NINETY-FIVE YEARS ago, on Good Friday, April 21st, 1916, Roger Casement disembarked at Banna Strand in Kerry. The purpose of his mission was to land 20,000 German rifles for the Irish Volunteers. At the same time, somewhat paradoxically, he wished to prevent the imminent Easter Rising because (as he saw it) of inadequate German help.
He came ashore from a German U-boat with two companions, Robert Monteith and Daniel Bailey. At dawn, a short distance inland, they came upon an ancient fort called Rathcrihane where Casement, exhausted, decided to remain. His friends pressed on towards Tralee, intending to return for him later. He was arrested in the fort at 1pm that day by an RIC sergeant and constable from Ardfert. Casement afterwards recalled the spot as “Currahane [sic] fort where I stayed to my doom’.
He had on him a number of compromising documents. The most damning of these was a photocopy of the agreement between him and the German government, dated December 1914, concerning the formation of a brigade pledged to fight for Irish independence, composed of Irish members of the British army held as prisoners of war in Germany. According to some of his subsequent statements he contrived, virtually under the noses of the police, to conceal all but one of these documents in a rabbit hole in the fort’s perimeter bank. Elsewhere, less dramatically, he says he concealed them some time after his companions left. In the fort he also concealed a sum of about £50 in English gold. While awaiting trial he became anxious to recover the documents, in particular, and drew a sketch map showing their location for his solicitor, George Gavan Duffy. This map and associated materials are today in the National Library of Ireland.
Duffy sought to locate the documents through a process of discreet inquiry. He was assisted by a Tralee solicitor, Dr John O’Connell, and his apprentice, Daniel J Browne, a friend of Austin Stack, who also worked in O’Connell’s office. There is no direct evidence that Duffy recovered the documents. Their contents, however, are known to historians, whether from additional copies made by Casement or other sources. They raise a tantalising question. During his trial Casement left a packet of papers behind him in court one day with a note to Duffy stating: “There is enough in these papers to hang me ten times over!” The provenance of this packet is apparently unknown, but it included a copy of the agreement concerning Casement’s Irish brigade. It came into possession of the British authorities too late to affect the outcome of Casement’s trial, but its contents were decisive in tipping the scales in cabinet in favour of his execution. It seems very probable that it contained the papers concealed at Rathcrihane which (though this is not recorded) Duffy must eventually have recovered and passed to Casement only, by a cruel irony, to bring about the latter’s destruction.
As for Casement’s money, we know that he drew another map indicating its location for his interrogators at Scotland Yard. Duffy apparently ascertained that the police had found it. This, however, was denied in letters to him from Casement’s interrogator, Basil Thomson, head of criminal investigation at the Yard, as well as the commissioner of police there. While both Kerry police and civilians were in a position to have appropriated the money surreptitiously, we know that the arresting sergeant, Bernard O’Reilly, was especially opportunistic in matters financial. Years later his son, John Francis O’Reilly, was to become a Nazi collaborator and was arrested as a spy after landing by parachute near Foynes, Co Limerick. He escaped to the home of his father, who promptly turned him in, collected the £500 reward for apprehending him, and invested it to his son’s subsequent advantage. If O’Reilly appropriated Casement’s money, he did the latter a double disservice. Despite being in sore need of it himself, Casement (who stressed that the money was not “German gold” but his own property) asked to have it given to Douglas Hyde for the Irish schools fund. He also told Duffy that O’Reilly, when arresting him “was the frightened man”, and he had to assure him that he was unarmed. With characteristic kindness he subsequently had his statement erased to avoid embarrassing the sergeant.
Be this as it may, Casement felt no bitterness concerning his unhappy experience in Co Kerry. Rather, he took from there a memory, almost in the guise of an aisling gheal, which came to comfort him in the grim environs of Pentonville Prison. He recalls this in a last letter written to his sister Nina while awaiting execution. He writes: “When I landed in Ireland that morning . . . swamped and swimming ashore on an unknown strand, I was happy for the first time for over a year. Although I knew that this fate waited on me, I was for one brief spell happy and smiling once more. I cannot tell you what I felt. The sandhills were full of skylarks rising in the dawn, the first I had heard for years – the first sound I heard through the surf was their song as I waded in through the breakers, and they were rising all the time up to the old rath at Currahane . . . and all round were primroses and wild violets and the singing of the skylarks in the air, and I was back in Ireland again.”