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.