Joe,

I lost your train of thought, Keith. Wasn't World War I more of an east-west war?

British soldiers from Ireland returning to the South after the war received no recognition.
No memorials were erected, no parades and no acts of remembrance.

"This was not an Ireland for a southern Catholic who had served in the British army. A collective national amnesia had decided that the southern Irish soldiers belonged neither to the unionist tradition of the north or the republican legacy of the south. Many veterans, including my great-grandfather, decided to live outside Ireland after the war. Poverty and high unemployment were certainly factors, but so too was the explicit hostility to those who had served in the war."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/05/irish-soldiers-who-fought-for-britain