Resolution Urging Clemency To Sir Roger Casement [ Ireland ]

Description

A rare original 1916 printing of Irish American Senator James A O’Gorman’s impassioned plea to stay the execution of Easter Rising plotter Sir Roger Casement

Resolution Urging Clemency To Sir Roger Casement Irish In The War Of Independence Speech of Hon. James A. O’Gorman of New York in The Senate of the United States. July 25, 1916. Government Printing Office, Washington. 1916.

This speech defending Irish nationalist Sir Roger Casement for his role in the Easter Rising of 1916 was given by Irish American Senator James O’Gorman shortly ahead of Casement’s execution by British authorities on August 3.

Casement, a human rights activist and journalist who rose to fame and a knighthood documenting Belgian atrocities in the Congo, was radicalized by his experience of the realities of European colonialism to join the cause of Irish liberation. Serving as a negotiator with German forces during World War I, Casement arranged for the shipment of German arms to Ireland to support an attempted coup in Dublin aimed for Easter 1916. Ultimately, however, his voyage and the arms were delayed, the Easter Rising failed and its organizers were executed by firing squad. Casement, captured near the Dingle penninsula at an Iron Age ring fort now called Casement’s Fort was convicted of treason in a separate trial and sentenced to hang, a sequence of events immortalized in the modern Irish folk song “The Banna Strand” named for the beach upon which Casement landed.

Though contemporary opinion was split at the time of the Easter Rising, support grew within Ireland after its brutal suppression. This is presciently echoed in Senator O’Gorman’s speech wherein he compares Casement and his compatriots to the recognized patriots of the American Revolution who were also seen as traitors by the British.

One copy in OCLC as of November 2022.

 

8pp, folded pamphlet. Evidence of past trifold with wear along fold and losses at margins. Minor losses along fold, pg 3-4. Pg 5-6 dogeared with partial split in binding. Soiling and wear with half inch loss to pg 8 fore margin. Good.

 

If you liked this book you might also enjoy this copy of Misinforming  A Nation, a WWI era anti-British and Encyclopedia Britannica treatise by Willard Wright, or this copy of Ogam, The Poet’s Secret on the history and theories of the Ogham language.