Show Notes
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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