Irish in the British Armed Forces when Ireland had achieved independence. Despite being a monument to people who fought in the British Army, it received cross-party support, partly because the likes of Major General William Bernard Hickie had been Home Rulers. There are a number of other major monuments relevant to the experience of Irish soldiers in World War I, this time based on the European continent; the Menin Gate in Ypres, Belgium, for example, features the names of many Irish soldiers. A second Belgium-based memorial was opened in 1998; the Island of Ireland Peace Park. There also exists in Thiepval, France, a monument called the
British Thomson-Houston Company War Memorial the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, described by Historic England as "the leading English architect of his generation". Lutyens designed the Cenotaph on Whitehall in London, which became the focus for the national Remembrance Sunday commemorations, as well as the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing—the largest British war memorial anywhere in the world—and the Stone of Remembrance which appears in all large Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries and in several of Lutyens's civic war memorials. The Thomson-Houston Company memorial is one of 15 War Crosses by Lutyens, all of which share a similar design. British Thomson-Houston was an engineering firm based