Madam, - Recent discussion of the so-called "black" diaries in your columns briefly gave hope that the matter was now taken seriously.
However, on 26th August one finds the Roger Casement Foundation sowing confusion again, this time above the name of Tim O'Sullivan who claims that the forensic report of 2002 still awaits publication.
The facts can be verified in the archives of this very Letters column, where photocopies of Dr Audrey Giles's handwriting report were offered to readers in Spring 2002.
Numerous readers took up the option, including a book-dealer who bought several. The original report, complete with colour illustrations of pages from the Diaries, was lodged in several libraries in Britain and Ireland, including the Royal Irish Academy and the National Library in Kildare Street.
It seems odd that the foundation's secretary is unaware of these very public opportunities to read the report in full, especially as I corresponded with his predecessor on this question last year.
However, the Giles Report will be again made available in a collection of papers shortly to be published by the Royal Irish Academy. This includes contributions to the symposium of May 2000, together with a report on the physical materials of the diaries prepared for me in 2002 by the eminent paper-historian, Peter Bower. The contents of Mr Bower's analysis - which found there to be no grounds for suspicion of forgery or fabrication - have been discussed on several occasions at which members of the foundation were present.
The volume is edited by that very distinguished Irish historian, Prof Mary E. Daly of University College, whose assistance in seeing Mr Angus Mitchell's work into print has been lavishly praised by Mr O'Sullivan's predecessor in the office of foundation secretary.
As Mr O'Sullivan observes, the Taoiseach accepted the findings of the inquiry in which I was assisted by a steering group consisting of:
1. Prof Daly (already mentioned);
2. Dr Helen Forde (sometime head of preservation at the Public Record Office, Kew, and a member of the board of the Department of Archives, University College Dublin);
3. Dr Siobhan Kilfeather (a Belfast-born graduate of Princeton University who teaches Irish and English literature in the University of Sussex);
4. Mr John MacIntyre (now retired head of the preservation division at the National Library of Scotland, with global experience as an adviser on centres of excellence of which the Chester Beatty Gallery is just one);
5. Dr Niamh Nic Daeid (a graduate of the Dublin Institute of Technology and the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland, and a senior lecturer in the department of forensic sciences, University of Strathclyde, and a participant in the European Network of Forensic Institutes).
In addition to the persons already mentioned, Dr Nigel Watson (Strathclyde) and Dr Patricia Wiltshire (University of London) further advised the Steering Group on issues of DNA and pollen testing respectively.
Amnesia about the Giles Report demonstrates a compulsion-repetition mechanism set up for forgery theorists when they were initially taken in by W.J. Maloney's 1936 baloney. Dr Maloney's activities are discussed at length in my Roger Casement in Death (UCD Press, 2003) of which Mr O'Sullivan also seems unaware. - Yours etc.
W.J. McCORMACK, C/o University College Dublin Press, Newman House, Dublin 2.