Redemption - Leon Uris [328]
The British added the acid of homophobia. Casement had lived quietly with his homosexuality, rendering harm to no one. Yet how lovely to be able to make a link to the case of another Irish homosexual, Oscar Wilde, who had been imprisoned after a withering prosecution by Edward Carson, the leader of the Ulster loyalists. Could not a case be drawn that Wilde and Casement were afflicted with the same diseased flaw in the Irish race?
Casement was refused a trial in his own country; he was denied access to bathing facilities, and his broken body became scaled with open sores. With his energy bled dry and in a deep depression, Casement yet managed to keep the great Irish weapon, words, and indeed, he had the last word.
Unlike the rebels of Dublin whose crimes were not clear and who were tried and killed in secret, Roger Casement had committed treason under British law. The showcase trial was staged to vindicate British justice.
Yet it was the words, piercing from the lips and pen of Roger Casement, that were to immortalize the affair and ring out to a world of small peoples who were listening intently.
Loyalty is a sentiment, not a law. It rests on love, not on restraint. The governing of Ireland by England rests on restraint and not on love; and since it demands no love, it can evoke no loyalty.
The dead martyrs of Stonebraker’s Yard in Kilmainham Prison reached out from their graves, crying out in concise measure that no other armies nor leaders of wars nor rebellions in all of England’s history were taken out and executed.
Judicial assassination is reserved only for only one race of the King’s subjects, for Irishmen….
The Irish legacy threading from generation to generation was not much more than the grace of words from the dock, and few were more profound than those of Sir Roger Casement.
In Ireland alone in this twentieth century is loyalty held to be a crime. If we are to be indicted as criminals, to be shot as murderers, to be imprisoned as convicts because our offense is that we love Ireland more than we value our lives, then I know not what virtue resides in any offer of self-government held out to brave men on such terms….
Self-government is our right, a thing given to us at birth; a thing no more doled out to us or withheld from us by another people than the right to life itself….
It is only from the convict these things are with held for crimes committed or proven…and Ireland, that has wronged no man, that has injured no land, that has sought no domination over others…Ireland is treated today among the nations of the world as if it were a convicted criminal….
If it be treason to fight against such an unnatural fate as this, then I am proud to be a rebel….
Irishmen, who yesterday seemed content with the status quo, awakened these days to view their national personality that ranged from compliance to cowardice. The most legal of all the Easter Rising trials now clearly seemed the instrument of British revenge. But open public trials have their risks, and even in the end when he was sentenced to be executed by hanging, Casement was granted the “fair play” of the last word:
Let me pass from myself and my own fate to a far more pressing, as it is a far more urgent theme—not the fate of the individual Irishman who may have tried and failed, but the claims and the fate of the country that has not failed. Ireland has outlived the failure of all her hopes—and yet she still hopes. Ireland has seen her sons—aye, and her daughters, too-suffer from generation to generation always for the same cause, meeting always the same fate, and always at the hands of the same power; and always a fresh generation has come forward to withstand the same oppression. For if English authority be so omnipotent a power, as Mr. Gladstone phrased it, that reaches