Thomas Michael Kettle was born on 9th February 1880 in Artane, Dublin, the seventh of twelve children.

A brilliant scholar and activist Kettle was staunch in his defence and commitment to the Home Rule-seeking Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP).

In 1906 Kettle won the vacant parliamentary seat of East Tyrone, winning the seat by only 18 votes.

In the House of Commons at Westminster he was celebrated as an amusing but caustic speaker and as a vigorous and implacable supporter of the Irish Party and its constitutional path to Home Rule.

Kettle was deeply steeped and impressed by European culture. His ideal was of an Ireland that identified with the life of Europe. In “Ireland” he wrote, “My only counsel to Ireland is, that to become deeply Irish, she must become European.”

In 1913 Kettle became involved with the paramilitary Irish Volunteers, a militia that formed in response to the creation in the north of the Ulster Volunteers who opposed the creation of an all-Ireland government based in Dublin via the passage of the Government of Ireland Act 1914.

In July 1914 he left Dublin and travelled to Belgium on behalf of the Irish Volunteers seeking to purchase arms. Whilst there World War I erupted. He put arms procurement to one side and become an on-the-scene war correspondent for the Daily News, reporting on the armies of the II Reich as they marched West through Flanders.

Kettle could clearly see the threat to Europe's liberty, and dispatched war reports from Brussels warning against the threat from German militarism, calling it “A war of Civilization vs Barbarianism”.

For Kettle the future of the 20th Century was being decided and he could not refuse that call. He now enlisted for service in the British Army.

Thomas Michael Kettle was killed in action on the Western Front with 'B' Company of the 9th Battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers in an attack on German lines on 9th September 1916, near the village of Ginchy during the Somme Offensive in France.

Tom Kettle

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