The great majority of English, Welsh and Scottish workers supported the war, as did a minority of Irish labour, not just in the Ulster counties. In a war of production, labour was in near unlimited demand both for the armed forces and for industrial and agricultural production. In Britain, perhaps a little under 40 per cent of the pre-war male workforce, 5,670,000 men, went into the Armed Forces in stages between 1914 and 1918.1 In Ireland some 210,000 men (just under 14 per cent) served in the British Army. The state soon had to determine priorities as to what could be imported and, to an increasing extent, where labour should be deployed.