REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE UNVEILING OF THE HIGH TREASON PAINTING BY SIR JOHN LAVER
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE UNVEILING OF THE HIGH TREASON PAINTING BY SIR JOHN LAVERY KING’S INNS, DUBLIN 7
Dia dhíbh a chairde. Tá an-áthas orm bheith anseo libh tráthnóna ar an ócáid speisialta seo.
Good evening everyone.
I am very pleased to be here at the King’s Inns this evening on one of the great double-sided anniversaries of our history. The 21st January, 1921, was the day on which Dáil Éireann met for the first time in the Mansion House in Dublin. But it was also the day on which the first shots of the War of Independence were fired at Sologheadbeg.
Ambiguity and tension also surrounds the painting we are here to unveil, a painting very familiar to me not just as a visitor over the years to the Inns but latterly as a resident of Áras an Uachtaráin where a smaller version of the painting adorned the main entrance for a number of years. For me it was a great comfort to have two such great Ulstermen so close by though it has to be said the painting bore the incorrect title - the “trial of Roger Casement” much to my annoyance and the incandescent rage of John McGuiggan. While Lavery was known in his day as a painter of society portraits, he must have found the presiding judge’s commission to paint Casement’s appeal completely irresistible. I know I found the commission to unveil the picture on its return definitely irresistible for I too like so many others have been haunted by Casement’s life and in particular, his death.
In the picture we see Casement centre stage surrounded, apart from three women, by a room full of men clothed mostly in the grim palette of the law and who, apart from the defence team, were not well disposed to him. In W.B.Yeats’s words “Casement upon trial, half hidden by the bars, Guarded”. He sits facing us almost as though we were his judges and indeed as with Emmet before him he may have been happier to leave to posterity a true judgement as to whether he was one who loved his country above all else or one who betrayed his country.
The continuing debate over the authenticity of the Black Diaries, whatever the truth of their authorship, is quite beside the point adding the sum total of nothing to the issues contained within the painting. Quite simply we see a hero, painted not in defiant pose but a vulnerable human being, facing an overwhelming phalanx, the establishment, the law, the blind temper of the times and facing it already dreadfully outnumbered.
It is a mark of Lavery’s honesty as an artist that, even if he did not set out to be sympathetic to Casement, he nonetheless conveys in a deep and convincing way a man who was about to be physically but not morally overcome. Like Emmet he was destined to die diminished it seems by the aura of tragic, even foolish failure and the taboo of treason. All that he had been was to be cancelled out by the powerful forces baying for his blood so elegantly and judiciously portrayed in Lavery’s depiction. The Casement knighted in 1911 for revealing the injustice of the colonial exploitation in the Congo and in South America was now pilloried, excoriated, executed, for applying the same standards to Ireland and asking the same questions as Swift, Tone and Emmet had done before him.
Lavery’s canvas is enormous, as large as the time he himself invested in it - finishing it only in the 1930’s. It was still in his studio when he died in 1941. Could it be that in and through this painting came the growth and development of Lavery’s own empathy with Ireland, with Casement’s Ireland. Certainly for a man who had painted the first modern portrait of the British royal family in 1913, he was never again the entirely comfortable society portrait painter he might have wanted to be. Like so many others, then and since, the integrity of Casement’s idealism inclined him to sympathise with those Anglo-Irish who were driven by a hatred of injustice into a wider national patriotism that took them beyond the bounds of the privileged community into which they were born and into a brotherhood and sisterhood with all of Ireland’s sons and daughters.
So much for Art Theory, one thing is certain, this is an historically important painting. Its locus is London where Ireland’s destiny is being shaped and not for the first or last time. Casement stands for Ireland, for Irishness, for the right of Irish men and women to the dignity of being in charge of their own destiny. The strength of all those forces ranged against him so clearly in this painting is simply not enough to expunge the deeply recessed image of Casement, like his island home, half hidden, yes, and like his homeland placed on a plane of importance well beneath his judges. Yet for all that, Casement’s eyes are firmly on us and in their intense gaze it is he and not the self-righteous actors who is the centre of gravity, the centre of truth of Lavery’s painting. We can, perhaps, accept as a momentary excess the words of Fr. McCarroll, the prison chaplain, who ministered to Casement and who said of him: 'He was a saint. We should be praying to him rather than for him.’
It is not so easy to dismiss the words of John Ellis, the last man to have had dealings with Casement.
'The impression will ever remain on my mind of the composure of his noble countenance, the smile of contentment and happiness, as he willingly helped my assistant, . . . the steady martial tread of his six feet four inches and soldierly appearance adding to the solemn echo of his prompt and coherent answers to the Roman Catholic chaplain while marching to his untimely doom. Roger Casement appeared to me the bravest man it fell to my unhappy lot to execute.'
Many in this painting strive to look important, to look powerful. They are outraged that a titled man, a knight of the realm has revealed their dark, murky little secrets, their vile, detestable world, their own metaphoric black diaries. A leitmotif of this prosecution is about taking back that nobility once conferred upon him and yet Casement succeeds in being noble in the truest sense of the word and in so doing shows up the empty vanity of that awful imperial world. They find him guilty. We find them guilty. And so generations of Irish barristers pass by this famous painting unabashed to have this towering personality, this so-called traitor wreak moral havoc in a canvas courtroom.
The Ghost of Roger Casement keeps beating on the door to our consciences, nagging us to a renewed inspiration for our country and a renewed gratitude to those whose sacrifices gave us the freedom we have. He might, I hope, be pleased to see today’s healthier recalibration of relationships between these two neighbouring islands and in particular the partnership between both Governments so powerfully given voice in the Good Friday Agreement. He had a role in all of that, even from the grave.
When Casement’s remains were returned to Ireland the poet Richard Murphy wrote:
Soldiers in green guard the draped catafalque
With chalk remains of once ambiguous bone
Which fathered nothing till the traitor’s dock
Hurt him to tower in legend like Wolf Tone.
We here, in full knowledge of what was said of him by his enemies, can still agree with de Valera’s judgement that Casement’s reputation ‘is safe in the affections of the Irish people’. I am glad the painting is safely home.
Go raibh maith agaibh go léir.