"Have you any women folk worth defending?" - Irish recruitment posters (1914-1918)

Here's a selection of the posters used to entice Irishmen into joining the British forces in the Great War (1914-1918). Although Irish attitudes to the war were mixed, many Irishmen enlisted, with a total of 208,000 serving during that period. Unlike in Britain, conscription was never introduced in Ireland. To what extent these appeals to manhood, peer pressure, heroism, and fear did their job is hard to say but they make for interesting and varied ephemera of those years. The Lusitania one is probably my favourite of this lot. Over on the National Library of Ireland's flickr account there's an interesting photo of a recruitment poster on display in a shop window in Waterford in early 1915.