THE LONDON Metropolitan Police last night handed over a sword and dress hat belonging to Sir Roger Casement to the National Museum of Ireland. They have been in police possession since Casement was captured in 1916 on Banna Strand, Co Kerry, bringing weapons for the Easter Rising.
The sword and hat were worn by Casement when he was knighted in 1911 by King George V for his services to Amazonian Indians in Peru after he exposed the treatment meted out to them by rubber plantation owners.
The presentation of the items was made by the force’s deputy commissioner John Yates to Dr Pat Wallace, the director of the National Museum of Ireland, last evening at a reception at the Irish Embassy in London.
"They minded them very well, it has to be said. They are in very good condition," Dr Wallace told The Irish Timeslast night. Sir Roger visited the Putamayo region in Peru in 1910 and again the following year before writing a report for the British foreign office on the charges of cruelty made against the British-registered Peruvian Amazon Company. Casement wrote that "men, women and children" had been held in stocks "for days, weeks and months", leaving many to die from starvation or wounds left by brutal floggings.
“These are important pieces of our heritage and it gives another aspect of Casement’s career apart from the 1916 Rising,” said Dr Wallace, who indicated that the sword and hat may be put on display first in the Kerry County Museum in Tralee.
The sword and hat were among a number of items taken by police from his home in the days after Casement’s arrest on Banna Strand before he was subsequently tried and executed for treason for working “with the king’s enemies”.
Irish Ambassador to Britain Bobby McDonagh said that Casement’s life and career were “a striking manifestation of the close and complex relationship between Britain and Ireland”.
“In this historic year for Anglo-Irish relations, with her majesty the queen having accepted an invitation to make a State visit to Ireland, it is fitting that these possessions of a distinguished Irish patriot, as well as an outstanding international campaigner for human rights, are coming home.”