“The calm sea sleeps upon the shore/Each wavelet like a dreamer’s breath Soft swells and falls, it could no more/Of stillness offer save in death. . .”
THOSE LINES from Autumn day in Glenariff by Sir Roger Casement were recalled during a recent visit to the Glens of Antrim. The spirit of this humanitarian and patriot still roams the glens.
On leave from the British consular service, Casement walked the nine glens in May 1904. He found learning Irish “a delightful study”. Later that year he helped Francis Joseph Biggar to organise the first Feis na nGleann (still held annually in Waterfoot at the end of July). A unionist landlord intimidated his tenant who had offered the use of a field to the feis sports committee. The only field they could obtain was overgrown with weeds and thistles. Casement took a scythe to clear it.
His exposé of human rights abuses in the Congo and Putamayo rubber industries intensified Casement’s identification with oppressed people. His 1912 report confirmed that physical abuse was integral to the operations of the Peruvian Amazon Company.
His unhappy experience in the Amazon region strengthened a resolve to quit the consular service and devote his time to Irish nationalism. As the prospect of all-Ireland Home Rule diminished and Europe plunged into militarism, Casement embarked on a path which would end on the scaffold in London.
But in October 1913 he was asked to speak at a Home Rule meeting in Ballymoney, near his old Ulster home. The invitation transformed Casement’s life, according to his biographer, Brian Inglis. The objective – to show that some Antrim Protestants were “standing out to fight Carsonism and proclaim their faith in a united Ireland” – delighted him.
He had never before appeared on a political platform. His host was the local Presbyterian minister, the legendary “Armour of Ballymoney”. In his speech Casement argued that the exclusion of part of Ulster would not resolve the Home Rule crisis.
The London Timesdismissed Ballymoney as only "a small and isolated pocket of dissident Protestants" – the last of the Irish Gladstonian Liberals. In a letter to the editor, Casement was concerned chiefly to rebut the Timescorrespondent's implication that he had been asked to speak because of the fame he had won on his travels, rather than as an Ulsterman. He pointed out that his family had been associated with Co Antrim life for generations.
The Ballymoney demonstration introduced Casement to the role he was best fitted to undertake in the independence movement: persuading Northern Protestants that they need not fear Home Rule. One of the speakers in Ballymoney was another Antrim Protestant, Jack White, the son of a general who had defended Ladysmith and himself a British army captain. White and Casement had a row at their first meeting.
With synchronicity, Captain White (by then of the Irish Citizen Army) was transferred to Pentonville Prison the day before Casement was hanged in August 1916. White had been arrested for trying to organise protests against the execution of James Connolly. It was not the government’s intention, he wrote, “but Casement and I were reconciled, even united, at last”.
Casement implored his cousin, Gertrude Bannister: “Don’t let me lie here in this dreadful place. Take my body back with you and let it lie in the old churchyard in Murlough Bay.” His remains were reinterred in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, in 1965.
According to the Northern Ireland Tourist Board, a poll placed the Antrim coast road fifth in a list of the world’s most spectacular views. A feat of 19th-century engineering, this route between basalt cliffs and coastline is the gateway to a land of cleft mountain and caverned waterfall. It passes by the foot of the glens: Glenarm, Glencloy, Glenariff (with its splendid forest park), Glenballyeamon, Glenann, Glencorp, Glendun, Glenshesk and Glentaisie.
Unsurprisingly, this dramatic landscape is rich in our multi-layered history. The former Torr Head coastguard station was built on the site of a fort occupied by the Red Branch Knights 300 years before Christ. It provides wonderful views over to the Mull of Kintyre on a clear day. A little to the south of the Cushendall-Ballymoney road there is a Neolithic court-tomb of circa 3000 BC. Local tradition identifies it as the grave of Fionn Mac Cumhaill’s poet-warrior son, Oisín.
St Patrick’s association with Slemish mountain, between Ballymena and Carnlough (where the Londonderry Arms Hotel was once owned by Sir Winston Churchill), is based more on tradition than historical fact. Liam de Paor found the medieval legend that Patrick tended flocks as a slave on Slemish less than wholly persuasive. In his writings, the saint gives only one Irish placename – the wood of Foclut in what is now Mayo – and implies that it was the place of his captivity. Our patron saint had connections with east Ulster, however, most notably Armagh. Slemish had a more recent brush with the course of Irish history when the remnants of the United Irish army defeated at Antrim in 1798 retreated to its slopes.
The people of the glens have retained their Gaelic identity invictus. The bilingual road signs: "Safe home – slán agus beannacht" compare favourably with our anodyne: "Slán abhaile". A visit to this region helps one to reflect that, despite all the grief and strife, thank God for life.