Editing Roger Casement (section)

=== Return to Ireland ===
In Ireland in 1904, on leave from Africa from that year until 1905, Casement joined the [[Gaelic League]], an organisation established in 1893 to preserve and revive the spoken and literary use of the [[Irish language]]. He met the leaders of the powerful [[Irish Parliamentary Party]] (IPP) to lobby for his work in the Congo. He did not support those, like the IPP, who proposed [[Government of Ireland Act 1914|Home Rule]], as he believed that the [[House of Lords]] would veto such efforts. Casement was more impressed by [[Arthur Griffith]]'s new [[Sinn Féin]] party (founded 1905), which called for an independent Ireland (through a non-violent series of strikes and boycotts). Its sole imperial tie would be a [[dual monarchy]] between Britain and Ireland, modelled on the policy example of [[Ferenc Deák (politician)|Ferenc Deák]] in Hungary. Casement joined the party in 1905.<ref>[[Brian Inglis]], ''Roger Casement''; Harcourt Jovanovich, 1974; pp. 118–120, 134–139</ref>

In a letter to Mrs. J. R. Green, (the Irish historian Alice Stopford Green) dated 20 April 1906 Casement reflected on his conversion to the national cause as someone who had "accepted imperialism" and had been close to an "ideal" Englishman:<ref>{{Cite web |last=White |first=Jack |date=1936 |title=Where Casement would have stood today – Address to the Roger Casement Sinn Fein Club, Dublin |url=https://libcom.org/article/where-casement-would-have-stood-today-jack-white |access-date=2022-10-19 |website=libcom.org |language=en}}</ref> <blockquote>It is a mistake for an Irishman to mix himself up with the English. He is bound to do one of two things—either to go to the wall if he remains Irish or to become an Englishman himself. You see I very nearly did become one once. At the Boer War time, I had been away from Ireland for years, out of touch with everything native to my heart and mind, trying hard to do my duty, and every fresh act of duty made me appreciably nearer the ideal of the Englishman. I had accepted Imperialism. British rule was to be accepted at all costs, because it was the best for everyone under the sun, and those who opposed that extension ought rightly to be 'smashed.' I was on the high road to being a regular Imperialist jingo—although at heart underneath all, and unsuspected almost by myself, I had remained an Irishman. Well, the war, [i.e., [[Second Boer War|the Boer War]]] gave me qualms at the end—the [[Second Boer War concentration camps|concentration camps]] bigger ones—and finally, when up in those lonely Congo forests where I found [[Leopold II of Belgium|Leopold]] I found also myself, the incorrigible Irishman''.''</blockquote>