A History of Ireland in Song

Roger Casement

Roger Casement, 1865-1916, British civil servant, Irish patriot.

Roger Casement was born on 1st September 1865 in Co. Antrim. His mother was Catholic, his father Protestant. Both parents died when he was young, the mother in 1873, the father in 1877. At the age of 17, Casement began work at a Liverpool shipping company with concerns in Africa, where he was sent three years later.

After travelling widely, he returned to Africa in 1892 as a British consular official. It was here that he gained international renown for revealing the horrifying cruelty and exploitation of native labour. His famous Congo Report (1904) led to an almost wholesale reorganisation of Belgian rule in the Congo. His Putumayo Report (1912) on the exploitation of Peruvian Indians earned him a knighthood. It was this first-hand experience of the horrors of European colonialism in Africa which guided his thoughts to home. He came to see Ireland too as an conquered, exploited colony.

"It was only because I was an Irishman that I could fully understand, I think, the whole scheme of wrong-doing at work on the Congo."

Casement, now ill, returned to Ireland to recuperate and began working with the Irish National Volunteers. In 1914 he travelled to the US on a fund-raising tour for the national movement. In 1915, with the First World War raging fiercely, he determined to travel to Germany in the hope of organising an "Irish Brigade" from the many Irish members of the British army now languishing in German prisoner of war camps. In this, he was signally unsuccessful.

Casement felt the planned Easter Rising of 1916 was premature, and doomed to failure. Nevertheless, he felt honour-bound to play his part, and returned to Ireland courtesy of the Kriegsmarine, arriving off the coast of Kerry on 12th April 1916.

After being landed at Banna Strand, Casement took shelter in Mc Kenna's fort. There he was arrested by a Royal Irish Constable who found German documents on his person. Casement was taken prisoner, but there is evidence to suggest that at first the RIC did not know who exactly they had in custody. Taken to Ardfert Barracks, he asked his captors to see a priest. A Fr Francis Ryan, sympathetic to the cause of the Irish Volunteers, answered his call. Casement told him his true identity and asked him to carry a message for the local Volunteers not to rise as it would be foolhardy without German support and arms. Casement was taken to the Tower of London, where he tried to commit suicide in his cell. He was refused visitors until a personal friend of the Casement family threatened Lloyd George with exposing his maltreatment to the newspapers. When visits were finally permitted, the visitor was horrified to find the state that Casement was in:

not allowed the opportunity to wash or shave;
locked up in a very dark cell, so much so that he started to lose his vision;
He stuttered while he spoke. This could possibly be as a direct result of prolonged isolation;
Untreated wounds were left to grow infectious on his person;
not allowed to keep his belt or shoe laces and so he had to hold up his trousers to avoid further embarrassment;
still in the clothes that he was arrested in and the smell off them was said to be unbearable;
not allowed out for exercise;
His cell was infested with vermin.

At Casement's trial, the case for the prosecution was presented by one F. E. Smith, a Unionist who had himself organised armed resistance to the Crown only two years before! Needless to say, there was never any likelihood of his joining Casement in the dock. Casment's speech from the dock is a fine defence of his right to fight for his country's freedom. However, despite a heroic past and influential friends, English vindictiveness would not be denied. Robert Kee's conclusion is definitive:

Once again, a British government which boasted as one of its unalterable principles the connection with Ireland, was to show that it had no true contact with Ireland at all.

—Robert Kee, The Green Flag, vol.III, p. 13

On 29th June, Roger Casement was sentenced to death by hanging. On 3rd August, that sentence was duly carried out, and his lifeless body tossed in quicklime.

It was 1965 before his sister obtained the exhumation of his remains. They were returned to the South of Ireland for a full-blown state funeral, courtesy, ironically, of the usurping régime which denied all that he had stood for.

Roger Casement lives forever in the song of the common people.

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