Roger Casement was hanged in London 85 years ago this month. This followed his sensational trial for treason by belligerent Great Britain - then, along with France, Russia and Italy, engaged in war against Germany, Austria/Hungary and Turkey.
One of the extraordinary aspects of the Casement saga is that today he is more remembered for the entirely hypothetical question of his alleged degeneracy and sexual perversion than for his years of monumental and mould-breaking humanitarian work on two continents, for which he was much honoured and decorated during his life, and his patriotism.
Before his trial, nothing but integrity was associated with Casement.
During his trial, however, he was reviled.
This had less to do with his alleged treason than because he was depicted, and became widely perceived, as a corrupt degenerate.
Casement had rattled Belgium by exposing inhuman barbarity in the king's personal property, the Belgian Congo. He likewise shook British commercial imperialism with similar revelations about their Amazonian holdings. He had been honoured and acclaimed for this work worldwide before devoting himself to freedom and justice for his native land.
Nevertheless, it is the so-called Black Diaries, circulated by the British government during his trial with the sole purpose of destroying his reputation, that often first spring to mind when the name Casement is mentioned.
These diaries depict him as a rampant homosexual (he has now also become something of a bizarre martyr-icon figure among some homosexual communities) indulging in "degenerate habits" - sometimes several times a day - throughout his adult life.
All the available evidence indicates that these Black Diaries were forged for this purpose at a time when it was critical to British war interests to demolish Casement's reputation, especially in the US, which Britain was desperately attempting to lure into the war on its side.
A second, also wrong, leg of Britain's reasoning about Casement was that, as Leon O'Broin puts it: "The military shared the government view that Casement was the key man in the whole business" - that is the 1916 Rising.
It is, therefore, reassuring to learn that Prof Bill McCormack's steering group (The Irish Times, August 4th) is preparing to carry out a comprehensive forensic examination of the suspect documents which should help to clarify the issue.
Meanwhile, it will be useful for the general reader to appreciate the circumstances in which the contents of the Black Diaries were first made public and why they are suspect.
(The originals were jealously guarded for most of the intervening period and have only recently been made available.)
Casement's diaries for part of the years 1903 and 1910 were "discovered" by Scotland Yard Special Branch in his old London lodgings.
This was after Casement, who had gone to the US at the outbreak of the first World War, wrote an open letter to the press in New York condemning British activity in Ireland and even encouraging Irishmen to join the German army and to fight for Ireland against England.
They were in the hands of the Special Branch for up to 18 months before Casement's capture and trial.
The head of the Special Branch was Sir Basil Thomson. The head of British Naval Intelligence was Capt (later Admiral) William Randolph Hall.
The then attorney general, and sometime member of the treasonable "Provisional Government of Ulster", was W.E. Smith. These three directed a counterespionage and propaganda machine which had at its disposal a battery of sophisticated "dirty tricks" machinery at the counter-espionage headquarters at Crewe, where wartime propaganda forgery was developed to a fine art.
Hall and Thomson were later involved in the notorious Zinoviev forgery.
The Black Diaries were produced during the trial at a moment when pressure from the US for a reprieve for Casement was creating considerable sympathy.
It was also a time when it was vital for Britain to bring the US into the war (things had been going so badly for Britain on the Western Front that the question of suing for peace with Germany had been seriously debated in cabinet.)
Only typewritten copies of these diaries were distributed. The originals were not made available to scrutiny even by Casement's lawyers.
Following his investigations in the Putumayo (Amazon), Casement had made a translation in his own handwriting of a diary kept by a Brazilian in which are described perverse practices such as were subsequently alleged against him. That translation, with other documentation, had been submitted by him to the Foreign Office several years before the Black Diaries were revealed.
In 1998, a US publication, the Barnes Review, published extracts from an interrogation by the US military after the second World War of Gestapo leader Heinrich Muller. He said a Swiss forger named Zwingleman, who he had later employed, confessed to having, on Hall's instructions, forged the Casement diaries during the first World War.
Although Casement was an almost obsessive diarist, and many of his diaries for other periods are extant and available, none of these contain the slightest reference to the practices of which he was accused.
The only diaries alleged to contain these references, and of which only typewritten copies were ever made available, are those obtained by Scotland Yard in 1914.
None of those who knew Casement believed the allegations and many friends and acquaintances, including the Brazilian doctor who accompanied him in the Putumayo, publicly declared the impossibility of Casement engaging in such practices without detection.
Significantly also, while Casement was still in Germany, the London Daily Mail published a false report that he had been arrested there for "unnatural vices".
This was when his reputation was still unblemished. Was the ground being prepared?
In all the suspicion, innuendo and evasion connected with these accusations against Casement, one clear fact stands out.
This is that before the production and dissemination of the so-called Black Diaries during his trial in London, not a solitary hint of the allegations had come to light elsewhere or been so much as hinted at by those who knew him; on the contrary, they vehemently denied the suggestions.
Significantly, therefore, the sole evidence that Casement was the alleged degenerate homosexual is contained in the Black Diaries, conveniently produced during his trial by individuals well known to be practitioners of major strategic disinformation and forgery. It is also convenient - if not surprising - that the sections of the diaries containing the allegations cover only and precisely the periods for which Casement's genuine diaries and the diary of the Brazilian were available to Thomson, Hall and Smith.
No other supporting evidence, either before or after - for instance from Germany - exists of Casement's supposed degeneracy.
It may be that all of these circumstantial factors are coincidental. It may be that Casement was the secret degenerate depicted in these documents. But the balance of probabilities is clearly against it.
Why, of all the 1916 leaders, was he so hounded? With his weighty international reputation and prestige, Casement had strongly tipped the separatist scales when, in 1914 in New York, he published his open letter condemning British rule in Ireland and urging Irishmen not to join the British forces. Hence, I believe, the beginning of powerful, official and sustained British animosity towards him.
Following that letter, Casement's trip to Germany (in 1915) to raise a German-Irish brigade from captured Irishmen made him a traitor and a renegade in British eyes; the Irish political recusant incarnate. It also seems that it was largely because of this that the British wrongly concluded that he was the source and leader of the subsequent Rising.
En route to Germany the British Consul in Norway attempted to suborn Casement's servant into murdering or otherwise disposing of his employer.
The fact was that Casement had committed the ultimate sin. He had publicly betrayed both Britain and, almost worse, the British Establishment.
The mistaken importance the British attributed to Casement in relation to the Rising, and which, in turn, almost certainly led to the bizarre campaign against him, was clearly because of his international stature.
It seems likely that the combination of his international status and prestige, the erroneous thinking as to his role in 1916, and the New York letter led to his determined and sustained character assassination. In many ways Casement was a strange, even eccentric, man - the Don Quixote of 1916, perhaps.
I trust that in linking him with Quixote I will cause no offence. The image of Don Quixote, too, has been much altered from the serious purpose of Cervantes.
Indeed one might quote Cervantes to some purpose, as when Quixote says: Muchos son los caminos por donde lleva Dios a los suyos al cielo - God has produced many paths to heaven.
So, yes, Casement could be tried and executed for treason. But what about the question of the rights of small nations, for which Britain was supposed to be fighting and which some influential American voices held included Ireland? The executions of the Rising leaders in Dublin and Cork had already aroused international sympathy. As things stood, to hang Casement - even for treason - could very easily create a martyr, the last thing wanted.
So far as the US government and people were concerned Casement's death had to be seen as morally, not merely politically, deserved and just.
It was, for the British, a strategic and political dilemma as old and as common as the record of history itself. The solution is just as old and as simple: before murdering the man murder the character and thus eliminate the martyr.
That it doesn't always work seldom inhibits the attempt to do so - the names of recent examples come to mind, including Patrice Lumumba, Makarios, Gandhi, Che Guevara, Parnell (also attacked through forgery).
Thus the circumstantial cases for and against.
Like Caesar's Gaul, Casement's life seems to have been divided into three parts, the first extending from his birth in Sandycove in September 1864 to his open letter in New York in September 1914; the second his period in Germany from 1915 to 1916; and the third his trial with its melodrama from June 26th to his hanging on August 3rd, 1916.
The grotesque perversion is that it is the sensational aspect of the third part, which depends solely on the highly suspect allegations made in the Black Diaries during his notorious trial, that has come to all but dominate everything else about this extraordinary man.
It is to be hoped that Prof McCormack's investigations will go far towards clarifying the situation.
Eoin Neeson is a writer and a former director of the Government Information Bureau