To mark the 90th anniversary of the 1916 Rising
A travelling Exhibition from Clare County Archives- with facsimiles of recently discovered private papers of Roger Casement & display boards depicting his life, is on display at The County Archives, First floor, Three Rivers Centre, Lifford.
Quotes from Roger Casement, patriot, human rights campaigner, smuggler of arms for the 1916 Rising:
‘The only thing I really want is peace… I am sick to death of….the hopeless folly…called ‘war’!’
‘I kept [a diary] …and then I gave it up because I became too personal…’
‘The 200,000 men they expected from Ireland to cut the German throat will not come up to the knife’.
The exhibition will run from Thursday 8th June 2006 to at least the end July 2006 (during normal office hours) All are welcome.
Casement’s life and untimely death
- Roger Casement was born in Dublin in 1864. During a colourful life as civil servant and consul he worked in Mozambique, Angola, the Congo and Brazil, during which he gained international respect and admiration for exposing atrocities inflicted on indigenous peoples in these countries. Casement resigned from the Foreign Office in 1913 and in that year joined the Irish Volunteers. He tried hard to keep Ireland out of World War 1 and in September 1914 went to Berlin undercover, his reason as stated by himself being ‘to keep Ireland at peace and Irishmen out of the [First World] War, and also to try to assemble an Irish Brigade from Irishmen in different prison camps. Unsuccessful in this aim, by 1916 Casement convinced the Germans to send a small consignment of arms to Ireland but on his return to Ireland he was captured, tried for treason and hanged in Pentonville Prison in London on 3 August 1916. His remains were returned to Ireland and re-interred in Glasnevin cemetery following a state funeral in March 1965.
The exhibition
- The display boards chronicle Casement’s extraordinary and controversial life.
- Copies of documents on display include: a photograph of Casement on Tory Island, correspondence between Casement and Count Gebherd Blucher and others on a variety of topics including nationalism. recruitment of Irishmen for the first world war, Irishmen in German prison camps, his attitude towards the British government