Roger Casement

Born in 1864, Roger Casement began his career in the British consular service and became widely known for investigating atrocities committed under colonial rule. His reports on the Congo Free State and on the rubber trade in the Putumayo region of the Amazon helped draw international attention to extreme violence and exploitation.

For that humanitarian work, he was knighted, but his politics changed sharply as he became committed to Irish nationalism. During the First World War he sought German support for Ireland and was captured after landing in Kerry in 1916, just before the Easter Rising.

Casement was tried for treason and executed in London in August 1916. Since then he has remained a powerful and contested figure: remembered at once as a witness to imperial brutality, a campaigner for oppressed people, and a martyr in Irish history.