all, and unsuspected almost by myself, I had remained an Irishman. Well, the war, [i.e., the Boer War] gave me qualms at the end—the concentration camps bigger ones—and finally, when up in those lonely Congo forests where I found Leopold I found also myself, the incorrigible Irishman. Ulster In the north, through his sister, Nina, in Portrush, and his close friends in London, Robert Lynd and Sylvia Dryhurst, Casement was drawn into the orbit of Francis Joseph Bigger. A wealthy Presbyterian solicitor, at his house on the northern shore of Belfast Lough, Ard Righ, Bigger hosted not only the poets and writers of the "Northern Revival", but also, and critically for Casement, Ulster Protestants committed to taking the case for an Irish Ireland to their co-religionists. These included Ada McNeil, with whom Casement helped organise the first Feis na nGleann (Festival of the Glens) at Waterfoot (Co. Antrim) in 1904, Bulmer Hobson (later of the IRB), the Nationalist MP Stephen Gwynn, and the Gaelic League activist Alice Milligan. Casement retired from the British consular service in the summer of 1913. In October he spoke at a Protestant assembly at Ballymoney Town Hall organised by Captain Jack White (who, in the midst of the great Dublin lock-out, with James Connolly had begun organising a workers' militia, the Irish Citizen Army). On a platform with Ada McNeill, the historian Alice Stopford Green, and the veteran tenant-right activist J. B. Armour, he spoke to the motion disputing the claim of Edward Carson and his unionists "to represent the Protestant community of North East Ulster", and condemning the prospect of "lawless resistance" to Home Rule. Enthused by the meeting, which had been covered by all the London and Irish papers, Casement resolved to replicate the Ballymoney meeting across Ulster, starting with Coleraine. But the Unionist controlled council refused to allow the group access to the local Town Hall, and nothing came of it. Meanwhile an anti-Home Rule meeting addressed by Carson's lieutenant Sir James Craig, then organising the Ulster Volunteers, not only filled the Ballymoney Town Hall but had the crowd spilling out into the surrounding streets. In the event, the Ballymoney Protestant "Protest Against the Lawles Policy of Carsonism" proved to be the only meeting of its kind held anywhere in Ulster. Already in November 1913, Casement had begun focussing on responding to "Carsonism" in kind: he became a Gaelic League member of