Everyone wanted a piece of Roger Casement but which piece? Carefully extracting his skeleton from heavy London mud in 1965 didn’t end the controversy over his life and lusts.

·     The treatment of Casement’s dead body was exceptionally cruel, even by the standards of executed prisoners.

·     Why are all our significant national events in March? Is there some penitential impulse forcing us to suffer for our patriotism?

·     After the burial of the great man in 1965, there little hope of anyone in Ireland reading his raunchy diaries, whether published or not.

·     The Roger Casement in the diaries is having great fun and that, more than anything, upsets people.

Some Reading:

Lucy McDiarmid ‘The Afterlife of Roger Casement’ in The Irish Art of Controversy (2005)

Jeffrey Dudgeon, Roger Casement: The Black Diaries (3rd edition, 2019)

‘Notes on the Exhumation of Roger Casement’s Remains’ in Documents on Irish Foreign Policy 1961-65 vol 12

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