Anti-Conscription Campaign Pledge

"This is an original copy of the anti- conscription campaign national pledge from April, 1918. Lloyd George extended conscription in England to Ireland in that year and it did not go down well. My grandfather, Michael Egan, was a member of the Irish Trade Union Congress and he represented that organisation in the campaign. This pledge was distributed throughout Ireland and people signed it in their hundreds of thousands, with some historians suggesting that it was as many as two million. The campaign, which united all shades of nationalism in Ireland, was extraordinarily successful. It was only in recent years, looking into my family history, that I fully realised the significance of this document. Not only is it a rare signed pledge, but my grandfather was also one of the nine men on the committee who created the document. He is pictured bottom left. "