THE GHOST OF CASEMENT
Afraid they might be beaten Before the bench of Time They turned a trick by forgery And blackened his good name.
WAS the diary found in Roger Casement's luggage a forgery? Or a genuine diary belonging to some rascal Casement had encountered on his travels? Or was it his own journal? The ghost of Roger Casement has risen many times since his execution as a traitor in 1916 to demand a retrial before the bar of public opinion; not on the justice of his sentence (for in the circumstances his fate when captured could not be in doubt) but on the truth of the rumours, put about in England and America at the time, that his diary had revealed him to be a pervert. It was a mean action; and the fact that it was felt at the time to be strategically necessary. in order to provide the American State Department with the evidence needed to restrain public opinion there, explains but does not excuse its meanness—even if the diary was genuine. But was it genuine? It is only fair to Casement, seeing that the account of his perversion is now generally accepted outside Ireland, that the question should be reopened. In this issue the subject is discussed by Admiral Sir William James, whose biography of Reginald Hall brought the subject up again; and a second article by an eminent Irish historian will follow.
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