Sir, - The destruction of the reputation of Oscar Wilde was triggered by the use of seven written words, "For Oscar Wilde, posing as a sodomite".
To go to the extensive trouble of forging 80,000 words in order to destroy Roger Casement's reputation seems a little excessive, even for the British intelligence services especially when the same effect could have been achieved by the forging of a few letters to former homosexual partners. And at much less cost.
Neither can it be seriously argued that the alleged forgery was to discredit his work in exposing imperial abuses in Africa and South America because it was precisely for that work that the British honoured him with a knighthood.
Casement was undoubtedly homosexual. According to his defence counsel, Sergeant Sullivan, KC, he gloried in it and instructed counsel that if the matter was to be raised in court then he was to impress upon the jury that being homosexual was rather a distinguished thing to be and that many great figures in history had been homosexual.
For disclosing this private information to Casement's biographer Rene McColl and thereby breaching the cardinal rule of client/barrister confidentiality, Sergeant Sullivan was subsequently expelled from the Honourable Society of the King's Inns.
But still the controversy rages. It is unfortunate that for Alfred Noyes the question of whether Casement was or was not homosexual was not, as Mr Mitchell suggests, a superficial issue. It was the issue, and his call for a panel of historians to examine the diaries was motivated more by patriotic homophobia than objective historical interest. I fear that Mr Mitchell's book looks likely to pander to the same constituency. - Yours, etc.,
From John McGuiggan
Four Courts, Dublin 7.