ROYAL IRISH ACADEMY CASEMENT SYMPOSIUM SPEECH

by Jeffrey Dudgeon

(to be delivered at 11.30 a.m. on Saturday 6 May 2000)

I owe to Roger Sawyer and his 1984 book ‘Flawed Hero’ the awakening of an interest in Casement, and my first excursion into print on the subject.  To Bill Mc Cormack and the 1998 symposium that he organised at Goldsmiths College where I first met some of the more illustrious members of the Casement cast, such as Roger Sawyer, Angus Mitchell, Lucy McDiarmid and Seamas Ó Siochain, I owe the seeding of a project that has taken over my life - as Casement did and has done with so many other people’s lives  - then and since.

I am the author of a forthcoming ‘documented biography’ of Casement.  It is largely finished and will be published by Gill & Macmillan hopefully in November of this year - or in the Spring of next.  The documentation aspect is important, as Angus Mitchell a rival and fellow-researcher, now I am happy to see, handsomely commissioned by the Department of Foreign Affairs in this area, knows well.  He is one of half a dozen Casement authors or would-be authors one meets in the National Library Manuscripts room or at the Public Record Office in Kew. 

It is a crowded house but not a cold one.  The field is well-populated but then so is the material.  There is a need - indeed it would be a great kindness - for the mammoth stock of Casement papers to be catalogued precisely – indeed for a Casement library or documentation centre to be established: Perhaps in Ballymena where Casement was educated.  For that reason, and for others, my book will include an abridged version of all five Black diaries and notebooks – and for the first time the highly sexual and never before seen 1911 diary – as well as a much needed comprehensive Casement family tree, as best as I have managed to create, with the kind assistance of his contemporary kinsman Hugh Casement.  It traces his Australian connections but still lacks a solution to the mystery of who his mother Anne really was.

I am perhaps unique amongst the speakers here, being someone of Ulster origin and gay, as well as a Protestant.  With those attributes I may be closer to Casement than most others, but then I would dispute any simpliste notion that he was an Ulsterman - in fact if he was, it was heavily by adoption.  As to being a Protestant he himself indicated on various occasions that he was not.  He certainly converted to Catholicism in 1916 and his mother, who may or may not have been a Roman Catholic herself, had him somewhat needlessly re-baptised in that faith when he was aged four.  

As we know there are a small, although perhaps again, increasing number of people who believe Casement was not a homosexual, and certainly not the author of the Black Diaries.  His status therefore can still seem unclear or contradictory.

Was he like so many of the most notable figures in history, self-invented - governed by not actually being what he desired to be?  Was he perhaps someone from the ethnic margins and thus an enthusiast for the certainties of the centre - his chosen tribe?

I would suggest his ethnic identity might be rather brutally defined as that of an English Catholic homosexual - of Irish birth.  In critical ways that is how Casement operated or seemed to operate.  But then some say the project for a Gaelic Irish Republic ended up creating in Ireland an English, Catholic state but one that was non-British.   

Although people have the right to be what they want to be, or what they believe themselves to be, historians must view them in the context of their choices, beliefs and deeds.  In the matter of homosexuality I lean to the view adopted by Brian Inglis, and the under-read B.L. Reid in their biographies: Casement enjoyed himself sexually, displaying little or no guilt -  and certainly no shame.  And good on him.  That’s a lot of what it ought to be about.  Casement showed himself to be an early exemplar of what is now standard in the gay community.  

And I use the word gay here, even though it will jar with many who reckon it is entirely historically inappropriate - but then the word ‘homosexual’ was a modern concoction from the 1860s, a word, to my knowledge that Casement never wrote.  The word in use then -  although ‘gay’ does have a pre-war provenance - is one we know was utilised between Tim Healy and F.J. Bigger’s second cousin, Joseph Biggar MP, and that is ‘musical’ - but it no longer retains such a double meaning.

The Taoiseach in his speech at the Fianna Fail Arbour Hill commemoration in April 1999 when calling for  a “new and rigorous enquiry into the provenance and genuineness of the so-called black diaries” also said that “today under our legislation of 1993, sexual orientation [the phrase he used] is thankfully no longer even nominally a crime”.  In other words Ireland can cope, either way, with an answer to the controversy surrounding the diaries’ authorship.

Of course the diaries are authentic and genuine.  Some post-modernists may believe they are authentic and fictional.  But believing in their authenticity does not mean you don’t do the most rigorous checks on provenance and detail, as I have done.  No scientific tests beyond proving they are not crude forgeries are probably available. But my status, political and otherwise makes me dedicated to the truth and I think I can safely say that in my manuscript I have not distorted a fact nor omitted an uncomfortable detail to prop up any theory or view.

Being a ‘gay unionist’  is not a crime, although to some, the combination might seem a near-capital offence.  Nor does it set you outside academic norms although I am not an academic.  It may have coloured the area of Casement I chose to concentrate on  -  his family and antecedents, the Co. Antrim setting, the politics of Ulster and Ireland in which he was involved and of course the origin of his homosexuality, and the eternal mystery of the diaries -  which like the Turin Shroud will never be fully resolved.

You can start off resembling Casement; you can come to resemble him, or you can have been like Casement and increasingly cease to resemble him, even to find many of his juvenile certainties irritating. Perhaps I know him too well, sharing so many of his attributes and experiences.  But then nobody is a hero to their valet, and most of all not to their biographer who knows both the humanity, and the ordinariness, perhaps the banality, of their subject. 

It is a matter of some pleasure to reveal that when researching Casement one comes across otherwise peripheral figures such as the indefatigable antiquarian Frank Bigger, Ada McNeill language enthusiast and Glens Feis organiser, Denis McCullough the key Belfast IRB man, the musician Herbert Hughes who arranged My Lagan Love and She Moved Through The Fair, Montgomery Hyde the Unionist MP with a passion for books on sex and spying, the droll Tyrone radical Patrick McCartan, Millar Gordon Casement’s stockbroker boyfriend, and Rose Young of Galgorm Castle where the orphan Casement was first taken in – people fascinating and courageous in their own way that make Casement bearable and enable one to better understand the times he lived in.

If this event is to take the study of Casement further, as the Taoiseach and his adviser Martin Mansergh intended, it will have to risk becoming controversial and be prepared to dip its hands into the Ulster turmoil.  Casement was no prissy operator when it came to revolution.  But like all revolutionaries he must be assessed sternly, and judged carefully, as he chose to destabilise very many people’s lives.  

I have assessed him from the position of one of those people who have been affected by his activities – it is not just the Congolese or the Huitotos of the Amazon who have reason to recall Casement and judge his actions.  Nor is it the preserve alone of humanitarians and Irish nationalists.

In conclusion, in so few minutes I have not been able to detail any of the quite startling discoveries especially on Casement’s sexual status and contacts, and on the diary authenticity question, made in my researches, but I assure you they are numerous and will be covered comprehensively in the forthcoming biography.