ROGER CASEMENT.. ONE STORY OUT OF MANY
The story is told by one for whom the incident had a poignant personal interest. She and her mother and the other children, poorest of the poor in a certain Gaeltacht, were going with heavy hearts to the town to sell their only milk provider, a little goat, so that they might pay the rent of the house that sheltered them.
And then God sent to meet them one of the finest men He ever made. Let her who prayed for him then in her heart and wept bitter tears later when she learned who he was and that the English had killed him for loving Ireland and its poor, unfree people; let her tell the story:—
“It was a weary way and a dreary day. And then as we went we
saw a man coming towards us. He was very tall and he walked with a long stride. His hair was black with a curl in it and he had a short
black beard. He was dressed in some sort of light homespun and he
carried his hat in his hand.
“When he got up to us he stopped and my mother stopped too and said:
“Go mbeannuI Dia dhuit.”
“Dia’s Muire dhuit,” he replied, and then asked in English:
“‘Why are the children all crying, the poor wee souls?”
“Well, indeed, it’s, because of the goat, sir.”
“What is wrong with the goat?”
“Nothing at all, sir. She’s a good goat, the very best. We’re taking her to the fair.”
“Are you going to sell her?”
“I am, sir, if I can get her price?
“At that little Sarah set up a louder wail. The tall, dark stranger put a hand gently on her rough red curls.
“What is it?” he said. Sarah looked’ up into the kind grey eyes looking down at her. “We d6n’t want her sold,” she sobbed.
“Then why sell her?” he asked my mother.
“‘Well, where will the money for the rent come from if I don’t sell her?” asked my mother sadly.
“Now, it’s an odd thing,” said the gentle stranger, “that I should be wanting a goat. What do you want for her?”
“I want to give the goat to a friend of mine,” he added, and again he laid his hand on Sarah’s head as she looked up, her eyes swimming in tears.
“I thought maybe I’d get fifteen shillings for her,” said my mother.
“The tall stranger took out his pocket case and from it took two pound notes.
“She’s a good goat,” he said. “She’s worth more than fifteen shillings. Here you are.”
“My mother was speechless. The gentleman took the rope that was round the goat’s neck out of her hand and put it in Sarah’s.
“There, little one with the curls,” he said. “You are the friend I wanted to give a present to.”
A hundred incidents of a similar kind could be told of Roger Casement, of him who loved not merely the hills and glens and lakes of Ireland, but all her people, and especially the patient poor, who were his dearest friends and who understood him better than even those among whom he worked for the liberation of Ireland.
The English knew his high qualities of head and heart, his influence, his strength, his patriotism, his love of justice, his nobility of character, his detestation of imperialism, of tyranny, of cruelty—and so they killed him and buried his comely body in quicklime among the most degraded of their criminals, and enlisted the help of still more degraded Englishmen and Irishmen to blacken his character and besmirch his name. They have failed and they will fail. THE PRACTICAL DREAMER
SOME Anglicised Irishmen have sought and still seek to lessen the worth and diminish the stature of Roger Casement by referring to
him as a romantic dreamer whose head was ever in the clouds and who was incapable of giving serious heed to the practical political problems of his day.
Let anyone inclined to be influenced by such contemptible propaganda against a man the slavish scribblers are too petty to understand ponder the following extract from a letter written by Roger Casement in 1911, and decide whether the writer of it was conversant with the whole truth regarding Ireland’s enforced connection with England, as well as with the brazen falsehood of the plundering enemy that Ireland was a burden to ber generous and philanthropic “Sister” beyond the Irish Sea.
The friend to whom the letter was written—from South America— had asked was it true that the Imperial Government was steadily losing Five Million Pounds per annum on Ireland. Here is what Roger Casement wrote in reply:
“The £5,000,000 per annum is one of the silliest of all the lies. You may tell your friends, the Enemy, that when the books are produced the shoe will be very much on the other foot. I have knowledge by the month and I know what I am saying. Ireland can, and does; more than pay her way today, and half her revenue under the existing Treaty between the two Kingdoms (the Act of Union) is absorbed by England I
“That is to say, out of the £12,000,000 she raises, £6,000,000 is spent in Great Britain. Great Britain herself raises roughly £140,000,000 per annum. Does she permit Germany, say, or France to collect £70,000,000 of that for their factories 7 But that is what she does with the Irish Revenue. She appropriates a full half of it to support British industries in what she terms the supply of the Irish public departments, i.e., clothing. booting, helmeting, gunning, cartridging, buttoning, shirting and underclothing our police; entirely supplying our Post Office, our Light
House, our Admiralty and our Military. departments as well as lifting the entire rental of the country, formerly paid to landlords and now paid to “the Treasury”; in other words to John Bull:
“The greatest lie of all is this one of John Bull transferring money to Ireland ; of his “gift” of £100,000,000 to the Irish tenant farmers. Why, the thing is just the other way. In -order to permit Irish farmers to buy their farms from Irish landlords John Bull has appropriated the rentals of Ireland to English financial uses. Not a pound of the so-called purchase money goes from England to Ireland; it is a question of stock and scrip on the London market, and the landlord’s purchase money is invested in England, not in Ireland, but the refund of the “purchase” money by Treland does go from Ireland straight to England. “if Ireland had had an internal government the settlement of her land question would have been an internal one, and the exchange of money and the transfer of deed would have contributed to the national wealth, instead of, as now, impoverishing it. if the English give Ireland £5,000,000 or one shilling, why don’t they produce the books ? There is the case in a nutshell. They have kept the accounts for a hundred years but they will not produce them to public audit. Why ? Because they dare not.
“The robbery of Ireland since the Union has been so colossal, carried on on such a scale, that if the true account current between the two countries were ever submitted to any impartial tribunal England would be clapped in jail; and of course civilisation would be mined and the Anglo-Saxon with a shaved head would not be a pretty picture I
This concise and undeniable statement of the financial relations between Ireland and England ever since 1800 to the day our martyr wrote the letter we have quoted, is ignored by the mean Irish slaves who try by all the foul means of their kind to belittle and. disparage him but a discerning, honest English writer, dealing with that letter calmly, critically and reasonably, said of him who had written it:
“His desire was to free Ireland from what he believed to be a bondage which was sapping her very life. He did not acknowledge that any advantage could accrue to Ireland from her association with England, and believed, until it became his political gospel, that England kept Ireland in thraldom to suit her own strategic and commercial ends. To Casement, Ireland had suffered at the hands of England for centuries, and it was time that an end was put to her sufferings.”
It was not because Roger Casement was a starry-eyed idealist, a romantic, a dreamer, a champion of lost causes, that the English tried to kill him on his. way to Germany, that they seized him when he came home to take his place among the freedom fighters of 1916, flung him into the Tower of London, put him on trial under an obscure, antiquated law, allowed an unscrupulous political opponent to be his prosecutor and to refuse him even the legal courtesies of the vaunted British Constitution, spread an infamous lie about his private life all over the earth, hanged him on August 3, 1916, flung him into a quicklime grave between two notorious criminals and have refused his martyred remains to Ireland ever since.
These things were done because, like Erskine Childers, he knew the lying, hypocritical ruling class of England through and through and could teach the men of Ireland how to deal with and overcome their lying and their treachery and their greed. For this he was hated, for this he was maligned, for this they killed his body and for forty-three years, with the aid of degraded and despicable Irishmen, have been trying to destroy the shining glory of his memory and his name.
CONFUSION AND MALICE
THE senior counsel employed to defend Roger Casement at his trial in June, 1916, was Serjeant Sullivan, son of the A. M. Sullivan to whom reference was made several times in the 1958 Animal. Serjeant Sullivan was a bitter opponent of the Irish Freedom movement all his life and there was no bond of sympathy or understanding between him and his client. He retired from the case on the plea of a nervous breakdown and mental blackout and the defence had to be continued by junior counsel.
Forty years later when discussion had again flared up in Ireland and in England about the forged diaries by means of which it was sought to destroy Roger Casement’s good name, Sullivan was reported to have said that in an interview with him in 1916, Roger Casement had gloried in the acts of moral degeneracy attributed to him in the forged diaries and declared that greater men than he had acted in the same way.
Charitable minds have come to the conclusion that the old lawyer in his dotage (remember he said that his mind was in a state of confusion from fatigue in 1916) was recalling something written by Roger Casement some nine days before his trial when he was endeavouring to show that his “treason” against his country’s enemies had many parallels in history.
Here is a letter he wrote hurriedly at the time, asking some of his friends to, deliver it at once to Mrs. Green, the historian:
“What I want to establish is this—not that I did not commit high treason, because that of course I committed openly and knowingly, but that I did not act dishonourably or treacherously. The Crown really want to convict me not so much of the offence at law as of the mean, dastardly ‘betrayal of my country.’ I want to show the very thing I did has been done again and again by far greater men, by the noblest men in history, men whom the English nation are asked to honour and praise forever.”
He was being arraigned in England as a traitor because he had asked an enemy of Ireland’s oppressor to help Ireland’s faithful sons in an effort to end the oppression of hundreds of years—and Ireland was his native land, not England. Poles, Austrians, Czechs, Bohemians had been lauded by England for acting in the very same way when the opportunity arose to break their country’s chains, and he was being tried as a traitor because he had done it for Ireland the land of his ‘birth and of his allegiance. What had been a virtue in others had become a mortal sin on his part because England was the oppressor and Ireland the oppressed. We can dismiss with pity the doddering “recollection” of the old pro-English lawyer, but we can have only scorn and contempt for Irishmen in their prime who accepted it as proof of the moral degeneracy of a great and noble man whose very name they were unworthy to mention.
A STREET BALLAD OF ROGER CASEMENT
LONELY BANNA STRAND
‘Twas on Good Friday morning all in the month of May, A German ship was signalling beyond there in the bay, “We’ve 20,000 rifles here all ready for to land .
But no answering signal came to them from lonely Banna Strand.
A motor-car was dashing ihrough the early morning gloom,
A sudden crash and inthe stream they went to meet their doom
Two Irish lads lay dying, just like their hopes so grand,
They couldnot give the signal now from lonely Banna Strand.
“No signal answers from the shore,” Sir Roger sadly said, “No comrades here to welcome me, alas, they must be dead. But I must do my duty, and at once I mean to land.” So in a boat he pulled ashore to lonely Banna Strand.
The German ships were lying there with rifles in galore;
Up came a British ship and spoke, “No Germans reach the shore
You are our Empire’s enemy, and so we bid you stand,
No German foot shall e’er pollute the lonely Banna Strand.”
They sailed for Queenstown Harbour, said the Germans, “We’re Undone,
The British are our masters, man for man and gun for gun;
We’ve 20,000 rifles here which never shall see lanth
For we’ll sink them all and bid farewell to lonely Banna Strand.”
The R.I.C. were searching for Sir Roger high and low,
They found him nt MacKenna’s Fort, they said, “You are our foe.”
Said he, “I’n Roger Casement, I came to my native land,
I meant to free my countrymen on lonely Banna Strand.”
They took Sir Roger prisoner and sailed for London town,
And in the Tower they laid him as a prisoner to the Crown;
Said he, “I ani no traitor,” but his trial he’d to stand
For bringing German rifles to lonely Banna Strand.
‘Twas in an English prison that they led ‘him to his death, “I’m dying for my country,” he said with his last breath. He’s buried in a prison yard far from his native land, The wild waves sing his requiem on lonely Banna Strand.
SOME Anglicised Irishmen have sought and still seek to lessen the worth and diminish the stature of Roger Casement by referring to
him as a romantic dreamer whose head was ever in the clouds and who was incapable of giving serious heed to the practical political problems of his day.
Let anyone inclined to be influenced by such contemptible propaganda against a man the slavish scribblers are too petty to understand ponder the following extract from a letter written by Roger Casement in 1911, and decide whether the writer of it was conversant with the whole truth regarding Ireland’s enforced connection with England, as well as with the brazen falsehood of the plundering enemy that Ireland was a burden to ber generous and philanthropic “Sister” beyond the Irish Sea.
The friend to whom the letter was written—from South America— had asked was it true that the Imperial Government was steadily losing Five Million Pounds per annum on Ireland. Here is what Roger Casement wrote in reply:
“The £5,000,000 per annum is one of the silliest of all the lies. You may tell your friends, the Enemy, that when the books are produced the shoe will be very much on the other foot. I have knowledge by the month and I know what I am saying. Ireland can, and does; more than pay her way today, and half her revenue under the existing Treaty between the two Kingdoms (the Act of Union) is absorbed by England I
“That is to say, out of the £12,000,000 she raises, £6,000,000 is spent in Great Britain. Great Britain herself raises roughly £140,000,000 per annum. Does she permit Germany, say, or France to collect £70,000,000 of that for their factories 7 But that is what she does with the Irish Revenue. She appropriates a full half of it to support British industries in what she terms the supply of the Irish public departments, i.e., clothing. booting, helmeting, gunning, cartridging, buttoning, shirting and underclothing our police; entirely supplying our Post Office, our Light
“The greatest lie of all is this one of John Bull transferring money to Ireland ; of his “gift” of £100,000,000 to the Irish tenant farmers. Why, the thing is just the other way. In -order to permit Irish farmers to buy their farms from Irish landlords John Bull has appropriated the rentals of Ireland to English financial uses. Not a pound of the so-called purchase money goes from England to Ireland; it is a question of stock and scrip on the London market, and the landlord’s purchase money is invested in England, not in Ireland, but the refund of the “purchase” money by Treland does go from Ireland straight to England. “if Ireland had had an internal government the settlement of her land question would have been an internal one, and the exchange of money and the transfer of deed would have contributed to the national wealth, instead of, as now, impoverishing it. if the English give Ireland £5,000,000 or one shilling, why don’t they produce the books ? There is the case in a nutshell. They have kept the accounts for a hundred years but they will not produce them to public audit. Why ? Because they dare not.
“The robbery of Ireland since the Union has been so colossal, carried on on such a scale, that if the true account current between the two countries were ever submitted to any impartial tribunal England would be clapped in jail; and of course civilisation would be mined and the Anglo-Saxon with a shaved head would not be a pretty picture I
This concise and undeniable statement of the financial relations between Ireland and England ever since 1800 to the day our martyr wrote the letter we have quoted, is ignored by the mean Irish slaves who try by all the foul means of their kind to belittle and. disparage him but a discerning, honest English writer, dealing with that letter calmly, critically and reasonably, said of him who had written it:
“His desire was to free Ireland from what he believed to be a bondage which was sapping her very life. He did not acknowledge that any advantage could accrue to Ireland from her association with England, and believed, until it became his political gospel, that England kept Ireland in thraldom to suit her own strategic and commercial ends. To Casement, Ireland had suffered at the hands of England for centuries, and it was time that an end was put to her sufferings.”
It was not because Roger Casement was a starry-eyed idealist, a romantic, a dreamer, a champion of lost causes, that the English tried to kill him on his. way to Germany, that they seized him when he came home to take his place among the freedom fighters of 1916, flung him into the Tower of London, put him on trial under an obscure, antiquated law, allowed an unscrupulous political opponent to be his prosecutor and to refuse him even the legal courtesies of the vaunted British Constitution, spread an infamous lie about his private life all over the earth, hanged him on August 3, 1916, flung him into a quicklime grave between two notorious criminals and have refused his martyred remains to Ireland ever since.
These things were done because, like Erskine Childers, he knew the lying, hypocritical ruling class of England through and through and could teach the men of Ireland how to deal with and overcome their lying and their treachery and their greed. For this he was hated, for this he was maligned, for this they killed his body and for forty-three years, with the aid of degraded and despicable Irishmen, have been trying to destroy the shining glory of his memory and his name.
THE senior counsel employed to defend Roger Casement at his trial in June, 1916, was Serjeant Sullivan, son of the A. M. Sullivan to whom reference was made several times in the 1958 Animal. Serjeant Sullivan was a bitter opponent of the Irish Freedom movement all his life and there was no bond of sympathy or understanding between him and his client. He retired from the case on the plea of a nervous breakdown and mental blackout and the defence had to be continued by junior counsel.
Forty years later when discussion had again flared up in Ireland and in England about the forged diaries by means of which it was sought to destroy Roger Casement’s good name, Sullivan was reported to have said that in an interview with him in 1916, Roger Casement had gloried in the acts of moral degeneracy attributed to him in the forged diaries and declared that greater men than he had acted in the same way.
Charitable minds have come to the conclusion that the old lawyer in his dotage (remember he said that his mind was in a state of confusion from fatigue in 1916) was recalling something written by Roger Casement some nine days before his trial when he was endeavouring to show that his “treason” against his country’s enemies had many parallels in history.
Here is a letter he wrote hurriedly at the time, asking some of his friends to, deliver it at once to Mrs. Green, the historian:
“What I want to establish is this—not that I did not commit high treason, because that of course I committed openly and knowingly, but that I did not act dishonourably or treacherously. The Crown really want to convict me not so much of the offence at law as of the mean, dastardly ‘betrayal of my country.’ I want to show the very thing I did has been done again and again by far greater men, by the noblest men in history, men whom the English nation are asked to honour and praise forever.”
He was being arraigned in England as a traitor because he had asked an enemy of Ireland’s oppressor to help Ireland’s faithful sons in an effort to end the oppression of hundreds of years—and Ireland was his native land, not England. Poles, Austrians, Czechs, Bohemians had been lauded by England for acting in the very same way when the opportunity arose to break their country’s chains, and he was being tried as a traitor because he had done it for Ireland the land of his ‘birth and of his allegiance. What had been a virtue in others had become a mortal sin on his part because England was the oppressor and Ireland the oppressed. We can dismiss with pity the doddering “recollection” of the old pro-English lawyer, but we can have only scorn and contempt for Irishmen in their prime who accepted it as proof of the moral degeneracy of a great and noble man whose very name they were unworthy to mention.
LONELY BANNA STRAND
‘Twas on Good Friday morning all in the month of May, A German ship was signalling beyond there in the bay, “We’ve 20,000 rifles here all ready for to land .
But no answering signal came to them from lonely Banna Strand.
A motor-car was dashing ihrough the early morning gloom,
A sudden crash and inthe stream they went to meet their doom
Two Irish lads lay dying, just like their hopes so grand,
They couldnot give the signal now from lonely Banna Strand.
“No signal answers from the shore,” Sir Roger sadly said, “No comrades here to welcome me, alas, they must be dead. But I must do my duty, and at once I mean to land.” So in a boat he pulled ashore to lonely Banna Strand.
The German ships were lying there with rifles in galore;
Up came a British ship and spoke, “No Germans reach the shore
You are our Empire’s enemy, and so we bid you stand,
No German foot shall e’er pollute the lonely Banna Strand.”
They sailed for Queenstown Harbour, said the Germans, “We’re Undone,
The British are our masters, man for man and gun for gun;
We’ve 20,000 rifles here which never shall see lanth
For we’ll sink them all and bid farewell to lonely Banna Strand.”
The R.I.C. were searching for Sir Roger high and low,
They found him nt MacKenna’s Fort, they said, “You are our foe.”
Said he, “I’n Roger Casement, I came to my native land,
I meant to free my countrymen on lonely Banna Strand.”
They took Sir Roger prisoner and sailed for London town,
And in the Tower they laid him as a prisoner to the Crown;
Said he, “I ani no traitor,” but his trial he’d to stand
For bringing German rifles to lonely Banna Strand.
‘Twas in an English prison that they led ‘him to his death, “I’m dying for my country,” he said with his last breath. He’s buried in a prison yard far from his native land, The wild waves sing his requiem on lonely Banna Strand.