To every place there belongs a story . . .

to every story there belongs another . . .

From Famine Queen to Faerie Queen - History repeats itself . . . 

The village and environs of Fenit were the scene of the ill-fated attempt of Roger Casement to land arms at Banna Strand to aid the Easter Rising. Casement was landed from a German submarine, just north of the harbour in the early hours of 21 April 1916, but the ship, Aud Norge, never landed at Fenit and was scuttled in Cork harbour by its German captain lest the British forces take possession of the arms cache.

From "The Famine Queen" to "The auld bitch"!

This monument to Queen Victoria stands outside the Queen Victoria Building in Sydney Australia. This sculptural monument to Queen Victoria by the Irish sculptor John Hughes was originally unveiled by King Edward VII in 1904 outside Leinster House in Dublin, the "second city" of the British Empire.

The monumental sculpture, and the portland stone column on which the statue of Queen Victoria sits, was located in the enclosed courtyard of Leinster House on 17 February 1908. At a ceremony with 1000 troops on parade, the Lord Lieutenant declared "we are assembled here to dedicate this noble work of art to the perpetual commemoration of a great personality and a great life."
 
According to Peter Moore:

The statue shows an effort to portray Victoria Regina as the 'Irish Queen' rather than the 'British Sovereign'. She is seated in a low chair rather than an elaborate throne, allowing the artist to contain the figure within a sphere rather than as a towering pillar. And she wears a simple coronet rather than the royal or imperial crown...Moreover, the statue portrayed her as the Sovereign Head of the Most Illustrious Order of St Patrick, Ireland's order of chivalry dating from 1783. The star on her left breast, and the pendant badge, feature shamrocks, crowned harps, and St Patrick's Cross.

The St Patrick reference probably backfired. It confirmed Ireland's colonial subordination. Round her neck the chain alternates the red and white roses of England.

The statue sat atop a portland stone column, also designed by Hughes, with three sculptural groups to be placed below – "Fame", "Hibernia at Peace" and "Hibernia at War". This last group was also known as "Erin and the Dying Soldier" and referred to the loyalty demonstrated by Irish soldiers in the Boer War. (These associated sculptures from the base of the statue are currently in the collection of Dublin Castle.)

In 1922, 14 years after the statue's installation, Leinster House had become the seat of the Irish parliament, the Oireachtas, and nationalistic sentiment disapproved of having a British queen celebrated in such a location. 

The statue had by now been given the nickname "The auld bitch" by Irish writer James Joyce. 

In August 1929 The Irish Times reported that discussions were under way to remove the statue “on the basis that its continued presence there is repugnant to national feeling, and that, from an artistic point of view, it disfigures the architectural beauty of the parliamentary buildings.”

As part of the Irish State's move towards declaring a republic, it was removed in July 1948 and replaced with a carpark. It was transported to the Royal Hospital Kilmainham and, along with the associated three sculptural groups, was left in a courtyard. The hospital had been a proposed site for the parliament, and so used as a storage location for property belonging to the National Museum of Ireland. Attempts to send the sculpture to London, Ontario did not succeed as neither the Canadian nor Irish governments wished to pay the cost of transport. 

In February 1980 the statue was transferred to a yard behind a disused children's reformatory at Daingean, County Offaly.

In the mid-1980s, the iconic Queen Victoria Building in central Sydney was undergoing major renovations after decades of disuse, and appropriate public art was being sought for the entrance. Neil Glasser, Director of Promotions for the company undertaking the renovations (Singapore's Ipoh Gardens Ltd), travelled to several former British colonies in the hope of finding a statue. After a "considerable amount of sleuthing", the statue, sitting in long grass behind the reformatory, was rediscovered and proposed to be moved to Australia. 

In order to obtain approval, Glasser contacted John Teahan, the Director of the National Museum of Ireland, and Sydney's Lord Mayor contacted the Irish Ambassador in Canberra. In August 1986 Fine Gael Taoiseach, Garret FitzGerald, authorised that the statue be given to Australia "on loan until recalled". Subsequently, declassified cabinet papers showed that the plan was opposed by the then finance minister John Bruton (later to be Taoiseach), as well as Teahan, on the basis that it represented the work of an Irish artist and;

"...representative of one of the many traditions of Irish history".

Despite heavy rain an unveiling ceremony took place on Sunday 20 December 1987 overseen by Eric Neal, Chief Commissioner of Sydney, and Dermot Brangan, first secretary at the Irish embassy to Australia. 

The irony of the British Queen being "transported" to Australia by ship was not lost on the Irish media. 

To many Irish people Queen Victoria has been known as the "Famine Queen". In the days before the unveiling the embassy and the Daily Telegraph newspaper received anonymous threats of violence and protest about "the propriety of an Irish government giving a statue of Victoria as a gift."

Ireland’s Australian embassy got “threatening and abusive phone calls” over the government’s gift of a statue of Queen Victoria to the city of Sydney, Irish cabinet papers declassified after 30 years have revealed.

“In the days preceding the unveiling, you should be aware that the embassy received a number of threatening and abusive phone calls about the propriety of an Irish government giving a statue of Victoria as a gift. The callers demanded to know the name of who was going to represent the Irish government at the ceremony and to warn him/her to stay away,” Brangan said.

Perhaps the unveiling of this statue had a capacity to trigger deep, and long standing, feelings of resentment regarding the British Crown. During the years of the Great War many within the Irish diaspora in Australia would resist attempts to introduce conscription by the aforementioned Billy Hughes. Hughes was a strong supporter of Australia's participation in World War I and, after the loss of 28,000 men as casualties (killed, wounded and missing) in July and August 1916, Generals Birdwood and White of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) persuaded Hughes that conscription was necessary if Australia was to sustain its contribution to the war effort.

However, a two-thirds majority of his party, the Labor Party, which included Roman Catholics and union representatives as well as the Industrialists (Socialists) such as Frank Anstey, were bitterly opposed to this, especially in the wake of what was regarded by many Irish Australians (most of whom were Roman Catholics) as Britain's excessive response to the Easter Rising of 1916.


The Easter Rising as a theme for an interactive computer game!

The Easter Rising was a "watershed moment" for the formation of a modern Irish identity, not so much because of the rebellion against British Rule by a small group of Irish nationalists, but because of the brutal British "imperialist" response. 

The Easter Rising, also known as the Easter Rebellion, was an armed insurrection in Ireland during Easter Week, April 1916. The Rising was launched by Irish republicans to end British rule in Ireland and establish an independent Irish Republic while the United Kingdom was heavily engaged in the First World War. It was the most significant uprising in Ireland since the rebellion of 1798, and the first armed action of the Irish revolutionary period.

100 years after the Rising the Irish Times published this guide

Wed, Sep 23, 2015 Diarmaid Ferriter

The 1916 Rising was the first major revolt against British rule in Ireland since the United Irishmen Rebellion of 1798. During Easter Week 1916, the rebels succeeded in taking over large parts of Dublin city for almost a week, right under the noses of the British empire, then the largest empire in the world. For fewer than 2,000 poorly armed amateur soldiers to take on a country with the political power and military strength of Britain was astonishing.

The Rising matters because, even though the rebels surrendered, it had a huge effect. After the Rising, the British authorities executed the rebel leaders and arrested over 3,500 suspected of involvement. These moves helped convince many people to turn against the British, and seek full independence for Ireland as a separate country.

Some say the people who planned the Rising feared it was the last chance to save a sense of Irishness. At the time of the Rising, 150,000 Irishmen were fighting for Britain in the first World War.

Almost 50 years ago, Garret FitzGerald, who was taoiseach in the 1980s, and whose father had fought in the GPO in 1916, said: “It was planned by men who feared that without a dramatic gesture of this kind, the sense of national identity that had survived all the hazards of the centuries would flicker out ignominiously within their lifetime, leaving Ireland psychologically as well as legally, like Scotland, an integral part of the United Kingdom.”

The Rising has been claimed by many as the founding act of a democratic Irish state. The rebels were determined that decisions affecting Ireland would be taken in Ireland, not in the British parliament in London.

It was also the start of Ireland being seen by some other colonies as a role model for the international struggle against the British empire. Others see the 1916 Rising as a bloody act by a few unelected individuals. The Rising, they say, increased the divisions between Ulster unionists and southern Irish nationalists, and was the start of an era of unnecessary bloodshed and violence. Many of these people say that independence for Ireland could have been achieved peacefully, without the Rising.

The Rising destroyed the Home Rule project. For 40 years, a group of Irish politicians had campaigned for an arrangement that would keep Ireland inside the British empire, but would allow some decisions be taken by Irish members of an Irish home rule parliament.

The Rising killed off this idea. After 1916, people called for recognition of the Republic that had been declared during the Rising.

The rebellion also remains important to some people because of the ideals put forward by the rebels in the Proclamation of 1916. Many of the promises made in the Proclamation – such as equality and social progress – have still not been delivered, they say.

What is indisputable is that 1916 was a hugely significant event that transformed the focus of Irish nationalism, increased divisions and made people more politically aware and active.

The 1916 Rising came to be seen as the first stage in a war of independence that resulted in the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922 and, ultimately, the formal declaration of an Irish Republic in 1949.

Diarmaid Ferriter is professor of modern history in University College Dublin. 

The Black (and Tan) Legends

Conscription crisis in Australia
The political mood in Australia amongst the Irish diaspora in 1916 had been shaped by Britain's excessive response to the Easter Rising of 1916, and to an extent comparable with the impact of British imperial policy for the Irish in Ireland too, led to more difficulties in the attempt to extend conscription in Australia for military service in the Great War. In October, Billy Hughes held a national plebiscite for conscription, but it was narrowly defeated. The enabling legislation was the Military Service Referendum Act 1916 and the outcome was advisory only. The narrow defeat (1,087,557 Yes and 1,160,033 No), however, did not deter Hughes, who continued to argue vigorously in favour of conscription. This revealed the deep and bitter split within the Australian community that had existed since before Federation, as well as within the members of his own party.

The Federation of Australia was the process by which the six separate British self-governing colonies of Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia, and Western Australia agreed to unite and form the Commonwealth of Australia, establishing a system of federalism in Australia. Fiji and New Zealand were originally part of this process, but they decided not to join the federation. Following federation, the six colonies that united to form the Commonwealth of Australia as states kept the systems of government (and the bicameral legislatures) that they had developed as separate colonies, but they also agreed to have a federal government that was responsible for matters concerning the whole nation. When the Constitution of Australia came into force, on 1 January 1901, the colonies collectively became states of the Commonwealth of Australia.

British, White, Protestant and anti-Catholic
Soon after Australia became a federation in January 1901, the federal government of Edmund Barton passed the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, drafted by the man who would become Australia's second Prime Minister, Alfred Deakin. The passage of this bill marked the commencement of the White Australia Policy as Australian federal government policy. Subsequent acts further strengthened the policy up to the start of the Second World War. These policies effectively gave British migrants preference over all others through the first four decades of the 20th century. During the Second World War, Prime Minister John Curtin reinforced the policy, saying:

"This country shall remain forever the home of the descendants of those people who came here in peace in order to establish in the South Seas an outpost of the British race."

The nascent Australian labour movement was less than wholly committed in its support for federation. On the one hand, nationalist sentiment was strong within the labour movement and there was much support for the idea of White Australia. On the other hand, labour representatives feared that federation would distract attention from the need for social and industrial reform, and further entrench the power of the conservative forces. The federal conventions included no representatives of organised labour. In fact, the proposed federal constitution was criticised by labour representatives as being too conservative. These representatives wanted to see a federal government with more power to legislate on issues such as wages and prices. They also regarded the proposed senate as much too powerful, with the capacity to block attempts at social and political reform, much as the colonial upper houses were quite openly doing at that time.

Religious factors played a small but not trivial part in disputes over whether federation was desirable or even possible. As a general rule, pro-federation leaders were Protestants, while Catholics' enthusiasm for federation was much weaker, not least because Sir Henry Parkes, the "Father of Federation", had been militantly anti-Catholic for decades, and because the labour movement was disproportionately Catholic in its membership.

Conscription had been in place since the 1910 Defence Act, but only in the defence of the nation. Hughes was seeking via a referendum to change the wording in the act to include "overseas", and therefore enable Australia to have a role in the ongoing World War. A referendum was not necessary but Hughes felt that in light of the seriousness of the situation, a vote of "Yes" from the people would give him a mandate to bypass the Senate. On 15 September 1916 the NSW executive of the Political Labour League, Frank Tudor expelled Hughes from the Labor Party, after Hughes and 24 others had already walked out to the sound of Hughes's finest political cry "Let those who think like me, follow me." Hughes took with him almost all of the Parliamentary talent, leaving behind the Industrialists and Unionists, thus marking the end of the first era in Labor's history. Years later, Hughes said, "I did not leave the Labor Party, The party left me."

In Dublin, and in Ireland, following the Easter Rising, life went on . . . 

However, nothing would be the same again!

At first, many Dubliners were bewildered by the outbreak of the Rising. James Stephens, who was in Dublin during the week, thought:

"None of these people were prepared for Insurrection. The thing had been sprung on them so suddenly they were unable to take sides."

There was great hostility towards the Volunteers in some parts of the city. Historian Keith Jeffery noted that most of the opposition came from people whose relatives were in the British Army and who depended on their Army allowances. Those most openly hostile to the Volunteers were the "separation women" (so-called because they were paid "separation money" by the British government), whose husbands and sons were fighting in the British Army in the First World War. There was also hostility from unionists. Supporters of the Irish Parliamentary Party also felt the rebellion was a betrayal of their party. When occupying positions in the South Dublin Union and Jacob's factory, the rebels got involved in physical confrontations with civilians who tried to tear down the rebel barricades and prevent them taking over buildings. The Volunteers shot and clubbed a number of civilians who assaulted them or tried to dismantle their barricades.

That the Rising resulted in a great deal of death and destruction, as well as disrupting food supplies, also contributed to the antagonism toward the rebels. After the surrender, the Volunteers were hissed at, pelted with refuse, and denounced as "murderers" and "starvers of the people". Volunteer Robert Holland for example remembered being "subjected to very ugly remarks and cat-calls from the poorer classes" as they marched to surrender. He also reported being abused by people he knew as he was marched through the Kilmainham area into captivity and said the British troops saved them from being manhandled by the crowd. 

However, some Dubliners expressed support for the rebels. Canadian journalist and writer Frederick Arthur McKenzie wrote that in poorer areas, "there was a vast amount of sympathy with the rebels, particularly after the rebels were defeated". He wrote of crowds cheering a column of rebel prisoners as it passed, with one woman remarking "Shure, we cheer them. Why shouldn't we? Aren't they our own flesh and blood?". At Boland's Mill, the defeated rebels were met with a large crowd, "many weeping and expressing sympathy and sorrow, all of them friendly and kind". Other onlookers were sympathetic but watched in silence. Christopher M. Kennedy notes that "those who sympathised with the rebels would, out of fear for their own safety, keep their opinions to themselves". Áine Ceannt witnessed British soldiers arresting a woman who cheered the captured rebels. An RIC District Inspector's report stated: "Martial law, of course, prevents any expression of it; but a strong undercurrent of disloyalty exists". Thomas Johnson, the Labour leader, thought there was, "no sign of sympathy for the rebels, but general admiration for their courage and strategy".

The aftermath of the Rising, and in particular the British reaction to it, helped sway a large section of Irish nationalist opinion away from hostility or ambivalence and towards support for the rebels of Easter 1916. Dublin businessman and Quaker James G. Douglas, for example, hitherto a Home Ruler, wrote that his political outlook changed radically during the course of the Rising because of the British military occupation of the city and that he became convinced that parliamentary methods would not be enough to remove the British presence. 

After the surrender the country remained under martial law. About 3,500 people were taken prisoner by the British, many of whom had played no part in the Rising, and 1,800 of them were sent to internment camps or prisons in Britain. Most of the leaders of the Rising were executed following courts-martial. The Rising brought physical force republicanism back to the forefront of Irish politics, which for nearly 50 years had been dominated by constitutional nationalism. It, and the British reaction to it, led to increased popular support for Irish independence.

After the Rising, claims of atrocities carried out by British troops began to emerge. Although they did not receive as much attention as the executions, they sparked outrage among the Irish public and were raised by Irish MPs in Parliament.

One incident was the 'Portobello killings'. On Tuesday 25 April, Dubliner Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, a pacifist nationalist activist, had been arrested by British soldiers. Captain John Bowen-Colthurst then took him with a British raiding party as a hostage and human shield. On Rathmines Road he stopped a boy named James Coade, whom he shot dead. His troops then destroyed a tobacconist's shop with grenades and seized journalists Thomas Dickson and Patrick MacIntyre. The next morning, Colthurst had Skeffington and the two journalists shot by firing squad in Portobello Barracks. The bodies were then buried there. Later that day he shot a Labour Party councillor, Richard O'Carroll. When Major Sir Francis Vane learned of the killings he telephoned his superiors in Dublin Castle, but no action was taken. Vane informed Herbert Kitchener, who told General Maxwell to arrest Colthurst, but Maxwell refused. Colthurst was eventually arrested and court-martialled in June. He was found guilty of murder but insane, and detained for twenty months at Broadmoor. Public and political pressure led to a public inquiry, which reached similar conclusions. Major Vane was discharged "owing to his action in the Skeffington murder case".

The other incident was the 'North King Street massacre'. On the night of 28–29 April, British soldiers of the South Staffordshire Regiment, under Colonel Henry Taylor, had burst into houses on North King Street and killed 15 male civilians whom they accused of being rebels. The soldiers shot or bayoneted the victims, then secretly buried some of them in cellars or back yards after robbing them. The area saw some of the fiercest fighting of the Rising and the British had taken heavy casualties for little gain. General Maxwell attempted to excuse the killings and argued that the rebels were ultimately responsible. He claimed that "the rebels wore no uniform" and that the people of North King Street were rebel sympathisers. Maxwell concluded that such incidents "are absolutely unavoidable in such a business as this" and that "Under the circumstance the troops [...] behaved with the greatest restraint". A private brief, prepared for the Prime Minister, said the soldiers "had orders not to take any prisoners" but took it to mean they were to shoot any suspected rebel. The City Coroner's inquest found that soldiers had killed "unarmed and unoffending" residents. The military court of inquiry ruled that no specific soldiers could be held responsible, and no action was taken.

These killings, and the British response to them, helped sway Irish public opinion against the British.

Under Regulation 14B of the Defence of the Realm Act 1914 1,836 men were interned at internment camps and prisons in England and Wales. Many of them, like Arthur Griffith, had little or nothing to do with the Rising. Camps such as Frongoch internment camp became "Universities of Revolution" where future leaders including Michael Collins, Terence McSwiney and J. J. O'Connell began to plan the coming struggle for independence.

 Banna Strand near Fenit

The strand close to the Kerry village and environs of Fenit is where the ill-fated attempt of Roger Casement to land arms at Banna Strand in order to aid the Easter Rising, was thwarted. In the early hours of 21 April 1916, three days before the rising began, the German submarine put Casement ashore here at Banna Strand in Tralee Bay, County Kerry. Suffering from a recurrence of the malaria that had plagued him since his days in the Congo, and too weak to travel, he was arrested by the RIC at McKenna's Fort, an ancient ring fort now called Casement's Fort, in Rahoneen, Ardfert,  on charges of high treason, sabotage and espionage against the Crown.

He sent word to Dublin about the inadequate German assistance. The Kerry Brigade of the Irish Volunteers might have tried to rescue him over the next three days, but had been ordered by its leadership in Dublin to "do nothing" —not a shot was to be fired in Ireland before the Easter Rising was in train.

A monument to Casement and Robert Monteith stands near the dunes with the inscription: ‘At a spot on Banna beach adjacent to here Roger Casement – Humanitarian & Irish revolutionary leader – Robert Monteith & a third man came ashore from a German submarine on Good Friday morning 21 April 1916 in furthering the cause of Irish freedom.’ The unnamed ‘third man’ was Daniel Julian Bailey,  who was a Prisoner of War when he was recruited into the ‘Casement Brigade.’

The monument was erected in 1966 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the landing. The organising committee deliberately omitted the name of the ‘third man’ from the monument because he turned ‘King’s evidence’ after his arrest.

Whilst Casement had been landed from German submarine, the ship, Aud Norge, never landed at Fenit and was scuttled in Cork harbour by its German captain lest the British forces take possession of the arms cache.

Who was Roger Casement?

Sir Roger Casement was tried in London for high treason and hanged at Pentonville Prison on 3 August. Roger David Casement (known as Sir Roger Casement, CMG, between 1911 and 1916), was a diplomat and Irish nationalist. He worked for the British Foreign Office as a diplomat and later became a humanitarian activist, poet and Easter Rising leader. 

He has been described as the;

"father of twentieth-century human rights investigations".

He was honoured in 1905 for the Casement Report on the Congo and knighted in 1911 for his important investigations of human rights abuses in Peru. In Africa as a young man, Casement first worked for commercial interests before joining the British Colonial Service. In 1891 he was appointed as a British consul, a profession he followed for more than 20 years. Influenced by the Boer War and his investigation into colonial atrocities against indigenous peoples, Casement grew to distrust imperialism.

 

After retiring from consular service in 1913, he became more involved with Irish republicanism and other separatist movements. During World War I he made efforts to gain German military aid for the 1916 Easter Rising that sought to gain Irish independence.

Casement's Black Diaries

Casement was arrested, convicted and executed for high treason. He was stripped of his knighthood and other honours. Before the trial, the British government circulated excerpts said to be from his private journals, known as the Black Diaries, which detailed homosexual activities. Given prevailing views and existing laws on homosexuality, this material undermined support for clemency for Casement. Debates have continued about these diaries: a handwriting comparison study in 2002 concluded Casement had written the diaries, but this was still contested by some.

At Casement's highly publicised trial for high treason, the prosecution had trouble arguing its case. Casement's crimes had been carried out in Germany and the Treason Act 1351 seemed to apply only to activities carried out on English (or arguably British) soil. A close reading of the Act allowed for a broader interpretation: the court decided that a comma should be read in the unpunctuated original Norman-French text, crucially altering the sense so that "in the realm or elsewhere" referred to where acts were done and not just to where the "King's enemies" might be. 

Afterwards, Casement himself wrote that he was to be "hanged on a comma", leading to the well-used epigram.

Bernard Shaw to Roger Casement: put on the performance of your life

As Casement faced trial for treason in 1916, Shaw wrote a speech that he was convinced could turn the trial into a national drama, and save Casement from the scaffold.

The Trial of Roger Casement, 1916, painted by John Lavery

Fintan O’Toole writes in the Irish Times 
Sat, Mar 26, 2016

After the Easter Rising, in the summer of 1916, the most famous Irishman in the world tried to save the last of the rebel leaders from execution. George Bernard Shaw was highly controversial, and his scepticism about the first World War had outraged mainstream British opinion. But he was still regarded as the world’s most important playwright. And now he sat down to draft a dramatic monologue for a very specific actor. It was to be performed for a very small and select audience. And it had a precise purpose: to save a life.

The actor he envisaged for the part was Roger Casement, who was about to go on trial in London for the capital crime of high treason, for seeking to import arms from Germany to Ireland in preparation for a rising.

Shaw attempted, in full seriousness, to get Casement to perform a script for the jury that would try him. The dramatic stakes could not have been higher: Casement would literally perform to save his life. The playwright’s proven capacity to make an English audience feel and think what it did not want to feel or think would, through the voice of the accused, force an English jury to acquit an Irish traitor.

Shaw did not think that Casement was right to forge an alliance with Germany. He was even more deeply opposed to what he saw as Prussian militarism than he was to the English ruling class. He would write, in a letter of June 1917, that the Germans, if victorious, would show “as ruthless a contempt for Irish as for Polish nationality”. But he did believe that Casement, as an Irishman, owed no allegiance to the British Empire and had the right to do what he sincerely believed was best for his own country, Ireland.

For all that he spent most of his career in England, Shaw’s profound understanding of Irish nationalism was revealed in the wake of the 1916 Rising, when he was the only public figure of any importance to predict that the execution of the leaders would transform Irish public opinion.

While the executions were still in progress, and while Irish newspapers and mainstream nationalists were still denouncing the rebellion as monstrous, Shaw, in the London Daily News of May 10th, 1916, wrote that the rebels had merely done what an English patriot would do were the Germans to win the war and occupy England.

Executing such a rebel, he argued, would make him “a martyr and a hero, even though the day before the rising he may have been only a minor poet”.

Shaw was personally sceptical about the value of martyrdom. In his play The Devil’s Disciple Gen Burgoyne does not really want to hang the apparent rebel Dick Dudgeon: “It is making too much of the fellow to execute him. Martyrdom, sir, is what these people like: it is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.”

But Shaw knew his Irish history. He presciently warned the British that “the shot Irishmen will now take their places beside Emmet and the Manchester martyrs in Ireland, and beside the heroes of Poland and Serbia and Belgium in Europe, and nothing in heaven or on earth can prevent it.”

And it was this line of argument that Shaw tried to get Casement to put to the jury at his treason trial.

Beatrice Webb, the economist and historian with whom Shaw had co-founded the London School of Economics, recorded in her diary for May 21st, 1916, a meeting between herself, Shaw and Casement’s great friend Alice Stopford Green. As she wrote in astonishment and irritation: “Shaw wants to compel Casement and Casement’s friends to ‘produce’ the defence as a national dramatic event.” Webb was appalled: “His conceit is monstrous.”

But Shaw was right: Casement’s trial, following on from the executions of the other leaders of the Rising, was indeed a national dramatic event. What concerned Shaw was what kind of drama it would be.

There was a tragic template for these shows, in which the climax was an inevitable execution. Shaw brought to bear on this template his contrary intelligence, seeking to infuse it with his own dramaturgy in which the inevitable almost never happens. He wanted to save Casement from martyrdom. As Shaw later explained, Casement’s trial was set to play out in an entirely predictable pattern: “I knew that the conventional legal defence which his lawyers were certain to advise would infallibly hang him after eliciting compliments from the Bench for its ability and eloquence. The facts were undeniable; but learned counsel would refuse to admit them and would cross examine the Crown witnesses at the utmost possible length so as to give plenty of value for their fees.

“The Lord Chief Justice would compliment; the jury would admire; and everybody except the prisoner would be perfectly happy in the obvious certainty that the facts were the facts, the witnesses unshakeable, and a verdict of guilty certain.”

In this familiar scenario Casement would make his heroic speech from the dock after his fate had been sealed by that verdict. In Shaw’s drama, to the contrary, he would conduct his own defence and speak to the jury before it had condemned him. In the play that Shaw wrote for his enactment Casement would contest none of the facts about his dealings with Germany. Instead he would, in the Shavian manner, turn treason inside out and reveal its opposite: patriotism and loyalty.

Casement would plead simply that he could not be a traitor because he was not English: “If you persist in treating me as an Englishman, you bind yourself thereby to hang me as a traitor before the eyes of the world.

“Now as a simple matter of fact, I am neither an Englishman nor a traitor: I am an Irishman, captured in a fair attempt to achieve the independence of my country; and you can no more deprive me of the honours of that position, or destroy the effects of my effort, than the abominable cruelties inflicted six hundred years ago on William Wallace in this city when he met a precisely similar indictment with a precisely similar reply, have prevented that brave and honourable Scot from becoming the national hero of his country.”

In this performance there is no pleading: “I ask for no mercy, no pardon, no pity.” In fact Shaw’s Casement gently teases his audience of jurors. They may, he suggests, be tempted to hang him not as a traitor but as a fool, because the Rising was a quixotic failure. But quixotic failures were the order of the day in the Great War: “Will you understand me when I say that those . . . days of splendid fighting against desperate odds in the streets of Dublin have given back Ireland her self-respect? We were beaten, indeed never had a dog’s chance of victory; but you also were beaten in a no less rash and desperate enterprise in Gallipoli. Are you ashamed of it? Did your hearts burn any the less . . . because you were at last driven into the sea by the Turks? Well, what you feel about the fight in Gallipoli, Irishmen feel all over the world about the fight in Dublin.”

The brilliance of Shaw’s dramatic provocation of the jury lies in the way it frames and subverts their power. The jurors had absolute power to have Casement hanged for treason. But Shaw’s Casement subtly suggests that this is not power at all, because if they set out to hang a traitor they will succeed merely in creating a martyr: “I am not trying to shirk the British scaffold: it is the altar on which Irish saints have been canonized for centuries.”

Shaw as Casement is certain of his posthumous status: “My neck is at your mercy if it amuses you to break it; my honour and my reputation are beyond your reach.”

On the contrary, therefore, the only real power the jurors have is to acquit Casement of treason, thereby depriving him of Irish sainthood. It is a perfect Shavian paradox.

Shaw’s play for Casement was not performed. Casement’s lawyers persuaded him to adopt a conventional defence, contesting the facts and making his speech only after he had been condemned. 

Casement, while awaiting his execution, regretted that he had not performed Shaw’s “national drama”.

As for Shaw, like any artist he wasted nothing. His last great play, Saint Joan, is, at heart, his considered response to the Rising and in particular to Casement’s martyrdom.

Joan’s unbreakable will to sweep the English out of France, her trial and her ultimate decision to choose death over imprisonment all echo Casement’s real drama. Joan, too, returns after death as an image and an inspiration: nothing in heaven and earth can prevent her spiritual and temporal triumph. Shaw’s “national drama” may be disguised as French, but it is deeply Irish.

A terrible beauty is born

Easter, 1916 is a poem by W. B. Yeats describing the poet's torn emotions regarding the events of the Easter Rising staged in Ireland against British rule on Easter Monday, April 24, 1916. The uprising was unsuccessful, and most of the Irish republican leaders involved were executed for treason. The poem was written between May and September 1916, but first published in 1921 in the collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer.

Even though a committed nationalist, Yeats usually rejected violence as a means to secure Irish independence, and as a result had strained relations with some of the figures who eventually led the uprising. The deaths of these revolutionary figures at the hands of the British, however, were as much a shock to Yeats as they were to ordinary Irish people at the time, who did not expect the events to take such a bad turn so soon. Yeats was working through his feelings about the revolutionary movement in this poem, and the insistent refrain that "a terrible beauty is born" turned out to be prescient, as the execution of the leaders of the Easter Rising by the British had the opposite effect to that intended. The killings led to a reinvigoration of the Irish Republican movement rather than its dissipation.

The poem ends with these lines, an augury of what was to come . . .

And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

W. B. Yeats

Conscription Crisis 1918 in Ireland  
The Conscription Crisis of 1918 stemmed from a move by the British government to impose conscription (military draft) in Ireland in April 1918 during the First World War. Vigorous opposition was led by trade unions, Irish nationalist parties and Roman Catholic bishops and priests. A conscription law was passed but was never put in effect; no one in Ireland was drafted into the British Army.

By June 1918 it had become apparent to most observers in Britain and Ireland that following American entry into the war the tide of war had changed in favour of the Allied armies in Europe, and by 20 June the Government had dropped its conscription and home rule plans, given the lack of agreement of the Irish Convention. However the legacy of the crisis remained.

Completely ineffectual as a means to bolster battalions in France, the events surrounding the Conscription Crisis were disastrous for the Dublin Castle authorities, and for the more moderate nationalist parties in Ireland. The delay in finding a resolution to the home rule issue, partly caused by the war, and exaggerated by the Conscription Crisis in Ireland, all increased support for Sinn Féin.

Sinn Féin's association, in the public perception at least, with the 1916 Easter Rising and the anti-conscription movement, directly and indirectly led on to their landslide victory over and effective elimination of the Irish Parliamentary Party, the formation of the first Dáil Éireann and in turn to the outbreak of the Anglo-Irish War in 1919.

This opposition also led in part to Sinn Féin being ignored by the subsequent victors at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, despite its electoral success. It appointed representatives who moved to Paris and several times requested a place at the conference, with recognition of the Irish Republic, but never received a reply.

The crisis was also a watershed in Ulster Unionism's relations with Nationalist Ireland, as expressed by Unionist leader James Craig: "for Ulster Unionists the conscription crisis was the final confirmation that the aspirations of Nationalists and Unionists were unrecompatible.

The conscription proposal, and the backlash that followed, galvanised support for political parties which advocated Irish separatism and influenced events in the lead-up to the Irish War of Independence.

Growing support amongst the Irish populace for the republican Sinn Féin political party saw it win 73 out of 105 seats in the Irish general election, 1918. On 21 January 1919, Sinn Féin established themselves as the First Dáil, which then declared an independent Irish Republic. They also declared the Irish Republican Army (IRA) the official army of the state, which in the same month began the Irish War of Independence. The main targets of the IRA offensive were the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and the British Army in Ireland.

In September 1919 David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, outlawed the Dáil and augmented the British Army presence in Ireland, starting work on the next Home Rule Act.

A Black and Tan in Dublin, smoking and carrying a Lewis gun.

In January 1920, the British government started advertising in British cities for men willing to "face a rough and dangerous task", helping to boost the ranks of the RIC in policing an increasingly anti-British Ireland.

There was no shortage of recruits, many of them unemployed First World War army veterans, and by November 1921 about 9,500 men had joined. This sudden influx of men led to a shortage of RIC uniforms, and the new recruits were issued with khaki army uniforms (usually only trousers) and dark green RIC or blue British police surplus tunics, caps and belts. These uniforms differentiated them from the British Army and the regular RIC, and gave rise to the force's nickname: Christopher O'Sullivan wrote in the Limerick Echo on 25 March 1920 that, meeting a group of recruits on a train at Limerick Junction, the attire of one reminded him of the Scarteen Hunt, whose "Black and Tans" nickname derived from the colouration of its Kerry Beagles.

Ennis comedian Mike Nono elaborated the joke in Limerick's Theatre Royal, and the nickname soon took hold, persisting even after the men received full RIC uniforms. The popular Irish claim made at the time that most of the men serving in the Black and Tans had criminal records and had been recruited straight from British prisons is incorrect, as a criminal record would disqualify one from working as a policeman. The vast majority of the men serving in the Black and Tans were unemployed veterans of the First World War who were having trouble finding jobs, and for most of them it was economic reasons that drove them to join the Temporary Constables.

The new recruits received three months' hurried training, and were rapidly posted to RIC barracks, mostly in rural County Dublin, Munster and eastern Connacht. The first men arrived on 25 March 1920. The British government also raised another unit, the Auxiliary Division of the constabulary, known as the Auxiliaries or Auxies, consisting of ex-army officers. The Black and Tans aided the Auxiliaries in the British government's attempts to break both the IRA and the Dáil. The Blacks and Tans were meant to back up the RIC in the struggle against the IRA, playing a defensive-reactive role whereas the role of the "Auxies" were those of heavily armed, mobile units meant for offensive operations in the Irish countryside intended to hunt down and destroy IRA units. At least part of the infamy of the Blacks and Tans is undeserved as many of the war crimes attributed to the Blacks and Tans were actually the work of the "Auxies".

The Black and Tans were not subject to strict discipline in their first months and, as a result, their deaths at the hands of the IRA in 1920 were often repaid with arbitrary reprisals against the civilian population. In the summer of 1920, the Black and Tans burned and sacked many small towns and villages in Ireland, beginning with Tuam in County Galway in July 1920 and also including Trim, Balbriggan, Knockcroghery, Thurles and Templemore amongst many others. In November 1920, the Tans "besieged" Tralee in revenge for the IRA abduction and killing of two local RIC men. They closed all the businesses in the town, let no food in for a week and shot dead three local civilians. On 14 November, the Tans were suspected of abducting and murdering a Roman Catholic priest, Father Michael Griffin, in Galway. His body was found in a bog in Barna a week later. From October 1920 to July 1921, the Galway region was "remarkable in many ways", most notably the level of police brutality towards suspected IRA members, which was far above the norm in the rest of Ireland.

On the night of 11 December 1920, they sacked Cork, destroying a large part of the city centre.

In January 1921, the British Labour Commission produced a report on the situation in Ireland which was highly critical of the government's security policy. It said the government, in forming the Black and Tans, had;

"liberated forces which it is not at present able to dominate". 

However, since 29 December 1920, the British government had sanctioned "official reprisals" in Ireland – usually meaning burning property of IRA men and their suspected sympathisers. Taken together with an increased emphasis on discipline in the RIC, this helped to curb the random atrocities the Black and Tans committed since March 1920 for the remainder of the war, if only because reprisals were now directed from above rather than being the result of a spontaneous desire for revenge.

The actions of the Black and Tans alienated public opinion in both Ireland and Great Britain. Their violent tactics encouraged the Irish public to increase their covert support of the IRA, while the British public pressed for a move towards a peaceful resolution. Edward Wood MP, better known as the future Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, rejected force and urged the British government to make an offer to the Irish "conceived on the most generous lines". Sir John Simon MP, another future Foreign Secretary, was also horrified at the tactics being used. Lionel Curtis, writing in the imperialist journal The Round Table, wrote: "If the British Commonwealth can only be preserved by such means, it would become a negation of the principle for which it has stood". The King, senior Anglican bishops, MPs from the Liberal and Labour parties, Oswald Mosley, Jan Smuts, the Trades Union Congress and parts of the press were increasingly critical of the actions of the Black and Tans. 

Mahatma Gandhi said of the British peace offer:

"It is not fear of losing more lives that has compelled a reluctant offer from England but it is the shame of any further imposition of agony upon a people that loves liberty above everything else".

Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (Abacus, 1998), p. 384.

What if Casement had managed to avoid arrest?

Casement was an Irish revolutionary, informed by the horrors of colonialism in the Congo and the borderlands of Peru and Colombia in South America. 

In 1906 the Foreign Office had sent Casement to Brazil: first as consul in Santos, then transferred to Pará, and lastly, on his promotion to consul-general in Rio de Janeiro, when he was attached as a consular representative to a commission investigating rubber slavery by the Peruvian Amazon Company (PAC). This company had been registered in Britain in 1908 and had a British board of directors and numerous stockholders. In September 1909, a journalist named Sidney Paternoster, wrote in Truth, a British magazine, of abuses against PAC workers and competing Colombians in the disputed region of the Peruvian Amazon. 

Casement traveled to the Putumayo District, where the rubber was harvested deep in the Amazon Basin, and explored the treatment of the local Indians of Peru. The isolated area was outside the reach of the national government and near the border with Colombia, which periodically made incursions in competition for the rubber. For years, the Indians had been forced into unpaid labour by field staff of the PAC, who exerted absolute power over them and subjected them to near starvation, severe physical abuse, rape of women and girls by the managers and overseers, branding and casual murder.

Chained workers photographed by Casement. Casement found conditions as inhumane as those in the Congo. He interviewed both the Putumayo and men who had abused them, including three Barbadians who had also suffered from ill treatment by the company.

As these Barbadians were subjects of the British Empire, it was deemed feasible to act against the company. When the report was publicised, there was public outrage in Britain over the abuses.

Casement's report has been described as a "brilliant piece of journalism", as he wove together first-person accounts by both "victims and perpetrators of atrocities ... Never before had distant colonial subjects been given such personal voices in an official document." After his report was made to the British government, some wealthy board members of the PAC were horrified by what they learned. Arana and the Peruvian government promised to make changes. In 1911, the British government asked Casement to return to Iquitos and Putumayo to see if promised changes in treatment had occurred. In a report to the British foreign secretary, dated 17 March 1911, Casement detailed the rubber company's continued use of pillories to punish the Indians:

Men, women, and children were confined in them for days, weeks, and often months. ... Whole families ... were imprisoned — fathers, mothers, and children, and many cases were reported of parents dying thus, either from starvation or from wounds caused by flogging, while their offspring were attached alongside of them to watch in misery themselves the dying agonies of their parents.

After his return to Britain, Casement repeated his extra-consular campaigning work by organising Anti-Slavery Society and Catholic mission interventions in the region.

In Ireland in 1904, on leave from Africa from that year until 1905, Casement joined the Gaelic League, an organisation established in 1893 to preserve and revive the spoken and literary use of the Irish language. He met the leaders of the powerful Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) to lobby for his work in the Congo. He did not support those, like the IPP, proposing Home Rule, as he felt sure the House of Lords would veto such efforts. Casement was more impressed by Arthur Griffith's new Sinn Féin party (founded 1905), which called for an independent Ireland (through a non-violent series of strikes and boycotts) whose sole imperial tie would be a dual monarchy between Britain and Ireland, modeled on the policy example of Ferenc Deák in Hungary. Casement joined the party in 1905.

Many years later James Joyce presents a set of conversation in a Dublin pub as the Cyclops episode in his Ulysses that, although his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, describes history as a nightmare;

"looking back we can see that in his Ulysses we find a compelling portrait of early 20th century Ireland. Especially in the Cyclops episode, the political life of early 20th century Ireland comes alive through a series of vivid exchanges between the characters in Barney Kiernan’s pub in the aptly named, Little Britain Street. Joyce pits Bloom, his cosmopolitan outsider, with his Hungarian-Jewish background, against the pub’s other customers with their more conventional nationalist attitudes. Joyce has some fun at the expense of Arthur Griffith, claiming that Bloom had given Griffith the idea of Ireland aspiring to emulate Hungary by acquiring effective independence as part of a dual monarchy."

Casement retired from the British consular service in the summer of 1913. In November of that year he was one of those helping to form the Irish Volunteers. He and Eoin MacNeill, later the organisation's chief of staff, co-wrote the Volunteers' manifesto. In July 1914, Casement journeyed to the United States to promote and raise money for the Volunteers among the large and numerous Irish community there. Through his friendship with men such as Bulmer Hobson, a member both of the Volunteers and of the secret Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), Casement established connections with exiled Irish nationalists, particularly Clan na Gael.

Elements of the suspicious Clan did not trust him completely, as he was not a member of the IRB and held views they considered too moderate, although others such as John Quinn regarded him as extreme. Devoy, initially hostile to Casement for his part in conceding control of the Irish Volunteers to John Redmond, was won over in June, and another Clan leader, Joseph McGarrity, became devoted to Casement and remained so from then on. The Howth gun-running in late July 1914, which Casement had helped to organise and finance, further enhanced his reputation.

In August 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, Casement and John Devoy arranged a meeting in New York with the western hemisphere's top-ranking German diplomat, Count Bernstorff, to propose a mutually beneficial plan: if Germany would sell guns to the Irish revolutionaries and provide military leaders, the Irish would revolt against England, diverting troops and attention from the war with Germany. Bernstorff appeared sympathetic. Casement and Devoy sent an envoy, Clan na Gael president John Kenny, to present their plan personally. Kenny, while unable to meet the German Emperor, did receive a warm reception from Flotow, the German ambassador to Italy, and from Prince von Bülow.

In October 1914, Casement sailed for Germany via Norway, traveling in disguise and seeing himself as an ambassador of the Irish nation. While the journey was his idea, Clan na Gael financed the expedition.

In November 1914, Casement negotiated a declaration by Germany which stated:

The Imperial Government formally declares that under no circumstances would Germany invade Ireland with a view to its conquest or the overthrow of any native institutions in that country. Should the fortune of this Great War, that was not of Germany's seeking, ever bring in its course German troops to the shores of Ireland, they would land there not as an army of invaders to pillage and destroy but as the forces of a Government that is inspired by goodwill towards a country and people for whom Germany desires only national prosperity and national freedom.

Casement spent most of his time in Germany seeking to recruit an Irish Brigade from among more than 2,000 Irish prisoners-of-war taken in the early months of the war and held in the prison camp of Limburg an der Lahn. His plan was that they would be trained to fight against Britain in the cause of Irish independence.

On 27 December 1914 Casement signed an agreement in Berlin to this effect with Arthur Zimmermann in the German Foreign Office. Fifty-two of the 2000 prisoners volunteered for the Brigade. Contrary to German promises, they received no training in the use of machine guns, which at the time were relatively new and unfamiliar weapons.

During World War I, Casement is known to have been involved in the German-backed plan by Indians to win their freedom from the British Raj, the "Hindu–German Conspiracy", recommending Joseph McGarrity to Franz von Papen as an intermediary. The Indian nationalists may also have followed Casement's strategy of trying to recruit prisoners of war to fight for Indian independence.

Both efforts proved unsuccessful. In addition to finding it difficult to ally with the Germans while held as prisoners, potential recruits to Casement's brigade knew they would be liable to the death penalty as traitors if Britain won the war. In April 1916, Germany offered the Irish 20,000 Mosin–Nagant 1891 rifles, ten machine guns and accompanying ammunition, but no German officers; it was a fraction of the quantity of the arms Casement had hoped for, with no military expertise on offer.

Casement did not learn about the Easter Rising until after the plan was fully developed. The German weapons never landed in Ireland; the Royal Navy intercepted the ship transporting them, a German cargo vessel named the Libau, disguised as a Norwegian vessel, Aud-Norge. All the crew were German sailors, but their clothes and effects, even the charts and books on the bridge, were Norwegian. As John Devoy had either misunderstood or disobeyed Pearse's instructions that the arms were under no circumstances to land before Easter Sunday, the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union (TGWU) members set to unload the arms under the command of Irish Citizen Army officer and trade unionist William Partridge were not ready. The IRB men sent to meet the boat drove off a pier and drowned.

The British had intercepted German communications coming from Washington and suspected that there was going to be an attempt to land arms at Ireland, although they were not aware of the precise location. The arms ship, under Captain Karl Spindler, was apprehended by HMS Bluebell on the late afternoon of Good Friday. About to be escorted into Queenstown (present-day Cobh), County Cork on the morning of Saturday 22 April, Captain Spindler scuttled the ship by pre-set explosive charges. It now lies at a depth of 40 metres. Its surviving crew became prisoners of war.

Casement confided his personal papers to Dr Charles Curry, with whom he had stayed at Riederau on the Ammersee, before he left Germany. He departed with Robert Monteith and Sergeant Daniel Beverley (Bailey) of the Irish Brigade in a submarine, initially the SM U-20, which developed engine trouble, and then the SM U-19, shortly after the Aud sailed. According to Monteith, Casement believed the Germans were toying with him from the start and providing inadequate aid that would doom a rising to failure. He wanted to reach Ireland before the shipment of arms and to convince Eoin MacNeill, who he believed was still in control of events, to cancel the rising. 

On 11 November 1918, U-19 was surrendered to the British, and was broken up at Blyth sometime in 1919 or 1920. The main gun of U19 was donated to the people of Bangor, Co. Down and today sits near the War Memorial in the town's Ward Park. It was donated by the Admiralty in recognition of the valorious conduct of Commander The Hon. Edward Bingham whilst on board HMS Nestor while fighting in the Battle of Jutland in July 1916, for which he received the Victoria Cross.

 

To commemorate the centenary of the arrest of Roger Casement, an Irish Republican floral tribute, known as an Easter Lily, was left at the base of the gun on Good Friday morning 2016.

What if the guns had landed?

History repeated itself when in 1984, the Marita Ann, a Fenit-registered boat, attempted a similar operation on behalf of the Provisional Irish Republican Army that included the present TD for Kerry North, Martin Ferris. 

In September 1984 Ferris attempted to import seven tons of explosives, arms and ammunition, as well as medications, training manuals, and communications equipment, using the fishing vessel Marita Ann, which was skippered by Mike Browne, an IRA volunteer. The plan involved rendezvousing with the trawler Valhalla, captained by Bob Anderson, which sailed from Boston, transferring arms and ammunition to the Marita Ann and sailing to the south coast of Kerry where a number of cars were on standby to deliver the arms to various arms dumps. The Marita Ann was intercepted by the Irish Navy vessels the LÉ Emer and the LÉ Aisling on the south coast of Kerry with the arms and ammunition on board. The crew were arrested. On 11 December 1984, Ferris and two other members of the Marita Ann crew, including Browne and a United States citizen, John Crawley, were sentenced to ten years imprisonment at Portlaoise Prison. Gavin Mortimer and Johnny McCarthy both received suspended sentences. He was released on 11 September 1994.

They were discovered by the authorities and arrested off the coast. This operation had the present TD for Kerry North, Martin Ferris prosecuted for gun-running, convicted for the possession of explosive substances for unlawful purpose and for possession of firearms and ammunition with intent to endanger life. Ferris served 10 years in prison.

From Bloody Bess to the Faerie Queen

Elizabeth I of England was also known as: Astraea, Belphoebe, Bloody Bess, Fortune's Empress, Gloriana, Good Queen Bess, the Glory of Her Sex, the Great, the Maiden Queen, the Fairie Queene, the Peerless Oriana, the Queen of the Northern Seas, the Queen of Shepherds, the Virgin Queen.

"Fort of Slaughter" - "Fort of Gold"

It was at this place that Sir Walter Raleigh was present at the Siege of Smerwick, and where he led a party that beheaded some 600 Spanish and italian soldiers, in what would nowadays be considered a war crime. 

Ard na Caithne, (English: Smerwick) meaning height of the arbutus or strawberry tree, in the heart of the Kerry Gaeltacht, is one of the principal bays of Corca Dhuibhne. It is nestled at the foot of An Triúr Deirfiúr and Cnoc Bhréanainn, which at 952 metres (3,123 ft) is the highest mountain in the Brandon group.

Bounded by the villages of Baile an Fheirtéaraigh, Baile na nGall and Ard na Caithne itself, the area is what has been known as the Fíor-Ghaeltacht, or true Gaeltacht, in recent decades. an Irish-language word for any primarily Irish-speaking region. In Ireland, the term Gaeltacht refers individually to any, or collectively to all, of the districts where the government recognises that the Irish language is the predominant vernacular, or language of the home. Ard na Caithne (old anglicised form Ardnaconnia) was also known in Irish as Iorras Tuaiscirt ("north peninsula") and Gall-Iorras ("peninsula of the strangers").


The Siege and Massacre of Smerwick  
The Second Desmond Rebellion (1579–1583) was the more widespread and bloody of the two Desmond Rebellions launched by the FitzGerald dynasty of Desmond in Munster, Ireland, against English rule in Ireland. The second rebellion began in July 1579 when James FitzMaurice FitzGerald landed in Ireland with a force of Papal troops, triggering an insurrection across the south of Ireland on the part of the Desmond dynasty, their allies and others who were dissatisfied for various reasons with English government of the country. The rebellion ended with the 1583 death of Gerald FitzGerald, 15th Earl of Desmond, and the defeat of the rebels.

The rebellion was in equal part a protest by feudal lords against the intrusion of central government into their domains; a conservative Irish reaction to English policies that were altering traditional Gaelic society; and a religious conflict, in which the rebels claimed that they were upholding Catholicism against a Protestant queen who had been pronounced a heretic in 1570 by the papal bull Regnans in Excelsis. 

On 10 September 1580, a squadron of Spanish ships under the command of Don Juan Martinez de Recalde landed a Papal force of Spanish and Italians numbering 600 men commanded by Sebastiano di San Giuseppe (aka Sebastiano da Modena), at Smerwick, on the Dingle Peninsula near the same point where Fitzmaurice had landed the previous year. They had been sent by Philip II to aid the rebellion (in a clandestine manner), as a result it was paid for and sent by Pope Gregory XIII. At the time neither Spain nor the Papacy was formally at war with the Kingdom of Ireland, but the papal bull Regnans in Excelsis of 1570 had released observant Catholics from their allegiance to Queen Elizabeth I. 

Leading a rebel force of 4,000 men somewhere to the east, Lord Desmond, Lord Baltinglass and John of Desmond tried to link up for supplies with the expeditionary force. However, the English forces under The 10th Earl of Ormond and The 14th Baron Grey de Wilton blocked them, and Richard Bingham's ships blockaded their ships in the bay at Smerwick. San Giuseppe had no choice but to retreat to the fort at Dún an Óir.

On 5 November, a naval force led by Admiral Sir William Winter arrived at Smerwick Harbour, replenishing the supplies of Lord Grey de Wilton, who was camped at Dingle, and landing eight artillery pieces. The invading forces were geographically isolated on the tip of the narrow Corca Dhuibhne (Dingle Peninsula), cut off by Cnoc Bréanainn (Mount Brandon), one of the highest mountains in Ireland, on one side, and the much larger English force on the other.

The 400–500 strong force of Papal freelance soldiers (of Spanish and Italian origin), having previously captured the village, had been forced by this situation to retreat to this nearby defensive position, now known as Dún an Óir ('the Fort of Gold', possibly a persistent mistranscription for Dún an Áir, 'the Fort of Slaughter'), where they were then besieged by the Irish Royal Army. The English forces began the artillery barrage on Dún an Óir on the morning of the 8 November, which rapidly broke down the improvised defences of the fort.

After a three-day siege, the commander Di San Giuseppe surrendered on 10 November 1580. Accounts vary on whether they had been granted quarter. Grey de Wilton ordered the summary executions, sparing only the commanders. Grey had also heard that the main Irish rebel army of 4,000 "who had promised to be on the mountains", were somewhere in the hills to his east, looking to be rearmed and supplied by Di San Giuseppe, and they might in turn surround his army; but this army never appeared.

According to Grey de Wilton's account, contained in a despatch to Queen Elizabeth I of England dated 11 November 1580, he rejected an approach made by the besieged Spanish and Italian forces to agree terms of a conditional surrender in which they would cede the fort and leave. Lord Grey de Wilton claimed that he insisted that they surrender without preconditions and put themselves at his mercy, and that he subsequently rejected a request for a ceasefire. An agreement was finally made for an unconditional surrender the next morning, with hostages being taken by English forces to ensure compliance. The following morning, an English force entered the fort to secure and guard armaments and supplies. Grey de Wilton's account in his despatch says "Then put I in certain bands, who straight fell to execution. There were six hundred slain." Grey de Wilton's forces spared those of higher rank: "Those that I gave life unto, I have bestowed upon the captains and gentlemen that hath well deserved..."

Local historian Margaret Anna Cusack (alias MF Cusack) noted that there is a degree of controversy about Lord Grey de Wilton's version of events to Elizabeth, and identifies three other contemporary accounts, by O'Daly, O'Sullivan Beare and Russell, which contradict it. 

According to these versions, Grey de Wilton promised the garrison their lives in return for their surrender, a promise which he broke, remembered in the term "Grey's faith". 

Like Grey himself, none of these commentators can be described as neutral, as they were all either serving the state or opposed to it. Cusack's interpretation of the events could not be described as unbiased, given her position as a Catholic nun and fervent Irish nationalist at the time.

Cusack also confirmed (Cusack MF, An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 Dublin, 1868) that Di San Giuseppe (whom she named by the Spanish version, San José) had sold the "Fort del Ore" for a bribe:Colonel Sebastian San José, who proved eventually so fearful a traitor to the cause he had volunteered to defend .. The Geraldine cause was reduced to the lowest ebb by the treachery of José. She explained that:

In a few days the courage of the Spanish commander failed, and he entered into treaty with the Lord Deputy. A bargain was made that he should receive a large share of the spoils. He had obtained a personal interview in the Viceroy's camp, and the only persons for whom he made conditions were the Spaniards who had accompanied him on the expedition. The English were admitted to the fortress on the following day, and a feast was prepared for them.

Sir Geoffrey Fenton wrote to London on 14 November about the prisoners that a further "....20 or 30 Captains and Alphiaries [were] spared to report in Spain and Italy the poverty and infidelity of their Irish consociates [sic]."

According to Cusack (Cusack, MF, The History of the Kingdom of Kerry, 1871 p.187-9), the few that were spared suffered a worse fate. They were offered life if they would renounce their Catholic faith; on refusal, their arms and legs were broken in three places by an ironsmith. They were left in agony for a day and night and then hanged. In contrast, Grey's report mentioned: "Execution of the Englishman who served Dr Sanders, and two others, whose arms and legs were broken for torture." He did not specify why they were tortured, nor refer to their religion.

According to the English writer John Hooker in his Supply to the Irish Chronicle (an addition to Holinshed's Chronicles) written in 1587, the bands ordered to carry out the executions were led by Captain Raleigh (later Sir Walter Raleigh) and Captain Mackworth.

Richard Bingham, future commander of Connacht, was present and described events in a letter to The 1st Earl of Leicester, although he claimed the massacre was perpetrated by sailors. The poet Edmund Spenser, then secretary to the Lord Deputy, is also thought to have been present.

A Monument to the Smerwick Harbour massacre

 The Field of the Heads (Gort nag Crann) near Dun an Oir commemorating the massacre of around 600 Irish, Spanish and Italian men and women by English troops commanded by Lord Grey of Wilton in 1580. 
The monument dates from 1980; the seaward side bears a cross and a Gaelic inscription 'igcuimhne dhun an oir samhain 1580'. According to the folklore of the area, the execution of the captives took two days, with many of the captives being beheaded in a field known locally in Irish as Gort a Ghearradh (the Field of the Cutting); their bodies later being thrown into the sea.

Raleigh received 40,000 acres (16,000 ha) (approx. 0.2% of Ireland) upon the seizure and distribution of land following the attainders arising from the rebellion, including the coastal walled town of Youghal and, further up the Blackwater River, the village of Lismore. 

This made him one of the principal landowners in Munster, but he had limited success inducing English tenants to settle on his estates. Raleigh made the town of Youghal his occasional home during his 17 years as an Irish landlord, frequently being domiciled at Killua Castle, Clonmellon, County Westmeath. 

Amongst Raleigh's acquaintances in Munster was another Englishman who had been granted land there, poet Edmund Spenser. In the 1590s, he and Raleigh travelled together from Ireland to the court at London, where Spenser presented part of his allegorical poem The Faerie Queene to Elizabeth I.

The Faerie Queene

 

Queen Elizabeth I played by Cate Blanchett

The Faerie Queene is an English epic poem by Edmund Spenser. Books I–III were first published in 1590, and then republished in 1596 together with books IV–VI. The Faerie Queene is notable for its form: it is one of the longest poems in the English language as well as the work in which Spenser invented the verse form known as the Spenserian stanza. On a literal level, the poem follows several knights as a means to examine different virtues, and though the text is primarily an allegorical work, it can be read on several levels of allegory, including as praise, or, later, criticism, of Queen Elizabeth I. 

In Spenser's "Letter of the Authors", he states that the entire epic poem is "cloudily enwrapped in Allegorical devices", and the aim of publishing The Faerie Queene was to "fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline".

Spenser presented the first three books of The Faerie Queene to Elizabeth I in 1589, probably sponsored by Sir Walter Raleigh. The poem was a clear effort to gain court favor and as a reward Elizabeth granted Spenser a pension for life amounting to £50 a year, though there is no further evidence that Elizabeth I ever read any of the poem. This royal patronage elevated the poem to a level of success that made it Spenser's defining work.

. . . and flattery will get you everywhere!

The finished poem is composed of six books, each centred on a particular virtue. Allegory being allegory, there is plenty of scope for merging praise with a hidden critique.   

William Blake chose to depict the characters in The Faerie Queene, perhaps to sort them out as symbolic characters according to his version of how the virtues and vices, as understood in his own day, could be reversed, inverted, turned upside down, to reveal an actuality that was skillfully masked by flattery, lies and hypocrisy.

In Spenser's day casuistry was name of the game. Casuistry is a process of reasoning that seeks to resolve moral problems by extracting or extending theoretical rules from a particular case, and reapplying those rules to new instances. This method occurs in applied ethics and jurisprudence. 

However, the term has also been commonly used as a pejorative term to criticize the use of clever but unsound reasoning, especially in relation to moral questions, as in the modern use of the term sophistry to refer to a fallacious argument, especially one used deliberately to deceive. The word casuistry derives from the Latin noun casus "case" or "occurrence".

The Oxford English Dictionary says, quoting Viscount Bolingbroke, (1749), that the word "applied to a quibbling or evasive way of dealing with difficult cases of duty." Its textual references, except for certain technical usages, are consistently pejorative, for example:

"Casuistry destroys by distinctions and exceptions, all morality, and effaces the essential difference between right and wrong".

"The Lie" by Sir walter Raleigh

Raleigh, or Ralegh, had come a long way. Following his time as a landlord in Ireland Raleigh was instrumental in the English colonisation of North America and was granted a royal patent to explore Virginia, paving the way for future English settlements. However, despite many legends, he never travelled to North America.

In 1591, he secretly married Elizabeth Throckmorton, one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting, without the Queen's permission, for which he and his wife were sent to the Tower of London. After his release, they retired to his estate at Sherborne, Dorset.

In 1594, Raleigh heard of a "City of Gold" in South America and sailed to find it, publishing an exaggerated account of his experiences in a book that contributed to the legend of "El Dorado". After Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, Raleigh was again imprisoned in the Tower, this time for being involved in the Main Plot against King James I, who was not favourably disposed towards him. In 1616, he was released to lead a second expedition in search of El Dorado. During the expedition, men led by his top commander ransacked a Spanish outpost, in violation of both the terms of his pardon and the 1604 peace treaty with Spain. Raleigh returned to England and, to appease the Spanish, he was arrested and executed in 1618.

Three decades after the massacre at Smerwick, when Raleigh had fallen from favour, his involvement was brought against him as a criminal charge in one of his trials. Raleigh argued that he was "obliged to obey the commands of his superior officer" but he was unable to exonerate himself. He was executed on 29 October 1618, chiefly for his involvement in the Main Plot.

What does the poem 'The Lie' by Sir Walter Raleigh mean?
Karyth Cara @ e notes writes:

Possibly writing while imprisoned in 1592 by England's Queen Elizabeth I, Ralegh blasts the supposed righteousness and might of England's governing and socio-cultural institutions. These institutions are those that permitted him to be imprisoned by his sovereign--whom he believed he had dutifully served--and others that failed to come to his defense. These governing and socio-cultural institutions range from Queen Elizabeth I's royal court to her courtiers "who brave it"--chiefly Elizabeth's new favorite, the Earl of Essex , Robert Devereux (or Essex)--to charity to wisdom to schools to love and, finally, to faith, manhood and virtue.

Ralegh devastates the superficial facade of each by naming what the institution professes to be, then, with bitter irony, proclaiming what it really is. For example, charity is "coldness," wisdom is overblown, brave courtiers are ease seekers, and virtue is "least preferred." The meaning of the poem--written at a time when Elizabeth I refused to accept Ralegh back into her favor--conveys Ralegh's retaliatory condemnation of those who condemned him thus compelling him to expose how false they all are. Since giving an accusation of falseness (equivalent to being said to lack truth, honor and valor) required a to-the-death challenge in Ralegh's time, he sends his "soul" to safely deliver the messages of condemnation for him.

To "Give Someone the Lie"

The premise of "The Lie," which is integral to the meaning of the poem, is that when the accused governing and socio-cultural institutions named in the poem deny the accusations charged against them, then the "soul," directed by the poetic persona, Ralegh himself, is to "give them the lie." This is an archaic (no longer known or used) expression that accused a person of being false and that was equivalent to proffering a challenge to a duel; it was a serious undertaking to "give a person the lie." In an era when a person's honor was inextricably tied to their courage to speak truthful words, to accuse someone of a lie was to accuse them of being dishonorable, cowardly and a liar. Duels were fought to resolve an affront as great as this, comprising as it does an attack against three of the highest virtues someone of Ralegh's era could possess. In "The Lie" Ralegh is setting forth the truth about the falseness of the institutions named and defying them to contradict his pronouncements.

Say to the court, it glows
   And shines like rotten wood;
Say to the church, it shows
   What's good, and doth no good:
If church and court reply,
   Then give them both the lie.

The first institutions Ralegh accuses are the foremost institutions of "the court" and "the church." While it might be tempting to think "court" means the Elizabethan justice system, that understanding would be incongruous for two reasons. First, Ralegh was not tried before his imprisonment under Elizabeth (he was later under James I). It was Elizabeth herself who order him sent to the Tower immediately upon his return in answer to her summons. Second, a judicial court of law is not readily described as "glowing" although a royal monarchical court is readily described as glowing and shinning. Therefore, while a case could readily be made that the Elizabethan judicial system was "rotten," "The Lie" presents a more compelling denunciation of the times if "court" is understood to mean the royal court of the English monarch.

What does Ralegh say, then, about the Elizabethan royal court? This is where Ralegh introduces the poetic device of irony, with a deeply bitter tone, that describes something by metaphorically associating it with the worst possible and opposite comparison that could be made. In his bitterly ironic accusation against the royal court, he says it "glows," but like "rotten wood" glows. If you've ever seen rotten wood, you know that it does not glow or "shine"; saying rotten wood glows or shines is bitterly ironic. Rotten wood has a disintegrated, crumbling surface that reflects only it's decomposing interior. Rotten wood is dull, not reflective; reflectivity is a needed quality for glow or shine. Rotten wood is crumbling and splintering; it is highly unappealing; it is the antithesis of that which "glows / And shines."

Tell potentates, they live
   Acting by others' action;
Not loved unless they give,
   Not strong but by a faction.
If potentates reply,
   Give potentates the lie.

A potentate is a great and powerful sovereign ruler, like a monarch (the term is considered out-of-date for today's rulers). Here, Ralegh separates Queen Elizabeth from her court at large so he can deliver a few significant words pointed directly at her, although her identity is disguised and euphemized in the generalized term "potentate." As an aside, what Ralegh says here argues for "The Lie" having been written after his 1593 release from the Tower, perhaps a 1594 date, which would accord well with the first manuscript evidence. While in the Tower, he was trying to win back Elizabeth I's favor and would not have been likely to want to risk his diatribe falling into her hands thus cutting off all his chances of regaining favor. This argument complements the one pointing out that after his release Elizabeth I took nearly all the profit from the booty taken off the Madre de Dios (the Portuguese merchant ship or carrack taken earlier by Ralegh), leaving him almost penniless along with being exiled from court, which was virtually the same as being left without opportunities for monetary income.

The first bitterly ironic thing Ralegh says about "potentates" (meaning Queen Elizabeth I) is that "they live / Acting by others' action." This is a double-meaning word-play. It can mean that, acting, they pretend to be great while others perform great actions: they live vicariously doing nothing themselves, and they take credit for the real actions of others. It can also mean that, governing, they take actions as rulers (enact laws, imprison people, give favored ones advancement, etc) based on the revelations exposed by the real-life actions of others (govern based on the reports and council of those who have real experience of conflict with other kingdoms, etc). Then, with more bitter irony, Ralegh accuses potentates of being unloved in themselves but loved only because of their gifts: if not for their gifts of wealth and privilege, potentates would be unloved. He further ironically and bitterly asserts that the strength of the potentate (i.e., Elizabeth I) is illusionary and exists only because a faction of the aristocracy places the potentate in power and safeguards that power: "Not strong but by a faction."

Tell faith it's fled the city;
   Tell how the country erreth;
Tell manhood shakes off pity
   And virtue least preferreth:
And if they do reply,
   Spare not to give the lie.

In the last four accusations that Ralegh makes, he summarily restates the essence of his entire accusatory argument. To summarily restate something means to restate what's been discussed in a brief, concise manner with few words; to restate a discussion in a narrow compass of expressions (narrow compass: narrow range of ideas and words) in order to bring the message home to the listener, in order to make the message evident and clear. What Ralegh has to say about "faith," "country," "manhood," "virtue" and fleeing, erring, pity and preferring encapsulate all that he has said above. He can do this summarily because of the depth of meaning in each word he chooses.  

"Tell faith it’s fled the city"
"Faith" is (1) belief in religious scriptures, which affect someone's life and traits; (2) loyalty, fidelity to promises and allegiance to duty; (3) agreement to truth based on someone's veracity; trust or confidence in someone's intentions. To flee ("fled" past tense) is to run away in an alarmed and cowardly way in order to avoid or escape danger. Ralegh says that personified faith--which includes religious faith, faith in someone's loyalty and allegiance, faith in honorable intentions--has fled, like a frightened coward, from the city, meaning London and symbolizing Elizabeth I. Her court, the schools, brilliant wits, the church and virtue, all the things Ralegh accuses are also encompassed in the deep symbolism underlying "faith."

"Tell how the country erreth"
To err, "erreth," is (1) to be mistaken or to offend; (2) to stray or to blunder in intellectual truth, judgement and opinion; (3) to go off from a true course; to wander and roam without a path of duty, rectitude or morality. Ralegh laments that the country, England under Elizabeth's reign, is mistaken and offends; has blundered and strayed from intellectual truth and sound judgement; is wandering about devoid of duty, religion, morality. This lamenting accusation is aimed at great men, at schools, teachers, the arts, at Elizabeth's loyalty and duty to her friends, at the church's pretensions of good and charity, just to name a few.

"Tell manhood shakes off pity"
"Manhood" is (1) being a man, no longer a child; a male human being endowed with virtue, plagued with vice; (2) a man's endowment with qualities of courage, bravery, resolve, steadfastness. To "shake off" is to get rid of something, to disassociate yourself from something, to disavow something. "Pity" is (1) religious reverence, piety; (2) compassion for the suffering of others; commiseration; (3) something that prompts or causes grief or regret. Ralegh accuses men of Elizabeth's realm of disassociating themselves from, of disavowing association with pity as religious piety, as compassion, as regret or grief over having erred. Ralegh calls up the images invoked earlier of cold charity, pretentious religion, rotted wood, factious potentates, love and flesh that are dust, beauty that blasts and blights, a society of irrelevant men who "brave it" for "commending" but who coldly, actively renounce and reject pity in all its forms.

"Tell virtue least preferreth"
"Virtue" is (1) (obsolete) a man's valor and courage; (2) a man's meritoriousness, his worth; (3) a man's integrity, spiritual purity; honoring of duty; loyalty; morality. "Preferreth," preferring or to prefer, is (1) (archaic) someone receiving a recommendation or gaining favor (as Ralegh hoped to gain a renewal of Queen Elizabeth's favor); (2) someone selecting or choosing what is of higher worth, esteem or value; (3) someone gaining a higher rank in dignity, office or honor. Ralegh asserts that a man's courage, worth, integrity, purity and loyalty (and, yes, he means "a man's" because in his society, those were attributes defining men, not women), a man's "virtue," was not the basis for preferring, for gaining favor or rank--it was not the basis of selection, of what was chosen as good, valuable, worthy of esteem.

With these words, Ralegh hearkens back to all his earlier words to the soul, words about the thanklessness of the errand; about the court's rottenness; about the failures of justice, law, friendship, charity; about the falseness of nature, wit, beauty; about the decay of zeal, flesh, wisdom. He hearkens back to his caution: "Fear not to touch the best." Through this stanza, Ralegh hearkens back to and in few words reiterates all he has said before, and Ralegh tells the soul that if these dare reply, do not spare them the accusation of falseness: "if they do reply, / Spare not to give the lie."