Crab Island is a small, rocky islet just off the pier at Doolin. It is best known these days There is a stone building of indeterminate purpose on top of Crab, which looks like it might have been a wine cellar. The German submarine Aud landed Dowing, servant of Roger casement, on Crab, in 1916. He couldn’t make the mainland and was arrested. This was the first in a long line of mishaps and misunderstandings that undermined the 1916 Rebellion and essentially confined it to Dublin . Casement has remained a controversial figure ever since. Branded as homosexual to alienate American Irish public opinion at the time, to the puzzlement of students of the subject since, it appears he was. The British were truthfully more upset by his exposition of third world abuses in the Congo and South America and elsewhere, but were happy to seize upon his treason in support of the Irish cause of the time.