Roger Casement: from "Speech from the Dock" (1916)

Editor's note:
Roger Casement had been one of the authors of the Irish Volunteer manifesto, and he visited the United States to raise funds. He was a major strategist in the Howth gun-running of July 1914. At the start of the first World War in August of that year, he proposed that Germany should supply guns to Irish rebels, thereby opening a new front in the war against Britain. He travelled from Germany with a shipment of arms on the Aud: but the ship was intercepted and he himself arrested on Good Friday at Banna Strand and charged with treason.

The case against him was argued by Edward Carson, the lawyer who had hounded Oscar Wilde in the witness-box in 1895 and had gone on to found the Ulster Volunteer Force in 1912 - hence the bitter lucidity of Casement’s references to loyalist leaders in his speech, which contended that as an Irishman he had a right to be tried only by his own people. He was hanged in August 1916.

Roger Casement From: "Speech from the Dock" (1916)

Then came the war. As Mr Birrell has said in his evidence recently laid before the commission of inquiry into the causes of the late rebellion in Ireland, "the war upset all our calculations."

It upset mine no more than Mr. Birrell’s, and put an end to my mission of peaceful effort in America. War between Great Britain and Germany meant, as I believed, ruin for all the hopes we had founded on the enrolment of Irish Volunteers. A constitutional movement in Ireland is never very far from a breach of the constitution, as the loyalists of Ulster had been so eager to show us.

The cause is not far to seek. A constitution to be maintained intact must be the achievement and pride of the people themselves; must rest on their own free will and on their own determination to sustain it, instead of being something resident in another land whose chief representative is an armed force—armed not to protect the population, but to hold it down. We had seen the working of the Irish constitution in the refusal of the army of occupation at the Curragh to obey the orders of the crown.  And now that we were told the first duty of an Irishman was to enter that army, in return for a promissory note, payable after death - a scrap of paper that might or might not be redeemed. I felt over there in America that my first duty was to keep Irishmen at home in the only army that could safeguard our national existence. If small nationalities were to be the pawns in this game of embattled giants, I saw no reason why Ireland should shed her blood in any cause but her own, and if that be treason beyond the seas I am not ashamed to avow to it or to answer for it here with my life. And when we had the doctrine of unionist loyalty at last - "Mausers and Kaisers and any King you like", and I have heard that at Hamburg, not far from Limburg on the Lahn - I felt I needed no other warrant than that these words conveyed - to go forth and do likewise.

The difference between us was that the unionist champions chose a path they felt would lead to the Woolsack; while I went a road I knew must lead to the dock. And the event proves we were both right. The difference between us was that my "treason" was based on a ruthless sincerity that forced me to attempt in time and season to carry out in action what I said in word—whereas their treason lay in verbal incitements that they knew need never be made good in their bodies. And so, I am prouder to stand here today in the traitor’s dock to answer this impeachment than to fill the place of my right honourable accusers.

Handbook of the Irish Revival: An Anthology of Irish Cultural and Political Writings 1891-1922 by Declan Kiberd and PJ Mathews and published by Abbey Theatre Press (€18.90)