Roger Casement's Bones

This teaching unit was designed by Nina Suter.

Since his execution by the British government on 3 August 1916, the afterlife of proto-humanitarian, Irish Nationalist and 'Black Diarist' Roger Casement has grown in both cultural and material significance. Casement’s material remains, his bones, which were interred in a lime pit in Pentonville Prison London in 1916, were subject to a political controversy that stretched across half a century, eventually resulting in the 1965 re-in-terment of Casement’s bones in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin – notably not, as was Casement’s express wish, in Northern Ireland due to Ireland’s continued partition.

By focusing on Casement’s bones, this teaching unit examines the practice of using the physical to imagine the non-physical, of establishing a physical connection to something that is lost.

The audio file for task 4 is taken from a radio play, part of which has been made available by the BBC at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05gh69k.