Casement tribute was hot potato

A statue of Sir Roger Casement was commissioned by the government in the late 1960s for his grave in Glasnevin but was never erected there because of political wrangling, according to State files just released in Dublin.

The bronze statue by sculptor Oisín Kelly was finished in 1971 but gathered dust in an Office of Public Works workshop in Dublin's Lad Lane before finally being erected on Banna Strand in Co Kerry, 13 years after it was completed.

The Dublin-born revolutionary had been hanged for treason in London in August 1916 for trying to secure German guns and recruit an Irish brigade abroad to help with the Easter Rising. He was arrested when he came ashore at Banna Strand on his return from Germany three days before the Rising.

In 1965, British prime minister Harold Wilson agreed as "a gesture of friendship" to return Casement's remains, after lengthy campaigning by Irish governments. He said the question of Casement's repatriation had been "an irritant for too long" in Anglo-Irish relations.

The State funeral in Dublin was attended by about 30,000 people and Oisín Kelly was commissioned to "execute an effigy of Casement, heroic-sized in bronze" for the grave at Glasnevin. By September 1971, a Department of the Taoiseach memo said the memorial would be ready for unveiling in mid-November and President Éamon de Valera was willing to do the honours. However, the Northern Ireland conflict intervened and it was felt the timing was inappropriate.

Three years later, and with the coalition in power, minister for finance Richie Ryan told the Dáil the statue would be erected "in due course". In a private memo to the then taoiseach, Liam Cosgrave, Ryan said it might be as well to erect the statue "but we need have no formal unveiling. This procedure would provide least comment but no action could stimulate protest."

However, a Department of the Taoiseach official advised the taoiseach against erecting it without ceremony, saying it could cause objections from the sculptor, the opposition, the media and the public "who might attribute the omission to unveil to (a) the diaries or (b) a desire to escape Northern loyalist criticism".

The future of the statue arose again in 1977 when permission was sought to include it in a retrospective exhibition of Oisín Kelly's work.

A note to the taoiseach said that since the matter had been raised last there had been a reappraisal of 1916 and a "less jingoistic attitude to Irish nationalism" had developed.

"There has grown, too, a feeling that the pendulum has swung too far on this and that we have reached the stage of almost apologising for the deeds of our patriot dead.

"In this context, the decision to erect Casement's statue by stealth or to allow it to remain in a store-room would seem particularly shabby," the official wrote.