Founded on 25 November 1913 at the Rotunda in Dublin in response to a call from Eoin MacNeill that nationalists should form their own force comparable to the Ulster Volunteers, the organisation comprised c.160,000 members by the beginning of World War 1. The majority of the membership followed John Redmond’s call to enlist in the British army, forming the National Volunteers and leaving a rump of radical nationalists who reorganised and planned the Easter Rising. In 1920 the Volunteers became the Irish Republican Army.