In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, this posting salutes one of Ireland’s most eminent and enigmatic national figures.

Roger Casement (1864-1916) was an unlikely Irish patriot. Baptized a Catholic, but bred an Ulster Protestant, he was a loyal subject of the British crown for most of his life. He entered the British consular service in 1895. Posted to remote locations in Africa and South America, he won international fame for exposing the brutal exploitation of native peoples in the Belgian Congo and the Putumayo basin between Peru and Columbia.

His humanitarian work earned him a knighthood in 1911. But it gave him little satisfaction. Gradually, he came to realize that beneath the braid of a British consul, there beat an Irish heart. Abandoning his career, he joined the radical wing of the Irish nationalists -- those who wanted complete independence for Ireland, rather than just home rule within the United Kingdom.

When World War I broke out, he went to Germany to negotiate an alliance between the Irish ultra-nationalists and the German government. The alliance promised German help for a projected Irish rebellion. The date was set for April 23, 1916 – Easter Sunday. But when Casement realized that the Germans were not prepared to offer more than token support, he knew that the rising was foredoomed. In a desperate effort to prevent useless bloodshed, he secretly returned to Ireland, where he was apprehended just hours after being put ashore.

Not only had Casement failed to stop the rising, he had put his own neck in an English noose. Transported to London, he was tried for treason and condemned to death.

Even then, his life might have been saved.

Casement was still world-famous for his humanitarian work in the Congo and the Putumayo. “Save Casement” drives were mounted as far away as South America. The Vatican made an appeal. In the United States (then the most important neutral country in the war), Irish-American voters took advantage of the fact that 1916 was an election year to pressure President Wilson and Congress to intervene on Casement’s behalf. Even in England, Casement did not lack sympathizers, particularly among churchmen and intellectuals. He had, after all, returned to Ireland to prevent a rebellion, not to foment one.

In the face of all this pressure, the British government might have had no choice but to accept the sensible suggestion of George Bernard Shaw that Casement be treated not as a traitor, but as a prisoner of war.

Instead, the government played a squalid trump card. British intelligence had managed to get hold of Casement’s diaries, in which his life as a covert homosexual was laid bare. By leaking the graphic details of his sex life, British officialdom got exactly what it wanted: Casement not only dead, but damned.

Bitter Irishmen insisted for years that the diaries had been forged -- a belief reinforced by the British government’s obstinate refusal to declassify them. Finally, in 1959, the diaries were released and authenticated by impartial experts.

Were the Irish a less warm-hearted people, Casement’s story might have ended there. But it did not. Straight or gay, Casement had died a martyr to Ireland, and his countrymen remembered his sacrifice.

It took nearly 50 years to obtain grudging consent from London but finally, in 1965, Casement’s remains were brought home. For four days, his coffin lay in state in Dublin’s Garrison Church of the Sacred Heart as 165,000 mourners filed past to pay their respects. On March 1, Casement was given a state funeral.

Casement’s speech to the court that condemned him to death ranks as one of the noblest and most moving of all patriotic apologia. In his concluding words, he spoke as much for gays and lesbians as for the long-suffering people of his beloved Ireland:

“Where all your rights have become only an accumulated wrong, where men must beg with bated breath for leave to subsist in their own land, to think their own thoughts, to sing their own songs, to gather the fruits of their own labors, and, even while they beg, to see things inexorably withdrawn from them – then, surely, it is a braver, a saner and a truer thing to be a rebel, in act and deed, against such circumstances as these, than to tamely accept it, as the natural lot of men.”