Divided Treasons and Divided Loyalties: Roger Casement and Others: Read at the Society's conference 11 September 1981
The problem of treason in the first half of the twentieth century is at its most acute for the historian of Britain in contemplating the Irish dimension. Treason against the realm up to 1922 meant treason against the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The dissolution of that Union, and the subsequent progress of twenty-six of the Irish counties to the status of a Republic in 1949, has built up a retrospective assumption on both sides of the Irish sea that such dissolution was inevitable. The British Tory and the Irish nationalist, similar in many cultural attitudes, agree on this point: the perpetual irreconcilability of the two countries and the inevitability of their disunion absolves the Tory from anxiety that the causes of Irish separation may have lain in British failure, and that they have comparative significance for possible future English divergence from Wales and Scotland; while the Irish nationalist separatist, the child of the Easter Week Rising of 1916, insists that Ireland never accepted British rule, and that the insurgent handful who took up arms in 1916 were acting on behalf of a people who secretly had been demanding such separation since the Norman invasion of 1169 and would continue so to do until the end of time.