#OTD in 1871 – Alexander Sullivan, barrister and last King’s Serjeant of Ireland, is born in Dublin; best known as the leading counsel for the defence in the 1916 treason trial of Roger Casement.

Sullivan failed to win the case and Casement was sentenced to death. After Roger Casement’s capture on Banna Strand he was brought to London. During his interrogation on Easter Monday, news of the Rising filtered through, and by the end of the week, English public opinion of Casement had plummeted. He was presumed to have […]

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#OTD in 1915 – Roger Casement visits Limburg after the full contingent of prisoners had reached the camp.

Casement is now doubtful as to whether the Brigade would be successful, he writes to Count Georg von Wedel from Limburg with his doubts. “I dare say a sham corps of sorts could be formed by tempting the men with promises of money: but an appeal to their “patriotism” is an appeal to something non-existent”… […]

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#OTD in 1915 – The Infamous Sabotage Order Against The U.S. and Roger Casement.

The Imperial German Admiralty requested that the military and naval attachés in Washington, Franz von Papen and Karl Boy-Ed respectively, initiate sabotage in the United States and Canada. This request only surfaced as a memorandum in the Imperial Foreign Office. Initially, the Admiralty envisioned the Irish nationalists to conduct sabotage operations in the U.S. This […]

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#OTD in 1864 – Roger Casement, British consular official and Irish nationalist, is born in Sandycove, Co Dublin.

Fuar siad bás ar son Saoirse na hÉireann. Roger Casement was born in Sandycove, Co Dublin to a wealthy protestant family, he initially served in the British diplomatic corps mainly in Africa. Described as the “father of twentieth-century human rights investigations”, he was honoured in 1905 for the Casement Report on the Congo and knighted […]

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#OTD in 1916 – Roger Casement, Irish patriot, is hanged by the English in Pentonville Prison, London.

Fuair siad bás ar son Saoirse na hÉireann. “Self government is our right, a thing born to us at birth. A thing no more to be doled out to us by another people than the right to life itself; than the right to feel the sun or smell the flowers or to love our kind.” […]

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#OTD in 1916 – Letter from Roger Casement to Margaret Gavan Duffy.

To dear Margaret Gavan Duffy – From Ruari. in my last cell — 2 Augt 1916 9 p.m. Thank you dear friend and Moya and Dana and Eva and all the fond ones. Tomorrow St Stephen’s Day I die the death I sought and may God forgive the mistakes and receive the intent — Ireland’s […]

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#OTD in 1914 – Irish Volunteers during the Howth Gun Running.

The plan was first conceived in April 1914, in response to the Curragh incident on 20 March. Many Irish believed that the British army could not be relied on to enforce Home Rule when it was enacted, and many Irish Volunteers also felt that availability of arms would aid recruitment. At a lunch attended by […]

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#OTD in 1916 – Sir Roger Casement, Irish Nationalist and British diplomat is sentenced to death for his part in the Easter Rising.

“If today when all Europe is dying for national ends, whole people marching down with songs of joy to the valley of eternal night, we alone stand by idle and moved only to words, then we are in truth the most contemptible of all the people in Europe.” –Sir Roger Casement Sir Roger Casement was […]

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#OTD in 1916 – Roger Casement goes on trial at the Royal Courts of Justice on a charge of treason.

In the early hours of 21 April 1916, three days before the rising began, Roger Casement was taken by a German submarine and was put ashore at Banna Strand in Tralee Bay, Co Kerry. Suffering from a recurrence of the malaria that had plagued him since his days in the Congo, and too weak to […]

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