Banna Strand
'Twas on Good Friday morning,
All in the month of May,
A German Ship was signalling,
Beyond out in the Bay,
We had twenty thousand rifles
All ready for to land,
But no answering signal did come
From the lonely Banna Strand.
"No signal answers from the shore",
Sir Roger sadly said,
"No comrades here to meet me,
Alas, they must be dead,
But I must do my duty
And at once I mean to land",
So in a small boat rowed ashore
On the lovely Banna Strand.
Now the R.I.C. were hunting
For Sir Roger high and low,
They found him in McKenna's fort;
Said they: "You are our foe",
Said he: "I'm Roger Casement,
I came to my native land,
I mean to free my countrymen
On the lonely Banna Strand.
They took Sir Roger prisoner,
And sailed for London town,
And in the Tower they laid him,
A traitor to the Crown;
Said he "I am no traitor",
But his trial he had to stand,
For bringing German rifles
To the lonely Banna Strand.
'Twas in an English prison
That they led him to his death,
"I'm dying for my country"
He said with his last breath,
They buried him in British soil
Far from his native land,
And the wild waves sing his requiem
On the lonely Banna Strand.
They took Sir Roger home again
In the year of '65,
And with his comrades of '16
In peace and tranquil lies,
His last fond wish, it is fulfilled
For to lie in his native land,
And the waves will roll in peace again
On the lonely Banna Strand.
All in the month of May,
A German Ship was signalling,
Beyond out in the Bay,
We had twenty thousand rifles
All ready for to land,
But no answering signal did come
From the lonely Banna Strand.
"No signal answers from the shore",
Sir Roger sadly said,
"No comrades here to meet me,
Alas, they must be dead,
But I must do my duty
And at once I mean to land",
So in a small boat rowed ashore
On the lovely Banna Strand.
Now the R.I.C. were hunting
For Sir Roger high and low,
They found him in McKenna's fort;
Said they: "You are our foe",
Said he: "I'm Roger Casement,
I came to my native land,
I mean to free my countrymen
On the lonely Banna Strand.
They took Sir Roger prisoner,
And sailed for London town,
And in the Tower they laid him,
A traitor to the Crown;
Said he "I am no traitor",
But his trial he had to stand,
For bringing German rifles
To the lonely Banna Strand.
'Twas in an English prison
That they led him to his death,
"I'm dying for my country"
He said with his last breath,
They buried him in British soil
Far from his native land,
And the wild waves sing his requiem
On the lonely Banna Strand.
They took Sir Roger home again
In the year of '65,
And with his comrades of '16
In peace and tranquil lies,
His last fond wish, it is fulfilled
For to lie in his native land,
And the waves will roll in peace again
On the lonely Banna Strand.
Roger David Casement born September 1st 1864 to an Anglo-Irish family, known as Sir Roger Casement, CMG, between 1911 and 1916, was a diplomat and Irish nationalist. He worked for the British Foreign Office as a diplomat and later became a humanitarian activist, poet and Easter Rising leader. Described as the "father of twentieth-century human rights investigations", he was honoured in 1905 for the Casement Report on the Congo and knighted in 1911 for his important investigations of human rights abuses in Peru.
Influenced by the Boer War and his investigation into colonial atrocities against indigenous peoples, Casement grew to distrust imperialism. After retiring from consular service in 1913, he became more involved with Irish republicanism and other separatist movements. During World War I he made efforts to gain German military aid for the 1916 Easter Rising that sought to gain Irish independence.
He was arrested, convicted and executed for high treason. He was stripped of his knighthood and other honours. Before the trial, the British government circulated excerpts said to be from his private journals, known as the Black Diaries, which detailed homosexual activities. Given prevailing views and existing laws on homosexuality then, this material undermined support for clemency for Casement. Whether Casement had written the diaries or not remains still unproven.
In the early hours of 21 April 1916, three days before the Easter Rising began, a German submarine had put Sir Roger ashore at Banna Strand in Tralee Bay, County Kerry. Suffering from a recurrence of the malaria that had plagued him since his days in the Congo and too weak to travel he was discovered at "McKenna's Fort", an ancient ring fort now called Casement's Fort, in Rahoneen, Ardfert, and arrested on charges of high treason, sabotage and espionage against the Crown.
At Casement's highly publicised trial for high treason, the prosecution had trouble arguing its case. Casement's crimes had been carried out in Germany and the Treason Act 1351 seemed to apply only to activities carried out on English (or arguably British) soil. A close reading of the Act allowed for a broader interpretation: the court decided that a comma should be read in the unpunctuated original Norman-French text, crucially altering the sense so that "in the realm or elsewhere" referred to where acts were done and not just to where the "King's enemies" might be.
Casement himself wrote that he was to be "hanged on a comma", leading to the well-used epigram.
On the day of his execution, Roger Casement was received into the Catholic Church. He was attended by two Catholic priests, Dean Timothy Ring and Father James Carey, from the East London parish of SS Mary and Michael. The latter said of Casement that he was "a saint … we should be praying to him instead of for him". Casement was hanged at Pentonville Prison in London on 3 August 1916. He was 51 years old, his body was buried in quicklime in the prison cemetery at the rear of Pentonville.
During the decades after his execution, many formal requests for repatriation of Casement's body were refused by British Governments. In 1965 Roger Casement was finally repatriated to the Republic of Ireland.
Despite the withdrawal of his knighthood in 1916, the 1965 UK Cabinet record of the repatriation decision refers to him as Sir Roger Casement.
