O what has made that sudden noise?
What on the threshold stands?
It never crossed the sea because
John Bull and the sea are friends;
But this is not the old sea
Nor this the old seashore.
What gave that roar of mockery,
That roar in the sea’s roar?
The ghost of Roger Casement
Is beating on the door.
W B Yeats from New Poems (1938).
The Irish News reports that legal action is being currently planned in order to finally return the bones of Sir Roger Casement to “his chosen ground” in County Antrim
A group campaigning for the remains of Roger Casement to be moved to
Co Antrim has said it is planning legal action in a bid to see the Easter
Rising organiser’s wish fulfilled.
The campaign for the final return of Casements bones to his chosen burial place is not a new thing, but has been developing for over the past quarter century following the signing of the Belfast Agreement as a significant public invocation of the “achievement of reconciliation, tolerance, and mutual trust, and to the protection and vindication of the human rights of all’ affirmed by both governments in their Declaration of Support.
The demand has been steadly growing. On 9th July 2015 Martina Devlin offered a timely reminder as the centenary of 1916 loomed of this long unfulfilled wish. She wrote in the Irish Independent, of how, in the condemned cell, Sir Roger Casement’s
…thoughts turned to the haunting majesty of the Glens of Antrim, scene of his boyhood, and he expressed a longing to be buried there.
That desire remains unfulfilled. As commemorations to mark the Easter Rising’s centenary begin on August 1 with a year-long series of events, it’s appropriate to re-open the matter of Casement’s dying wish. Now is the time to make a respectful request on his behalf to the Belfast and London governments.
Let me take you back to those final days in London’s Pentonville Prison. His appeal against conviction was rejected on July 18, and he began writing farewell letters. One of the most poignant went to his cousin, Elizabeth Bannister. “Don’t let my body lie here – get me back to the green hill by Murlough – by the McGarry’s (sic) house looking down on the Moyle – that’s where I’d like to be now and that’s where I’d like to lie.”
The 25 July 1916 letter to Elizabeth “Ellis” Bannister, written only nine days before his execution may be read online at the National Library of Ireland Catalogue site. In it Casement writes..
“The other night I dreamed that you, Gee and I were at Murlough Bay, on the green hill, nine hundred feet above the sea coast to the McGarry’s [McCary’s] house,– looking out at the racing tides of Moyle – Churning currents and whirlpools, and overlapping tides – and Alba across the way, and the blue peaks of Jura clean and clear – and all the great panorama of island and hill and swirling waters that first made me realize what Ireland was to me. It was there “Benburb “ [his poem] was written or near there on the sandy shore in a cove of white sand between the headlands ”
At the instigation of Casement’s friend and colleague Francis Joseph Bigger, a tall wooden cross was erected in the early1920s at the very spot on the crest of the slope where Casement had hoped his body might finally lie. A contemporary photograph taken, possibly by Bigger, as it was erected shows Joseph Warwick Bigger in the background.
Michael Cronin, writing about “Roger Casement’s Long Journey to Ballyheigue” at Breic, a Digital Journal of Irish Studies continues the narrative……
In 1928, a stone Celtic cross was erected to Casement in Murlough Bay, by the McCarry family, but over the years it was regularly vandalized by paramilitaries and the B-Specials. This cross, and an empty grave were constructed as Casement’s final resting place in the absence of Casement’s actual body. The cross, as mentioned has largely been destroyed, and the empty grave is now the stage for an annual Republican commemoration. During the 1950s and 1960s Murlough was the place where the Casement Repatriation Committee, the body lobbying to have Casement’s remains returned to Ireland, staged an annual event at the site. Such was its importance that de Valera was regularly in attendance at the annual August commemoration event
But in 1965 when the British Labour Government of Harold Wilson finally addressed the series of appeals for the repatriation of the body to Ireland, although it was a made clear that there could be no possible burial at Murlough in the light of protests by the Northern Ireland Unionist government of Captain O’Neill. O’Neill was already under considerable pressure from the conservative wing of his party to resist even the tiny liberalisations recommended in Brookborough’s final years by his Attorney General Brian Maginnis. The British Government were compelled to make the stripulation that no such burial in Antrim could be contemplated as they “feared that a reburial there could provoke Catholic celebrations and Protestant reactions.” This was, after all, the year before the fiftieth anniversery of the Rising.
Accordingly, when the great humanitarian’s remains were repatriated to Ireland they lay in state at Garrison Church, Arbour Hill Cemetary for five days, close to where the leaders of the 1916 Rising now lie. Casement was then granted a full state funeral, and his body conveyed to a plot in Glasnevin cemetery where he was buried at a service attended by 30,000 mourners. An eighty-three year old Éamon de Valera attended in as the President of Ireland. Only a decade before he’d met with Churchill to instigate the first of several post-war requests for Casement’s return.
In the course of this year’s commemorative events, the Roger Casement Commemoration & Reinterment Association (RCCRA), which hosts the annual wreath laying ceremonies in his memory in various parts of Ireland and at Pentonville Prison in London, revealed that they were consulting over the possible legal issues of fulfilling Casements last wish for a resting place. Speaking at the wreath-laying ceremony conducted at Casement Park in west Belfast, association chairperson Alan Daly told those attending the ceremony: “The association is calling for Casement to be brought home.”.
In a less degenerate age, the sixteenth century Lord of all Ulster, but in my current incarnation, a one time film maker, animator and producer/director, currently a visual artist, iconographer, writer, historian, neo-Jacobite and, I believe, a political moderate with serious polycultural leanings. Even so, I would like the old place to perhaps develop some of its own culture rather than simply borrow styles from the homogeneous mix available for the discerning plagiarist from other International art sources. I remember the Queens Festival when it was worth going to, not so very long ago. Also, I’d give a lot to see a serious re-forestation project, deciduous please.
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