Veteran journalist Liam Mac Gabhann was at Banna Strand in Co Kerry to watch the unveiling of a memorial to Roger Casement in 1968 and to untangle the mystery of its inscription. – JOE JOYCE
TO THE many mysteries woven around Casement’s fatal landing in Kerry was added one more today. The unveiling of a finely constructed stone monument to mark the place on Banna Strand where Casement and Captain Robert Monteith rested after their exhausting three-mile row in the collapsible dingy from the U-boat, has created a riddle of the sands for those who come in pilgrimage.
The inscription refers to Casement and Monteith, and mentions “a third man” but does not name him. Everybody who made a speech at the unveiling, and they were many and long, carefully refrained from mentioning the name.
The man who was so carefully scrubbed from history will now, of course, out-publicise Casement and Monteith because the question will be asked as long as the Atlantic laps the beach at Banna.
He has been given now a kind of Benedict Arnold notoriety. For the more the Banna Strand Committee tried to keep the name of Daniel Bailey, alias Beverly, erstwhile sergeant in Casement’s Brigade, out of the story, the more the incognito puzzled the minds of the thousands at the memorial stone.
Bailey, of course, told the truth or turned King’s evidence, however you like to put it, but historians said at Banna (under their breaths) that the man who hauled Casement out of the sea when that boat collapsed and who went for aid to Tralee, where he was captured, should at least have had his name on the plaque.
Sergeant Bailey was not mentioned in the nicely-produced brochure about today’s commemorations either. The booklet had a very apt quotation from Victor Hugo – “There is a spectacle more grand than the sea. It is heaven. There is a spectacle more grand than heaven. It is the conscience.” Well, conscience was the thing many Kerry veterans were also examining today.
The old controversy was being brought up (under the breath) about the Kerry Volunteers sacrificing Casement. It appears he was expendable. Handcuffed and unheeded, he was led from Tralee to London Tower so that the orders received from Dublin be strictly carried out. These were, according to veteran Willie Mullins, who raised and lowered the Tricolour today, given in two loaded words: “Do nothing.”
Nevertheless the committee chairman, Eamonn O’Mahony, had to emphasise this from the platform today, to kill, he said, “the ignorance and malice and unfair criticisms” of the Kerry Volunteers on those three fatal days of Easter 1916. He quoted the result of the inquiry the I.R.A. thought fit to set up into the allegations of inaction and callousness of the volunteer leaders in question.
It was a “no blame whatever” verdict, but the whisperings are as endless as the little waves of Banna.
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