Sir, - Many of your readers will have noted a sinister sub-text to Prof Bill McCormack's letter of August 4th. They will wonder what purpose his "Casement Steering Group" can have other than to steer Roger Casement into an acceptable "straight" jacket - as though, after 85 years, humanitarian effort and homosexuality must still be regarded a paradox, a circle requiring to be squared.
For Irish gay people Casement's homosexuality is a cause for celebration, a pink chink in the green curtains. His Black Diaries" provide an important and delightful glimpse into our homosexual past, and any gay reader will immediately grasp their authenticity. We would argue that, far from being detrimental or incidental to his work, his sexuality was central to its accomplishment: an outsider himself, he was afforded an insight into other classes and races, the despised of his world. His alleged promiscuity - let us read "indiscrimination" - indicates an open and sharing nature, rare in the contemporary colonial mind-set.
Casement was hanged for treason in August 1916. By then, all other Irishmen sentenced to death who had not yet been executed had been reprieved. The determination of the British to carry through Casement's sentence was inextricably bound to his discovered homosexuality - a treason to his gender far more threatening than the political. Casement's life is a monument to humanitarian effort, to the exposure of colonial and industrial cruelty. Let his death too stand as a monument to humanity, an exposure of that other cruelty, the anti-homosexual bigotry of the 20th century. - Yours, etc.,
Jamie O'Neill, Carragh Hill, Knocknacarra, Galway.