on their own terms' . </P>

List of irish soldiers in world war 1