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’.