Latest articles for The Last of the Mohicans: After-images of Sir Roger Casement in the Irish Landscape.
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Friday June 28th 1916
by Conor Kelly 12 Jun 2009
‘I made awful mistakes, and did heaps of things wrong, confused much and failed at much – but I very near came to doing some big things…It was only a shadow they tried on June 26 ; the real man was gone.’
- Roger Casement to Richard Morten,1916.
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Day 21 Friday June 12th 2009 The Dancing Chicken
by Conor Kelly 12 Jun 2009
A great difficulty in articulating the argument for a memorial to Roger Casement remains his partisan political usefulness. It is key that the memory of Casement and any imagery associated with him service a public beyond such times when it can be manipulated for mere political gain. Like the unfortunate dancing chicken in Stroszek, Werner Herzog’s 1976 study of the search for new beginnings, Casement’s memory suffers the fate of being peddled out to strut its stuff when certain needs be. He becomes nothing more than a spectacle, His memory could serve as a touchstone for the reading of the post-colonial issue, not only in Western Europe but also in Africa, South America and other regions only too aware of the fallout and hangover of the colonial project.
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Day 20 Thursday June 11th 2009
by Conor Kelly 11 Jun 2009
In 1953, the same year the first fire was lit for Roger Casement above Murlough Bay, the workers rose up in protest against the Communist machine in East Germany. To the memory of the June 17th uprising in Berlin, Katharina Karrenberg’s 1998 prize-winning response proposed 468 lights to run across Leipziger Strasse. The lights spelled out the words, ‘Who are you that you would dare to say – these were heroes?’ The sculpture found little favour with veterans of the movement. The seeming ambivalence of the sentiment was found unsuitable for the re-unified public.
This ambivalent phrasing is central to the Casement memorial. If he is not a hero, then what is he? Without his contribution to Irish history and to Irish culture, the landscape today would certainly be very different. Those in the majority of the island would most likely argue that because of the ‘sacrifice’ he made and that of others like him, the state of things have, in the long term, altered for the betterment of the public. Its not a view shared by everyone, one could view his contribution as merely the continuation of a culture of murderers and would-be murderers. The derivation of monument from the Latin ‘monere’, to remind or warn, would suggest that, over time, a failure to articulate the questions surrounding such ‘amnesiac sites of history’, (as Young puts it) such as Murlough Bay is somehow a perilous pursuit.
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Day 19 Wednesday June 10th 2009 1.5 Metre Hurdle
by Conor Kelly 11 Jun 2009
Re-imagining a memorial at Murlough Bay contains a number of unfortunate and sticky points that have to be addressed. In describing the classical role of the mnemonic device in the public sphere. In his essay The German Counter-Monument, James E. Young writes that, ‘the matrix of a nation’s monuments traditionally employs the story of ennobling events, of triumphs over barbarism, and recalls the martyrdom of those who gave their lives in the struggle for national existence – who, in the martyr logical refrain, died so that a country might live.’ It is, of course, impossible to envisage such a matrix existing in a country that has endured almost 90 years of an often extremely difficult partition. To imagine a memorial at Murlough Bay, one has to begin by imagining a public without the historical burden of the country/nation/state.
In the practical terms of framing the relationship between the public and any potential memorial, it is imperative that a fragile memory like Casement’s be handled carefully. The greatest hurdle is the notion of martyrdom. South of the border, in the Republic of Ireland, Casement can cheerfully fit the classification of martyr and in turn be ‘rewarded’ with all the worthy imagery and rhetoric that accompanies martyrdom. In Northern Ireland, to classify Casement as martyr would immediately undermine the legitimacy of the state and alienate a good proportion of its population. How can any process of memorialisation begin without becoming an extension of a turf-problem? We have clearly entered the arena where, as Theodor Adorno views it, “cultural criticism shares the blindness of its object.’
James E Young writes, ‘in suggesting themselves as the indigenous, even geological outcrops in a national landscape, monuments tend to naturalize the values, ideals and laws of the land itself. To do otherwise would be to undermine the very foundations of national legitimacy, of the state’s seemingly natural right to exist.’ This question of the state is integral to the question surrounding the future of any Casement memorial at Murlough Bay. Is it an absurdity for a state, in this case Northern Ireland, to wish to memorialise an individual (albeit one pre-existing partition and civil war) completely opposed to a British authority on Irish soil? If a public calls for the remembrance of this individual and the state complies then the state is, in essence, opposing the legitimacy of its own existence. The only exception would be if all parties agreed that the individual was being remembered or memorialised on the grounds that he was a popular madman of some historical significance.
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Day 18 Tuesday June 9th 2009
by Conor Kelly 11 Jun 2009
Whilst on the theme of memorials, I visit the gravesite of Oisin (son of supposed giant Fionn McCumhaill and hero of Irish mythology) and find also, to my surprise, the grave of Irish poet John Hewitt (1907-87) Both sites reside on a hilltop just outside of Cushendall and are carefully watched over by a rather vigilant flock of sheep and a lack of signposts.
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Day 17 Monday June 8th 2009 Punchbag
by Conor Kelly 9 Jun 2009
‘From Ozymandias to Caeser to Napoleon to Hitler, public art has served as a kind of monumentalising of violence. Public sculpture that is too frank or explicit about this monumentalising is likely to offend the sensibilities of a public committed to the repression of its own complicity in violence.’
-W.J.T. Mitchell
The troubled history of the Casement cross can only inform any future it may have when the catalogue of destructive acts unleashed upon it are taken into account in the overall reading of the work. Irrespective of whether the authors were bigots, homophobes or misanthropes, the consequences of their actions connote them to be part of a (particularly proactive) public.
In his essay, The Violence of Public Art (on Spike Lee’s seminal film Do The Right Thing) W.J.T. Mitchell argues that, ‘the long history of political and religious strife in the West could almost be rewritten as a history of iconoclasm. There is nothing new about the opposition of art to its public.’ He continues, ‘the openness of contemporary art to publicity and public destruction has been interpreted as a kind of artistic aggression and scandalmongering. A more accurate reading would recognise it as a deliberate vulnerability to violence, a strategy for dramatising new relations between the traditionally ‘timeless’ piece of art and the transient generations, the ‘publics,’ that are addressed by it.’
Perhaps the re-installation of the mutilated/truncated sculpture would be susceptible to further attacks and perhaps this is a necessary part of the role it could inherit. The public should be freely allowed (and possibly be encouraged) to perform cathartic acts of vandalism. The sculpture should possibly have a reasonably reflective surface that is easily maintained so these acts will continue to have an audience to bear witness to this process. Embracing this notion would certainly ensure that the public for whom the monument is erected will embrace a wider demographic than just those who sanction its existence. Perhaps the whipping post at the top of the hill above the bay would somehow reflect and protect the memories that reside elsewhere; at the unmarked ‘graveside’ down below in Murlough, in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin and in the wider Glens of Antrim where Casement’s promotion of Irish culture through sport, dance, art and literature have had a lasting effect.
Perhaps – like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. – the monument above Murlough can be, as Mitchell describes, a ‘cunning violation and inversion of monumental conventions for expressing and repressing the violence of the public sphere. The VVM is anti-heroic, antimonumental, a gash or scar, a trace of violence suffered, not of a violence wielded.’
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Day 16 Sunday June 7th 2009 Meeting with historian Harry Hume
by Conor Kelly 9 Jun 2009
I had the opportunity today to meet with local historian Harry Hume, former Chairman of the Glens of Antrim Historical Society, and keeper of an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of the townlands within the Glens. After breakfast in Cushendall he kindly gave me a tour of the area surrounding Ballymena, where a young Roger Casement schooled at Ballymena Academy before beginning his career, first in Liverpool, before joining the Foreign Office for the first of many consular appointments. The Academy has unfortunately been demolished making way for the Fairhill Shopping Arcade, the now thriving commercial centre of the town. Ballymena also possesses one of the few streets in Northern Ireland named after Casement, ironically situated in a predominantly Loyalist part of town.
Whilst discussing my interest in the image of the once mutilated cross above Murlough, Harry mentions the practise of erecting truncated columns in Church of Ireland cemeteries. On his advice we visit St. Patrick’s Church in the Parish of Ballyclug outside Ballymena. In the Ballyclug cemetery there is a monument in the form of a truncated column erected by former tenants of a local landowner O’Hara, who died of heart disease in middle age. Traditionally, this type of memorial was erected to symbolise the premature death of a nobleman/woman, a life cut short, so to speak. In place of the complete column topped with an urn, the truncated column is marked with an aggressive diagonal slice across the shaft leaving the absence of the upper half. In some cases it is also said to mark the end of a noble genealogical line. The similarities between this practise and the former cross at Murlough are both striking and particular. Aside from Casement being 51 and childless when he was executed, there is something quite poetic in this mark given Casement’s unlikely and short-lived contribution to political and cultural events in Ireland.
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Day 14 Friday June 5th 2009 Francis Turnly’s Grass
by Conor Kelly 9 Jun 2009
As part of the terms of agreement of my residency at Cushendall, I am expected to cut the grass in the small garden behind the tower. With little other distraction at my disposal, I have embraced this task with some gusto, and with the grass at waist height, there is more than an ample stage on which to play out my enthusiasm.
In 1906, landowner Francis Turnly, (the son of landowner Francis Turnly who thought to build a tower reminiscent of those punctuating the Great Wall of China, here, in sleepy Cushendall) refused the organisers of the second Glens Feis access to a field in which to play Gaelic games. The Feis was an event celebrating Gaelic identity (in which Casement played a pivotal role) and was championed by the Cultural Nationalist movement in the very early twentieth century. Turnly’s refusal led to the local legend of Casement grabbing a scythe and cutting the grass of an overgrown wreck of a field nearby in an act of ingenuity and exasperation. I am reminded of this as I chop Frank Snr’s grass by his tower for ‘idlers and rioters.’ Cutting Francis Turnly’s grass becomes a sort of performance to Casement’s memory.
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Thursday July 6th 1911 The Kings Liege
by Conor Kelly 9 Jun 2009
Roger Casement becomes Sir Roger Casement in honour of his human rights investigations into atrocities committed under colonial rule in the Congo and the Amazon Basin. He instigates the publication of two offical Blue Book documents indicting both the government of King Leopold II’s Belgian Congo in Africa and British-owned rubber merchants The Peruvian Amazon Company in the Putumayo region, Although uncomfortable with the appointment Casement becomes a celebrated figurehead for human rights in Britain and abroad.
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Day 13 Thursday 4th June 2009 Meeting with local people
by Conor Kelly 6 Jun 2009
I have been meeting a number of locals over the last two weeks to discuss my project. Many of those I have spoken to have been quite elderly and due the creeping years have been wrestling with memory in a more personal, specific and practical manner than the ideas I am broaching. There is a certain irony contained in trying to frame the question of memory sitting in living rooms and kitchens with men and women who can no longer remember because memory is failing them. They cannot remember whilst I am considering if another monument is constructed, if it will be brutalised and destroyed again. Clearly if this thought exists then there are some who do and will remember, and some who would actively enforce a certain mnemonic manicure. Perhaps perversely this is what James E. Young (when discussing the German counter monument) refers to when he claims that ‘the surest engagement with memory lies in its perpetual irresolution. Instead of a fixed figure for memory, the debate itself – perpetually unresolved amid ever-changing conditions – might be enshrined.’
One could erect a monument on a Thursday and have it destroyed on a Friday. This relationship between the object and the viewer/public seems a somewhat troubled encounter. It would probably be unfeasible to supply enough monuments to fit this particular demand. It feeds the question of whether this divisive memory will prevent us from ever reflecting back on the events that have shaped and changed society irrespective of political maps.
Lucy McDiarmid writes in The Posthumous Life of Roger Casement that the epnonymous individual remains, ‘the ubiquitous subject of an unendable argument or long national dream, She describes Casement’s legacy as ‘disturbing, entertaining’ and ‘irresistible’.
The Ghost of Roger Casement – WB Yeats
O what has made that sudden noise?
What on the threshold stands?
It never crossed the sea because
John Bull and the sea are friends;
But this is not the old sea
Nor this the old seashore.
What gave that roar of mockery,
That roar in the sea’s roar?The ghost of Roger Casement
Is beating on the door.John Bull has stood for Parliament,
A dog must have his day,
The country thinks no end of him,
For he knows how to say,
At a beanfeast or a banquet,
That all must hang their trust
Upon the British Empire,
Upon the Church of Christ.The ghost of Roger Casement
Is beating on the door.John Bull has gone to India
And all must pay him heed,
For histories are there to prove
That none of another breed
Has had a like inheritance,
Or sucked such milk as he,
And there’s no luck about a house
If it lack honesty.The ghost of Roger Casement
Is beating on the door.I poked about a village church
And found his family tomb
And copied out what I could read
In that religious gloom;
Found many a famous man there;
But fame and virtue rot.
Draw round, beloved and bitter men,
Draw round and raise a shout;The ghost of Roger Casement
Is beating on the door. -
Day 12 Wednesday 3rd June 2009 Meeting with the Roger Casement Commemoration Committee
by Conor Kelly 6 Jun 2009
On my second meeting with the committee my main concern is the communication of their goals in terms of what they wish to see realised at Murlough. Their main focus continues to be the reconstruction of the Celtic cross in its 1929 entirety overlooking the bay with some form of plaque or sculpture by the ‘graveside’ on the site of St. Mologe’s burial place.
For a number of years they have been selling commissioned bronze representations of a reading Casement sitting contemplatively on a rock. The proceeds of the sales go toward the realisation of a new memorial. They have long been the guardians of the Casement/Murlough legacy but in recent years have encountered certain intransigence on the part of local authorities and the public. The latter is partly due to the difficulties inherent in the reading of Casement’s legacy. The appearance of a Northern Irish Protestant recruiting and gun-running for a nationalist revolt in the memory of a country split by a partition that was partly the result of his actions will, of course, always jar to a degree.
Reconstructing the 1929 cross might be seen, in some quarters, as a failure to fully embrace the complexities of the situation and a sidestepping of the quagmire that Casement’s posthumous existence presents. The prospect of meeting the mutilator of the original cross halfway in the non-redemptive image of the previously mentioned ‘phase 3’ might somehow be more reflective of, and engaged with a contemporary public reception.
The committee have very kindly allowed me to document and copy many of the photographs they have amassed over the years. The original copy of the wonderfully subversive Casement-with-dog photo is a strange anomaly. It’s odd to see the original handwriting with his note and signature on a grey surrounding mount-card. His handwriting was, for so long, the subject of such controversy in the accusations of forgery in the matter of his ‘Black Diaries’. There is also extensive documentation of the early annual memorial services from the 1950s and the slow ebbing-away through the years of attendances at gatherings and general proactive interest. Because Murlough is neither the site of a battle nor the stage of a specific cultural or political event, it has slipped through a public consciousness and remained, to a degree, within the fantasy of a long-dead historical shape-shifter.
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Monday March 1st 1965 The Miracle of Television
by Conor Kelly 6 Jun 2009
After years of protest and political wrangling, a change in government to Labour in Westminster in 1964 saw a reversal in official policy towards the repatriation of the earthly remains of Roger Casement. After a 49-year stay at Her Majesty’s Prison Pentonville, Casement was to finally return to Ireland. Paraded by gun carriage to Glasnevin cemetery in Dublin, Casement’s belated coffin brought 665 000 people out onto the streets of the capital. With allegations of Casement’s homosexuality swept under the rug for the day and his distinguished diplomatic career in the British foreign service quietly set aside, the Irish public/Republic embraced their prodigal son and the miracle of television. The fledgling national broadcaster RTE beamed events across the country, as the ghost of Roger Casement became the unlikely star of the first televised state funeral in Irish history. As the cortège passed through O’ Connell Street, a roll of thunder and a bright flash of lightening provided a well timed element of pathetic fallacy to the TV drama.
At the time, unionist opposition prevented Casement’s remains being interred at Murlough Bay but this always looked an impossibility through the eyes of Westminster. A sod of turf was symbolically removed from the designated spot for his ‘return’ (the burial place of St. Mologe) at Murlough Bay and buried with the coffin at Glasnevin. The defunct TV prop gun carriage sits to this day near the grave, in honour of Casement’s last journey Looking through photographs of the event and stock footage, it seems a world away from the absence of marks at Murlough today.
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Tuesday June 2nd 2009 Intentional Fallacy and the Stinky Fish
by Conor Kelly 3 Jun 2009
During several days of warm sunshine local interventionists have decided to devise their own alternative approach to art within the public realm by installing a dead fish in Cushendall’s only public telephone box, next to Curfew Tower. The smell of the decomposing mackerel has rendered the iconic red booth completely defunct in the hot sunshine. Given the fact my mobile phone receives little or no signal and the tower has no telephone connection, the symbolism and the practicalities of the gesture are not lost on me. In a way it’s quite powerful.
The fish incident seems to point back somehow to my revision of the mutilated cross (or phase 3) that once resided above Murlough Bay and the notion of the ‘intentional fallacy’. The ‘intentional fallacy’ was a term first employed by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in 1946 to question the complete legitimacy of the intentions of the author. They claimed that the design or intention of the author was ‘neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art’ We cannot know the intentions of the author of the sea creature in the booth and therefore must attempt to reconcile the aggressivity of the intervention to gain further and clearer readings of the work.
Introducing this line of argument to the outcome of the mutilated sculpture also calls for a leap beyond the aggressivity inherent in the genesis of the work. It is this leap that could liberate the viewer/public in overcoming an act so heavily imbued in violence. There is something fascinating and oddly fitting about this half-destroyed monument, the near-erasure of this mnemonic device. It seems to position itself somewhere in the no-man’s-land of these divisive histories and memories: a muted, yet powerful and provocative image.
The superimposing of a muted post-monumental aesthetics onto a landscape may, of course, prove itself incapable of transcending the violence of its origins. Like the stinky fish, an attempt to articulate the multi-faceted, problematic history of an individual may always sit at odds with this locality. The potential of an artwork to provoke is key but how does this operate in a landscape attempting to overcome centuries of accumulated division. The practicalities of living inhibit recollection in certain spheres; I have spoken to some people in the Glens who would rather forget someone like Casement, particularly if his memory could be the vehicle for sectarianism.
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Monday June 1st 2009 Site visit to Murlough Bay
by Conor Kelly 3 Jun 2009
24º C and a very clear day at Murlough. An opportunity for extensive documentation of the former site of the mutilated monument. I also visit the former RAF Murlough base near Torr Head, which, in 1956, shared the fate of Casement’s Celtic cross. It has become a monument in its own way to the Cold War. The base was situated here to survey enemy activities over the same waters that Casement traversed in 1914 on his way to Germany to enlist the help of the Kaiser in the planned rising of 1916.
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Day 7 Friday May 29th 2009 The Casement Cross (Phases 1 through 4)
by Conor Kelly 30 May 2009
The committee also revealed an extensive collection of photographs of the memorial constructed in 1929. It was a somewhat basic stone Celtic cross with a marble face at the base dedicated to Casement and other members of the republican movement in the early twentieth century. It was erected at the edge of the plateau perched high above the bay. The fate of this monument seems to have been greatly affected by an attack by the IRA in 1956 on a nearby military installation, RAF Murlough. Soon after the installation was attacked, person or persons unknown made an intervention on the Casement sculpture by destroying the top half. The work could have been carried out using either a sledgehammer or a machine-gun and the lower half was left severely bullet-ridden. It was locally considered to be a reprisal for the IRA attack. It can be presumed that the intentions of those who did the job sat clearly beyond any Situationist gesture, yet the remains of the action resided at Murlough for over forty years, laying testament to the tricky inheritance of Casement’s Irish dream.
One can imagine the monument at this site existing in several phases:
Phase 1 (1903 – 1929) A wooden cross to famine victims
Phase 2 (1929 – 1956) A stone Celtic cross to Roger Casement and others.
Phase 3 (1956 – 2001) A stone cross with intervention/mutilation
Phase 4 (2001 – present) A bald concrete stump.
The artist (artists) unknown of the 1956 ‘phase three’ of the monument successfully removed the somewhat problematic element of the Christian iconography given that it is not a grave and those named on the sculpture were (theoretically) involved in a political conflict rather than a religious war. The symbolism of ‘phase 2’ has heavy overtones of triumphant martyrdom that are happily absent from ‘phase 3’.The documentation of the mutilated cross presents a very stark and provocative sculpture overlooking the bay.
It could be considered that over time the piece was certainly overworked as it was repeatedly vandalised until no trace was left, with the exception of a concrete outline on the ground. I think it is important to draw a distinction between the first intervention and latter attempts leading to ‘phase 4’. The first intervention could be a clear, legible gesture where as subsequent attempts were bent on mere destruction, without paying due attention to the aesthetics of any final outcome. Much of this is the superimposition of my own thoughts but it seems an appropriate response given the history of divisive receptions to the monument.
Morphing and interrupting the success/effect of the Celtic cross somehow slips into Apollinaire’s vision of the ‘monument devoted to nothing’. This, in turn, seems to directly tap into the questions and ideas raised in the late 1980s by the counter-monument movement in Germany. The development of the notion of the anti-redemptory obligation of public art was obviously informed by a very different series of events (i.e. German artists dealing with the legacy of the Holocaust) but the model could easily be applied to an Irish landscape today. In a post-war, post-civil war, post-partition, post Troubles Northern Ireland, the marking of the past in this self-conscious manner may suggest a number of possibilities.
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Day 6 Thursday May 28th 2009 Roger the Dog Lover
by Conor Kelly 30 May 2009
‘The process involved in the molding of memory is, theoretically at least, antithetical to that involved in the writing of history.’
- Saul Friedlander
For two days I have been stewing over information provided by local people and the committee whilst listening to the cacophonous symphony of little boy racers ‘making donuts’ outside the Curfew Tower. The chairperson of the Commemorative Committee kindly showed to me the original photograph left by Casement to M McCarry of Murlough. It is an incredible image and a profoundly odd image. The subject sits forward awkwardly with a rather large dog on his lap against a strange semi-theatrical backdrop. The picture seems not unlike the Byzantine icons of old depicting the Madonna and child. In the Hodegetria icons, the hand of the Madonna would present the viewer with the fruit of her magic womb. It seems an odd choice of image to send to Mrs McCarry. It seems a wilfully subversive act for a revolutionary and treasonous gunrunner awaiting the hangman’s noose. It is ‘Roger the dog lover’ who is kind to animals or ‘At home with Roger’. It seems to suit the Casement shape-shifter and it certainly tips its hat to the post-Casement dilemma of memorial and the search for an image that is representative (in whatever fashion) of a man and a movement he both inspired and complicated.
A local republican paper by the name of Saoirse (meaning freedom) reported in 2001 that this image would form the basis for a new monument at Murlough. It is my assumption that this image as a public sculpture might denote an emancipation of a sexual rather than political nature, given that the young eligible Edwardian gent in the photograph was the author of those rather racy ‘Black Diaries’.
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Day 5 Wednesday May 27th 2009 The Roger Casement Commemoration Committee (continued)
by Conor Kelly 30 May 2009
(I should note that blog entries are dated as they are written and are posted only when I have access to Internet which is intermittent and during office hours only. I apologise for any confusion between the dating of the text and the dating of the blog post!)
Returning to posthumous Casement, here is an excerpt from a small independent publication by the Committee from 1995 to mark the staging in Ballycastle, Co. Antrim of Casement, a play by Irish-American Charlie Dunne.
‘At the beginning of the year 1953, a few of us, associated with Carey Faughs Gaelic Athletic Club, decided that in order to promote the idea of Irish nationalism in our area, we would, rightly or wrongly, light a bonfire on the top of Croc an Oir, a hill at the top of Murlough. With the help of Seamus McBride’s tractor, a large quantity of wood was hauled up from the Breeshie Plantation, down in Murlough.
At around 9 o’ clock on the evening of March 17th 1953, in the presence of 50 or 60 people, the bonfire was lit. The late Pearse Dempsey, the local vet, was among the crowd and was persuaded to say a few words. At a meeting afterwards it was decided to form a branch of Conmadh na Gaedhilge, and under that branch, to honour our Irish patriot, Roger Casement, who was executed by the British for his part in the Rising in Dublin at Easter, 1916. So was laid the foundation of the first Casement Commemoration at Murlough in August 1953, and it has been held every year since. A wooden plaque was placed on the spot chosen for the last resting place of the mortal remains of Roger Casement.From Pentonville prison, Roger Casement sent this photograph of himself and his dog to my grandmother in Murlough. It was delivered by F. McCarroll, who ministered to Casement while in Pentonville, right up to his moment of execution. It is still in the possession of our family. It has the following inscription on it:-
‘Roger Casement and “Patrick Ni Hoolihan†who saved his life on two occasions – To M. McCarry.’
The graveyard at Murlough dates back to early Christian times, and previous to that was probably a site of pagan worship. The remains of St.Mologe’s church are still visible, although the small Celtic cross carved out of local basalt, which marked his grave, has been stolen. The alter stone has also been stolen, as has the sandstone lintel with the Latin inscription which had been over the door of the church. Folklore has it that the graveyard holds the remains of men killed in action in the 1798 Rebellion.
- Frank McCarry 1995
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The Roger Casement Commemoration Committee
by Conor Kelly 27 May 2009
This is a local organisation charged with the task of raising funds and planning a fitting memorial to Roger Casement at Murlough Bay. Without any significant financial backing and despite their best efforts since the 1950s, nothing has been realised in the area and, over the years, the turnouts for an annual memorial service dwindle in size. They do, however, possess a wealth of information and imagery that bring the curious Casement to light…
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Day 4 Tuesday May 26th 2009 Site visit to Murlough Bay Meeting with members of the Roger Casement Commemoration Committee
by Conor Kelly 27 May 2009
Today involves visiting another site in the upper part of the bay. Rumour has it that there was once a cross erected here to the memory of Casement. It has since either been removed or vandalised. Following a meeting with members of the Roger Casement Commemorative Committee outside Ballvoy near Murlough, it emerges that a celtic cross once stood here on the site of a previous wooden cross. The first erection in 1903 was to the memory of those killed by the Great Famine of 1847 and it was then appropriated for the purposes of remembering Casement and other members of the republican movement. All trace of it has gone, with the exception of a bald concrete rectangle on the grass overlooking the natural amphitheatre at Murlough.
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Day 3 Monday May 25th 2009 Site visit to Murlough Bay, Co. Antrim
by Conor Kelly 27 May 2009
A key focal point for my period of research will be a site at Murlough Bay, Co. Antrim. Situated between Fair Head and Torr Head, Murlough is an area of outstanding natural beauty and for many years has played host to sporadic memory-work on Casement. It is where Casement wished to be buried. It was a place that took prominence in the memory and imagination of the incarcerated Casement in 1916 whilst awaiting execution at Pentonville prison. He expressed the wish that his m o r t a l r e m a i n s b e r e m o v e d f r o m ‘ t h a t d r e a d f u l p l a c e a n d b e b u r i e d i n t h e o l d c h u r c h y a r d a t M u r l o u g h ’. After his execution in London many appeals were made for the return of his remains but all were denied. In 1965 his remains were brought back to Ireland but were interred at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin and not in Murlough, which now resided (post-partition) on British soil after the birth/half-birth of Casement’s beloved republic.
Today there exists a type of empty grave at Murlough. It was the site of a monastic dwelling belonging to former local hermit St.Mologe. In a sense, Casement lies unburied here and it seems more than a fitting place for any memory-work to begin.
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Wednesday July 19th 1916
by Conor Kelly 27 May 2009
The Daily Mirror in London publishes a front-page photograph of a condemned Roger Casement leaving Bow Street Police Magistrates Court for the gallows at Pentonville Prison. The headline reads ‘Casement’s Appeal fails:†He was the king’s liege wherever he might beâ€. In the same year as the battles at Jutland and the Somme – the year that Dada crawled out from the wrenching guts of Europe and George Bernard Shaw wrote his Nobel Prize-winning Pygmalion – Casement was hung until dead and his remains placed in a quick limed mass grave at Pentonville.
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The Roger Casement Microbiography
by Conor Kelly 27 May 2009
Casement was born in Sandycove, Dublin in 1864 to a Unionist family loyal to British rule in Ireland. Orphaned at age 13, he was raised by his uncle at Magherintemple, Co. Antrim. After a brief stint working with a railway company in Africa, he joined the British consular service. In 1903 he headed the investigation into allegations of slavery and torture against the native workers on rubber plantations in the Congo Free State (or Belgium) of Leopold II. Around this time he began to grow quite critical of the colonial dream and the notions of Empire. This, in turn, led him to become involved with the growing underground movement for a republic on his native soil. In 1910 he found himself investigating yet more atrocities under Portuguese rule in the Putumayo region of the Amazon. In 1911 he was knighted in London for his diplomatic and humanitarian services. After retiring early on the grounds of ill health from the Foreign Office, he began recruiting volunteers in Ireland and abroad to stage a rebellion against British rule in Ireland. In 1916 he was arrested near Banna Strand, County Kerry attempting to run 20,000 guns (a gift from the German Kaiser) into Ireland for the planned Easter Rising. During his trial, it emerged that a series of personal diaries – allegedly in Casement’s handwriting and alluding to a multitude of homosexual sex acts (then illegal) – were circulating in a bid to discredit his name and his republican cause. With mild public outcry Casement was tried and found guilty. In 1916, guilty of treason, he was hung until dead and buried in a mass grave at Pentonville Prison in London.
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Day 1 Saturday May 23rd 2009 Arrival at Curfew Tower, Cushendall, Northern Ireland.
by Conor Kelly 27 May 2009
My residency is taking place over a brief and presumably intensive three-week period at the Curfew Tower (formerly Turnly’s Tower) in the village of Cushendall, County Antrim. It is a red sandstone folly commissioned by landlord Francis Turnly in the 1820s as ‘a place of confinement for idlers and rioters’. Today it is owned by Bill Drummond (of KLF and K Foundation fame) and artists’ residencies are facilitated by Void Gallery in Derry. The village was known well to one Roger Casement (1864-1916) and it seems an appropriate place to contemplate and frame a relationship with certain histories and the notion of memory. The memory of Casement has long been a divisive one and although the question of his memorialisation has rattled on intermittently and publicly for what is fast approaching a century, there appears a kind of absence in that regard, here, in a place to which he was so intrinsically linked.
The introduction of this blog begs the question not only of how and why, as a society, we should wish to memorialise but who is it we wish to memorialise? Who was Roger Casement? Which Casement shall we recall? Is it fitting to memorialise Casement’s achievements?
And should we?