The release by the Home Office of the final batch of documents relating to Roger Casement is the outcome of a request I made for access to them to my Labour colleague in the House of Lords, Lord Williams of Mostyn, the Home Office Minister. They were being kept from public view, apparently on grounds of "national security", and were not due for release until 2006.
My hope had been that the Labour government, in pursuit of its avowed policy of "transparency", would release them sooner. This has now been fully realised and the entire file is being made available to approved readers at the Public Record Office in Kew, west London.
It sheds fascinating new light for historians and others on the final months of Casement's life, which would end with his execution for high treason a scant four months after he landed at Banna Strand from a German submarine, the U19, on Good Friday, April 23rd, 1916. He had been arrested a few hours later. The papers include:
A copy of his agonised 14-page letter, written from his sick-bed in the Saxonia Hotel, Berlin, to his friend and ally at the German Foreign Office, Count von Wedel, on March 30th, clearly showing his opposition to the Easter Rising and the deep ambivalence he had come to feel towards the General Staff in Germany.
A verbatim transcript of the shorthand record kept of his interrogation by Sir Basil Thomson, head of the CID at Scotland Yard, on Easter Sunday - the day before the Rising - and the two following days, ending with his transfer from Brixton prison to the Tower of London.
The handwritten letter to Casement's lawyer, Gavan Duffy, from Father F.M. Ryan OP, dated July 12th of the same year, stating that he saw Casement at his request in Tralee a few hours after his arrest, and "he told me that he had come to Ireland to stop the rebellion then impending".
The letter from Dr Percy Mander to Sir Herbert Smalley at the Home Office giving details of the disquieting nature of the post-mortem he carried out on Casement's body after his execution, which he claims gives evidence of Casement's addiction to homosexual practices.
It is hard to disentangle the confused web of thoughts, fears and aspirations that runs through Casement's lengthy screed to Count von Wedel. Of German plans for the dispatch of arms to support the imminent Rising, he begins by writing: "I am, in this, a passive agent, powerless to act according to my judgment, and with a course of action forced upon me that I wholly deprecate. I am being used as a tool for purposes of which I disapprove, by pressure that I am powerless to combat, since I am practically a prisoner."
He expresses his complete confidence that Germany would win the war, but writes impellingly of his conviction that the Rising would be "hopeless" and "doomed to failure", especially if the General Staff could provide no greater support than the 20,000 outdated rifles and "one day's supply" of ammunition that were on the point of departure for Kerry on board the freighter Aud. He had been hoping for Zeppelin raids and a U-boat offensive - and for a contingent of German machine-gunners to sail with the Aud, to defend it if it was intercepted on the high seas and to support the landing of its arms cargo when it reached Tralee Bay.
Now the Germans were telling him that even this consignment would be called off unless he agreed to accompany it, with up to 50 members of the so-called Irish Brigade, recruited by him from Irish prisoners of war, to bring the arms ashore.
Casement makes clear to von Wedel that he was totally opposed to this. He was asking to be sent ahead in a U-boat to supervise preparation for Aud's arrival. He believed his Brigade members were hopelessly undertrained - and shows small confidence in their loyalty. He writes of his "particular fear" that if the arms ship were "arrested en route by British men-of-war" some of the men might "turn king's evidence and establish a very damaging case against both the German government and myself".
The letter shows the General Staff was maintaining at this time that it was unable "for technical reasons" to put a U-boat at his disposal. However, all the plans were to be changed at least twice in the next three days.
Throughout the correspondence Casement accepts that he is going to his death in the event of his capture in Ireland, which he seems to think inevitable. He freely admits that under English law he has been guilty of treason.
He makes the same admission several times in the course of his interrogation at Scotland Yard. The verbatim transcript has him telling Thomson at an early stage: "Some Irishmen are afraid to act, but I was not afraid to commit high treason. I am not endeavouring to shield myself at all. I face all the consequences. All I ask you to believe is that I have done nothing dishonourable, as you will one day learn."
"I have done nothing treacherous to my country. In this last act of mine in going back to Ireland, I came with my eyes open wide."
There are only two brief references to the vexed question of the trunks in which Casement's "black diaries" were supposedly found. The transcript has Thomson asking towards the end of the second day, "have you got some trunks at 50 Elbury Street? I propose having them examined." To this Casement replied simply, "there's nothing in them".
Next day as the interrogation was ending, Thomson says: "Sir Roger, your trunks are here but there are no keys." Casement replies: "Break them open." And that is all.
Such nonchalance would imply that he had forgotten that one of the trunks contained the incriminating diaries - unless, as some still maintain, they were forgeries of which he had never had any knowledge, or were innocent diaries to which the "black" passages were to be added.
Lord Kilbracken, the Irish peer, sits on the Labour benches in the House of Lords