Lt Tom Kettle, B Company, 9th Battalion, Royal Dublin Fusiliers, was killed in action on September 9th, 1916, near the village of Ginchy in northern France at about 5pm of the 71st day of the Battle of the Somme. Buried on the battlefield by members of the Welsh Guards, the location of his grave was subsequently lost and his remains were never found thereafter.

There is only one public memorial in Ireland to Tom Kettle and it is in St Stephen’s Green

Thomas Michael Kettle (9 February 1880 – 9 September 1916) was an Irish economist, journalist, barrister, writer, poet, soldier and Home Rule politician. As a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party, he was Member of Parliament (MP) for East Tyrone from 1906 to 1910 at Westminster. He joined the Irish Volunteers in 1913, then on the outbreak of World War I in 1914 enlisted for service in the British Army, with which he was killed in action on the Western Front in the Autumn of 1916. He was a much admired old comrade of James Joyce, who considered him to be his best friend in Ireland, as well as the likes of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, Oliver St. John Gogarty and Robert Wilson Lynd.

He was one of the leading figures of the generation who at the turn of the twentieth century gave new intellectual life to Irish party politics, and to the constitutional movement towards All-Ireland Home Rule. A gifted speaker with an incisive mind and devastating wit, his death was regarded as a great loss to Ireland's political and intellectual life.