A chara, - In response to Lord Kilbracken (December 17th), I feel he should be put straight on a few matters before dismissing the valuable work of Eoin O Maille on Casement's linguistic fingerprint.
Casement makes clear and direct reference to his 1910 diary in two letters held among the antislavery papers at Rhodes House in Oxford. He describes that diary as "an honest record of my own mind", where he is unquestionably referring to the text that was published last year as The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement (The Lilliput Press). Lord Kilbracken should read pages 37-38 of that book to elucidate his clear misunderstanding on this matter.
Lord Kilbracken also takes Mr O Maille to task on some confusion about what specific diaries were used subversively at Casement's trial. He is not the first. Any effort to trace the provenance of the Black Diaries is confused by the six contradictory statements made by Sir Basil Thomson, the figure credited with discovering the diaries. Thomson was hounded out of his position as a Director of Intelligence in 1922 for his unscrupulous, below-thebelt methods, including forgery. One recently rediscovered statement by Thomson, describing the physical appearance of the diaries, was made to the Paris correspondent of The Daily Telegraph on November 18th, 1931, when he described the diaries as "two thin volumes of foolscap paper".
Finally Lord Kilbracken fails to understand the greater implications of why British Intelligence might have gone to the effort to forge four volumes of diaries that directly coincide with Casement's African and South American investigative exploits. Roger Casement's official reports into atrocities committed in the Congo and Amazon rainforests a century ago remain the most important accounts of two of the most horrendous crimes of the 20th century - crimes that have implications until today. Yet the forged diaries have obscured and distorted the evidence of Casement's work and many historians have been "turned off" venturing further into this Heart of Darkness because of the nature of the source material.
Lord Kilbracken's work as a journalist during the 1950s for Lord Beaverbrook's Daily Express would, I am sure, have given him a special insight into the discreet use of propaganda as a weapon.
Rather than attacking people who wish to discover the truth of a controversy that still haunts Anglo-Irish relations, Lord Kilbracken's time could be better spent keeping the promise he made to the readers of this newspapers on November 15th, 1995. In that letter he said that he had placed a question before the House of Lords to have the diaries independently examined.
Since 1994 hundreds of documents, relevant to Casement and the diaries issue, have finally been released into the National Archive of Ireland and at Kew Public Office. An increasing number of informed historians, including Dr Owen Dudley Edwards, are now beginning to see the possibility of forgery.
It is a mark of a new self-confidence in Ireland that Eoin O Maille's work is finally receiving the recognition it deserves. Linguistic fingerprint analysis is still in its infancy as a forensic science but it is rapidly gaining credibility. It is only a question of time before Mr O Maille's work is recognised as pioneering research deserving proper scholarly appraisal. - Is mise, Angus Mitchell,
Arbour Hill, Dublin 7.