Michael Collins and the Troubles by Ulick O'Connor

Author:Ulick O'Connor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

On August 2, the Cabinet finally rejected requests for reprieve and Casement was hanged on August 3. A significant factor about Casement’s career is that though an Irish nationalist, he had until quite late in life supported the idea of a free Ireland within the British Empire. Indeed in 1900 when he was in South Africa, he strongly disapproved of the recruiting of Irishmen to fight for the Boers against the British Army. However, as he became immersed in the dealings of the Foreign Office, he began to conclude that when it came to dealing with colonial dependencies of which Ireland was one, the rules so ardently supported by democrats in Parliament were no proof against the activities of those who, at the end of all, had shown themselves to be in control of the sources of power.

A letter he wrote to a warder who had been kind to him while in prison showed that he had no hatred of England. ‘You showed the best side of an Englishman’s character – his native good heart. Whatever you think of my attitude towards your Government and the Realm, I would ask you to keep only one thing in that good heart of yours – and that is that a man might fight a country and its policy, and yet not hate an individual of that country.’

Those English who supported his reprieve came largely from the ranks of anti-imperialists, Fabians, Socialists, Pacifists. They shared the belief with Casement that the time had passed when a power such as that possessed by the British Empire should be concentrated in the hands of an elite. They had opposed his sentence on humanitarian grounds but in temperament they were light years away from him; Casement was a romantic whose dream was for a small country which held little interest for his well-intentioned English friends. How could they understand that when he landed from the German submarine after a ghastly journey and with the expectation that he was facing almost certain execution, his only thoughts were that he was back in his native land?

‘The sandhills were full of skylarks rising in the dawn, the first I had heard for years – the first sound I heard through the surf was their song, as I waded through the breakers, and they kept rising all the time up to the old rath at Currsahone, where I stayed and sent the others on, and all round were primroses and wild violets and the singing of the skylarks in the air, and I was back in Ireland again.’

During Casement’s trial, F. E. Smith produced to Serjeant Sullivan what he alleged were Casement’s diaries. This was in an effort to secure from Casement’s Counsel a plea of guilty but insane. The diaries contained details of a number of homosexual acts. The suggestion was not taken up by Sullivan. The diaries were afterwards circulated in influential circles in the United States to blacken Casement’s character and to lessen sympathy for him so as to militate against his reprieve.

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