Roger Casement

Can there be a more charming historian than Eamon Phoenix?  He lectures in a soft,  fluent voice that draws you in to what feels like a private conversation, and he has that rare skill: an academic with a sense of humour. I was at a talk by him last week on Roger Casement and Joe Biggar.

Apparently Biggar, who is maybe best known for his raising of filibustering to the level of high art, just went on and on in the House of Commons, enraging his fellow-MPs.. According to Eamonn Phoenix, Biggar would locate a hefty tome on something truly obscure, such as pig-breeding in the Cotswolds, and would simply read aloud from it in the Commons for hours and hours. On one occasion a purple-faced MP informed him in a Home Counties bellow that he could not be heard by MPs on the other side of the House. “Right then”  Biggar is said to have replied in his grating Ulster accent. “I’ll start at the beginning again, so”.

Roger Casement was an even more controversial figure, of course, and was executed by the British for his attempt to smuggle German guns into Ireland in support of the revolution. Casement was knighted for his work as a British consul in Africa and South America, where he exposed the brutality to which the native people were exposed by their imperial masters.  In the Congo, natives who weren’t sufficiently productive were subject to limb amputations by way of punishment. In Peru, a favourite punishment was to put men, women and children in the stocks, where they’d be kept for weeks and months on end.  Parents died in the stocks, from flogging wounds or starvation, while their children were confined at a nearby vantage-point where they were forced to watch their parents die.

It was this experience of colonialism that turned Casement from being a British knight into  an Irish republican. When he was convicted, as just about everyone now knows, the British authorities produced the Black Diaries, which detailed Casement’s homosexual activity in these far-flung places. This was crucial in drowning out any possible  pleas for clemency, given Casement’s outstanding humanitarian work.

There’s a general acceptance now that these diaries were  genuine. There’s also a general acceptance that, while he did not engage in sex with pre-pubescent boys – which is how paedophilia is generally defined –  he did enjoy sexual relations with teenage boys. Whether these were older or younger than sixteen is uncertain.

Had Casement lived today, it’s almost certain that his sexual activities would have eclipsed everything else. For whatever reason, our society sees the sin of paedophilia or even sexual relations with young teenagers as the sin for which there is no forgiveness. Whatever good people may have done elsewhere in their lives – that’s forgotten or ignored.

There are those who think the use of the Black Diaries to ensure Casement’s execution was despicable. His heroic concern for the mistreated peoples in Africa and South America should have mattered more than his private life. I’d agree with that. I’d also say that if he’d been alive today, Casement’s private life would have totally eclipsed his heroism abroad and at home. We like to think we’re more enlightened than former times. No we’re not. We have our blind prejudices and our lop-sided judgements too.