Sir, - Eight years ago, for the BBC series "Document", I investigated the charge of forgery against the British Government in relation to the "Black Diaries" of Roger Casement (The Casement Diaries, September 23rd, 1993).
Having started with an open mind, I found compelling circumstantial evidence of forgery and began to believe the forgery theory. But because it was almost always supported by people who had either not seen the diaries, or had not examined them with expert help, I asked the British Home Office if a forensic expert could examine the diaries for the programme. The request was granted.
In September 1993, with the producer Nigel Acheson, I was admitted to the secure room in which the diaries are kept. The diaries were produced from a locked steel box and we were allowed to examine them under the watchful eye of a Home Office official.
There was no doubt in our minds that the diaries were genuine. To have created the endless and varied descriptions of sexual encounters, never mind written them down, would have taken years. We could see where some 20 pages had been torn out and gummed back in again. These I assumed to have been the pages which the British Government of the day showed to King George V, the Bishop of Durham, the Irish nationalist leader John Redmond, the Associated Press and the United States Ambassador in order to quell demands for clemency.
The diaries were then examined by Dr David Baxendale, who compared the handwriting in them with the handwriting in Casement's public diaries kept in the Irish National Archive in Dublin. Dr Baxendale - the first forensic expert to examine the diaries publicly - confirmed their authenticity.
I am amazed to see The Irish Times rerun the old shibboleth about the "Black Diaries". Surely the point to be made about Roger Casement is that he belongs to us all. The debate about the diaries kept him for too long anchored to the Republican cause.
He is still a Republican hero. But he couldn't have been Sir Roger Casement, humanitarian hero, if he hadn't believed in an enlightened role for the British Empire. He wouldn't have been Roger Casement, Republican hero, if he hadn't seen the oppression by that Empire abroad. And if he hadn't been homosexual, knowing what it was like to feel oppressed and marginalised, he might not have been a hero to anyone. - Yours, etc.,
Roisin McAuley, Reading, Berkshire, England.