The man who made modern Ireland Roger Casement's ghost still haunts the nation

The bald facts are these. Casement was born in Dublin in 1864. Orphaned at 12, he grew up in England and Co. Antrim. At the age of 15, his uncle secured him a job as a shipping line clerk, a position that led to his first visit to Africa. He was soon working under Henry Morton Stanley in the Congo, and subsequently took a position in the British Consular Service. A lengthy investigation into the grotesque treatment of the Congolese peoples by Léopold II, who ran the Congo as a personal demesne, resulted in the transfer of the region to the Belgian government and global fame for Casement. He climbed the consular ladder: Santos, Pará, Rio de Janeiro. This period in South America led to a second investigation into cruelty and murder. The victims were the Putumayo Indians and the profiteering murderer was a Peruvian rubber baron, Julio César Arana. Casement was instrumental to the dissolution of Arana’s homicidal little kingdom.

Casement was knighted in 1911. His story up to this point had been extraordinary enough. The British Empire’s cursus honorum had allowed a young man of limited prospects to achieve fame, favour and a fat pension. More importantly, he had done a lot of good. But there was more to do. In the first years of the new century, Casement found a renewed interest in his birthplace. And then came the Great War, and Germany, and a noose in a London prison.

Casement’s first Ireland was born from books and yearning. In 1904, he joined the Gaelic League and set about learning Irish. He stayed at Ardrigh, the fine Belfast home of Francis Bigger, who hosted every nationalist worth knowing. He helped to organise a festival of traditional culture in the Glens of Antrim and ferried the Irish-speaking population of Rathlin Island across so that they could take part in the competitions of music and dance. He attempted to fill out his cheques in Irish and was outraged when the bank refused them. Casement needed a new cause, and Ireland rushed to meet him.

Casement’s Irish turn came in middle age. Although he had spent much of his childhood near Ballymena and showed a keen interest in Irish history as a boy, the enthusiasms and causes of the nationalist movement do not seem to have engaged him as a young man. Perhaps things would have been different if he had remained in Ireland rather than seeking his fortune in foreign climes. The Second Boer War is a case in point. Dublin was consumed by “pro-Boer fever” in the autumn of 1899. As Donal McCracken has observed, for a time the Vierkleur flag became “the emblem of the Irish nationalist movement”. Matters came to a head in December, when a full-blown riot broke out. James Connolly seized a horse-drawn carriage and raced it around Dublin crying “Up the Boers! Up the Republic!” The day only ended when mounted police charged the crowd with drawn swords.

Yet while the Mayor of Kilkenny proposed that two maxim guns (to be christened “Parnell” and “Wolfe Tone”) be sent to the Transvaal, Casement was in Africa, busy gathering intelligence on Boer arms shipments and concocting impractical schemes to disrupt their supply lines. Later, he had a rather different attitude to the war. In his 1913 essay “The Enemy of Peace”, he argued that England’s relations with Germany showed that “the policy of the Boer war is being tried on a vaster scale against Europe”. A deepening commitment to Ireland required all kinds of intellectual realignments.

An excellent new book charts Casement’s conversion to the nationalist cause. Roland Philipps’s Broken Archangel: The Tempestuous Lives of Roger Casement integrates its subject’s successive passions. Casement’s need for action emerges as the unifying factor. Without an all-consuming project on the grandest of scales, he withered. After Africa, Ireland was the natural next step. He distanced himself from the British Empire even as he continued to serve it. Such distancing ranged from the intense monologues for which he became known in nationalist circles to occasional bouts of adolescent peacocking. Philipps notes that Casement refused to wear the pith helmet and linen of the colonial apparatchik while investigating humanitarian outrages in Peru, instead sporting a suit of brown Irish homespun in the appalling heat.

Philipps takes Casement’s sexuality seriously. As recently as 2013, experts have argued that the journals which record various homosexual assignations — the so-called “Black Diaries” — were faked by British intelligence. The diaries were certainly used to discredit Casement after his death, but Philipps has no time for talk of forgery. The results are interesting precisely because the Black Diaries add little to our understanding of the man. Yes, he desired, and was often able to satisfy that desire. But did homosexuality influence his political activity?

Perhaps. He had no wife or children, and so was arguably willing to go further than other men might and to take risks that other men wouldn’t. In The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald concluded that Casement’s sexuality gave him a unique insight into the suffering of others; the sand-worn trope of the homosexual as a hog snouting for injustice rather than truffles. Such connections are entirely speculative. Philipps, quite rightly, avoids using the Black Diaries to make grand assumptions. Instead, Broken Archangel stresses Casement’s kindness, generosity, and charisma. The people who knew him tended to love him.

Casement inhabited his first Ireland until war blocked the interminable, creeping road to Home Rule yet again. He was among those who felt that the time for waiting was over. Frustrated by political dithering and alarmed by the Ulster Volunteer Force’s competing insurrectionist movement, Casement travelled to Germany in late 1914. As Wolfe Tone had done over a century before, he sought the aid of a foreign nation to overpower Britain. Later he would write of “my contemplated Wolfe Tone descent on the coast of Ireland”.

Two years in Germany forced Casement to encounter another Ireland. If his first Ireland reflected his romantic nature, then this second Ireland threw his naivety into sharp relief. His plan to form a Brigade from Irish prisoners of war was frustrated when it became apparent that the POWs didn’t really care for talk of liberty and old Ireland: “Some of them insulted me — but all showed clearly the utter slothful indifference of that type of debauched Irishman to any appeal but to his greed… in a very despondent mood after the revelation of Irish depravity I had witnessed among these 2,200 so-called ‘Irishmen’.”

Only a tiny number ever enlisted, despite inducements of better food, more comfortable lodgings, and guaranteed passage to America should the venture fail. His bookish and abstract speeches, delivered in a cut-glass English accent, found little favour among tired young men who just wanted to get home in one piece. The Germans also let him down. It is bleakly comical to read of Casement’s shock that German interest in Ireland was of a purely military character, and that no one in Berlin gave a fig for Irish freedom one way or the other. His second Ireland was a barren moor, unpeopled and inanimate. It was a place where daylight rendered all of those impassioned midnight conversations ridiculous.

Casement’s return to Ireland shortly before the Easter Rising is now the stuff of legend: the submarine, the lost rifles, the raw morning on Banna Strand. Capture came swiftly, and the subsequent trial for High Treason could have only one outcome. He used the dock to give a final defiant address, and was able to recapture his first Ireland now that he had left action behind and could rely on words once more: “Judicial assassination today is reserved only for one race of the king’s subjects — for Irishmen, for those who cannot forget their allegiance to the realm of Ireland.” He was executed in Pentonville Prison on 3 August 1916.

Who was Roger Casement? That surname is suggestive. A window, sometimes clouded, swinging on its hinge. He was a creature of change, in some ways well-suited to a world that was shaking off the certainties of the 19th century with alarming speed. Even in his last hours, he was adapting. His conversion to Catholicism the evening before his execution foreshadowed broader shifts in Ireland, where protestant nationalists were soon to become rare birds. He did not live to see that change, or the many others that followed in the decades after his death. He died at the height of the conflict that would lame the British Empire, and before the Civil War that would stain his first Ireland forever. If the records of his life never quite satisfy, it is because he was never still, always hurrying off to impose his awkward, admirable dreams elsewhere.

Two statues of Casement have been erected. The first is in Dún Laoghaire, a short stroll from his birthplace at Sandycove. Casement is perched above the sea baths, back turned to Britain, bronze eyes fixed on Dublin and all that lies beyond. The second is at Ballyheigue, Co. Kerry. This statue faces inland too, though Casement’s wrists are bound together, as if the man is trapped by his own memorial. There the two patriots stand, gazing back at one another across a strange new nation. This is Roger Casement’s third Ireland, a country that would strike him as far more foreign than the Congo ever did, a place of both disappointment and opportunity. Knock, knock, knock.