Roger Casement

Such aliens as those on The X-Files
burst faceless from the lime-pits and lift shafts,
from the fiery saltire of Casement’s trial,
into uproar from furnace doors’ draughts

between the no-longer-United
Kingdom of Great Britain, and Ireland.
The World Servant’s reputation blighted
after Congo and Peru, by Siren

Isle’s hoarse cormorant youth. What had been mum
and mouthless on the traffickers’ tree,
published, gibbeted loud inside a drum.
The body that should know easement, not freed

yet for burial, to be Ireland’s basement
to union. Open the flaming casement.

Woodford Halse - 4 April 2026

Roger Casement ( 1864 - 1916 ) a Foreign Office official, and Human Rights activist against human trafficking and forced labour in Leopold II’s Congo and in the rubber trade of Amazonian Peru, was stripped of his knighthood and hanged after being tried for treason during WWI. Disclosure of his sexual life in 1916 from his explicit diaries caused a sensation. He was on his way to General Paresis of the Insane, the way he was living.

Casement was an Irish nationalist, and the disposal of his body remains as controversial to this day, as his lifewas. He was also a Protestant, and part of the Northern Revival cultural movement in Northern Ireland, and the bestowal of his remains remain a significant issue in any Irish union or reconciliation. The post-Catholic population of Ireland owes so much to Protestant Ireland for its cultural softpower and international personality. that the question now is what place is there for Protestant pro-British Unionists in such an Ireland, if Democracy tends towards Irish Union.

I felt the only way to deal with Casement’ life was to assimilate him to T.S. Eliot’s great poem on Intelligence work, Gerontion, which is based on Henry Adams’ role as his father’s secretary at the American Legation in London during the American Civil War. Casement both gathered Intelligence and became the plaything of intelligence services.

One wonders if the UK has long for this world.