The young Limerick doctor who went to war as Ireland changed
Ahead of Armistice Day on November 11 Brían McNamara shares his family history he recently unearthed about his great-grandfather
Every year on November 11, remembrance events across Europe mark Armistice Day, honouring those who served and remembering the lives forever changed by the First World War.
For Ireland, the war remains a complex part of our history. More than 200,000 men from Ireland served in British forces, including over 4,000 from Limerick city and county. Their experiences, and the lasting impact of the war on their families, form an often overlooked part of our local and national story.
One such story links the war to Limerick through Michael Joseph Ahern, an Irish doctor who served with the Royal Army Medical Corps, and his daughter, Nora McNamara, who would later make a lasting contribution to education in the city.
On 13 June 1914, a young doctor and the daughter of an Irish Parliamentary Party MP were married at St Michael’s Church in Dún Laoghaire. After the wedding breakfast at the Royal Marine Hotel, my great-grandparents, Dr Michael Ahern and Nora O’Dowd, boarded the 1.40 p.m. boat to Holyhead, beginning their honeymoon journey to London and Paris.
Michael was a recently qualified doctor from Brosna, Co Kerry, and a graduate of the Royal College of Surgeons. His wife, Nora, was a nurse and the daughter of John O’Dowd, the nationalist Member of Parliament for Sligo.
Just 19 days before Michael and Nora were married, the Government of Ireland Bill had passed its third reading in the House of Commons, bringing Home Rule closer to reality than at any previous point. Yet the political crisis over Ulster remained unresolved. Unionists had armed themselves against the measure, while the Irish Volunteers had been established to support it, raising the prospect of civil war. Then, on 28 June, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo. Within weeks, the crisis had spread across Europe. In August, Britain went to war with Germany.
A report in the Sligo Champion on 24 June 1916, covering his father-in-law, the local MP, also recorded Michael’s departure. He was leaving for France just weeks after the Easter Rising in Dublin as the British Army prepared for the Somme offensive on the Western Front.
For an Irishman such as Michael, service in the British Army did not necessarily carry the political meaning it would acquire in the years that followed. Michael’s own circumstances capture the complexity of that Ireland. He was from a Catholic family, had trained as a doctor in Dublin and had ambition to take over his elderly father’s medical practice in Kerry. He was leaving behind a young family—ten months before his departure for France, Nora had given birth to twin daughters, Aileen and Nora, my grandmother.
Michael arrived in northern France in June 1916, at the moment the British Army was assembling for an offensive on a scale not previously seen on the Western Front. On 1 July, the Battle of the Somme began and by the end of that first day, almost 20,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers had been killed and more than 57,000 had become casualties. It remains the worst single day in British military history. Michael was about to witness the human consequences of one of the defining battles of the First World War. Across the Irish Sea, meanwhile, his own country was dealing with the consequences of the Easter Rising.
The Easter Rising had erupted in Dublin in April 1916, only weeks before Michael arrived in France. For Nora, the Rising was not a distant political event. She was at home with their ten-month-old twin daughters and in November 1916, Michael and Nora’s third child, Mary Rose Ahern, was born at Denmark House in Dublin. The building stood only a few hundred yards from the General Post Office, by this point a blackened shell in the centre of the city. Family accounts indicate that Mary Rose died within weeks of her birth. Her death, however, has not yet been conclusively established in the surviving records. For the Ahern family, therefore, 1916 was not simply a year in the history books. Its events were unfolding on either side of Michael’s absence: war in France, rebellion in Dublin, and a family trying to continue its life between them.
On 11 November 1918, the guns fell silent on the Western Front. The fighting in Europe was over; Ireland was entering a period of profound political change. A month later, Ireland went to the polls in a general election that transformed the country’s political landscape. Sinn Féin won a sweeping victory, while the Irish Parliamentary Party, the political movement that had dominated Irish politics for decades, was reduced to a small number of seats. Among those defeated was John O’Dowd, Michael’s father-in-law, bringing an end to his parliamentary career.
In January 1919, Sinn Féin’s elected MPs established the First Dáil in Dublin. The War of Independence followed, and the relationship between Ireland and Britain entered a new and violent phase.
The end of the war did not mean that Michael simply returned to the life he had left behind. Family tradition records a troubled aftermath. Michael is remembered as developing a serious problem with alcohol and finding it increasingly difficult to hold down employment. The family moved from Ireland to London, then onto Birmingham and then to Swansea, but a settled life proved elusive.
The family record left by my grandmother offers a rare glimpse behind the official documents. Her account describes a family gradually coming apart. At one point she and her sister Aileen ended up in an orphanage in London.
The reasons for Michael’s decline are impossible to establish with certainty. With modern knowledge, it is tempting to view his difficulties through the lens of psychological trauma but the psychological consequences of war were not understood or recognised as they are today. The records tell us what happened to Michael; they cannot tell us why.
Nora and the twin girls eventually moved to Sligo, while Michael remained apart from them, moving back to Brosna in Co. Kerry, where he would die eleven years after the war ended in 1929 at the age of 43.
The experiences of Irish men who served in the First World War deserve to be remembered. For some, the burden was carried quietly, through wounds, memories, disrupted families and lives that never quite returned to what they had been. For men like Michael, there was another challenge: returning to a country whose political identity had changed while they were away. Michael Ahern was one of those men. For him, the war was over in 1918. Its consequences were not.
Despite the disruption and uncertainty of her early life, Nora McNamara, née Ahern, went on to win a university scholarship and graduate from University College Galway in 1938. She would become a pioneer of women’s education in Ireland. In 1951, she founded the High School of Commerce in The Crescent, Limerick, opening up opportunities that would shape generations of students. During its 60-year history, more than 50,000 students passed through its doors.
Her journey, from a childhood marked by uncertainty to a career that helped thousands of others build their futures, offers a remarkable legacy. While her father’s life was profoundly disrupted by the war and its aftermath, his daughter’s contribution to education became part of Limerick’s own story.
Writer Brían McNamara regular posts stories and columns on the SubStack website: livesbehindtherecords.substack.com