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.