Tories foiled plans to repatriate Casement’s body for years

Efforts to get Sir Roger Casement's remains repatriated to Ireland were frustrated for years by Conservative governments led by Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home, Seán Lemass revealed.

However, the objections disappeared once Labour's Harold Wilson took command in No 10 Downing Street in 1964. "As soon as we talked to Wilson all these objections disappeared overnight," Lemass recalled.

Casement was buried in the grounds of Pentonville Prison in London after he was hanged in August 1916, following his foiled bid to bring in German guns to aid the Easter Rising.

The Irish authorities had lobbied for years for repatriation, but the Conservatives claimed they did not know where his body was buried, or that his remains no longer existed because they had been buried in quicklime.

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“The remains were found, they had not been buried in quicklime,” said Lemass. “All the arguments of the Conservative government were completely phoney.

‘No pretence’

“Wilson brushed all this aside and said: ‘That grave is number such and such . . . the body is there.’ There was no pretence of lying or that sort. I liked Wilson. There was no personal animosity between us at all.

“On the whole I think, from the Irish point of view, I found him to be by far the best prime minister in my time,” said Lemass, in the tapes now deposited with University College Dublin’s archives.

However, the two governments were forced to conspire to ensure that Casement’s remains were flown back to Ireland without alerting anybody in London in advance.

“It is difficult for us to understand the English point of view. To us, Casement was an Irish patriot. To them, he was a traitor who tried to stab them in the back in the middle of a crucial period in the first World War,” Lemass explained.

“There was no British political problem, but if Wilson had said, ‘I am going to release these remains this day month,’ a group would have been organised against it,” he went on.

Flag

Wilson also released the Irish Republic flag that flew over the GPO during Easter Week 1916 in time for the 50th anniversary commemorations.

Lemass made it clear from the outset that he wanted to talk about his life after the Civil War and not before it

“To Wilson these were no problems and he was, of course, very much aware of the fact that he was not losing political support by conceding these things to us.

“The Conservatives would have been worried about the possibility of losing political support from their right wing, but Wilson was if anything gaining support from the Irish population in Britain and in particular his own constituency by these concessions of no great importance.”

Lemass was famously uninterested in looking back at the past, and those looking for some new insights into the revolutionary period between 1916 and 1923 and his own involvement will be disappointed.

Lemass made it clear from the outset that he wanted to talk about his life after the Civil War and not before it. He was facilitated in that desire by his interviewer Dermot Ryan.

Ryan did, however, ask him if he looked back on the past during the 50th anniversary commemorations for the Easter Rising in 1966.

“I did not,” Lemass responded. “I had to write various articles and make many speeches about it, but I did not sit at home and ask where we had gone in the last 50 years.”

Interview

He did, however, give an interview to the Kerryman newspaper in which he suggested that the progress that Ireland had made in the intervening 50 years would have been "inconceivable" but for Independence.

“There would have been some progress anyway, because the whole world was going ahead, but we could never have achieved anything like what was done: the intensification of the industrial effort, the creation of employment opportunities, the rise in the standard of living and social conditions if there had not been an Irish government.”

By the time Lemass had said this in January 1969, the Irish state had recovered from the slump of the 1950s, but such sentiments on an economic level at least would have been questionable if stated 10 years previously.

Lemass expanded on his beliefs that Ireland was better off economically as an independent country.

He said young Irish people in the 1960s had no idea what the country was like under British rule, “with foreign troops and most appalling social conditions, particularly so far as housing was concerned. After the conclusion of the 1914 war, literally no employment opportunities at all when the war-time industrial boom ended.

“Indeed, I suppose most people looking objectively at the situation, certainly if they looked with the economic knowledge that people have nowadays, would have been convinced that it would be almost impossible for the country to develop an industrial existence building on that basis.”