While Irish nationalists called for access to Roger Casement's diaries to confirm their claims that a British forger had written the controversial homosexual passages, Irish diplomats were more circumspect in their approach, writes John Bowman, who has been examining some newly released files from the Department of Foreign Affairs
Files just released by the Department of Foreign Affairs reveal a record of conservative and - in the event - prudent advice from a succession of diplomats who advised Irish politicians on one of the most controversial issues in Anglo-Irish relations.
This was the authenticity or otherwise of accounts of homosexual practices in the diaries of the executed patriot and human rights campaigner, Roger Casement.
Among Iveagh House's specialists on the Casement diaries was Tommy Woods.
In May 1957 Woods reviewed the history of how the Department had handled the issue and the public debate.
The case that the diaries were authentic, Woods summarised, "rests on the contention that there is nothing surprising, in the light of modern psychological knowledge, in the proposition that a man like Casement was addicted to the practice in question".
Also that the British would never have risked interfering with the diaries since this was "so fraught with risks" and if discovered "so likely to end in a disastrous conclusion for themselves".
But Woods also exhaustively listed the various arguments suggesting the diaries had been interfered with.
And his colleague, Conor Cruise O'Brien, in preparing a strategy for the government recorded that Woods had come to the conclusion that the obscene passages in the diary were "in all probability forged interpolations".
The question then arose "as to what, if anything, we should do".
O'Brien notes that hitherto the Irish government had taken "no official action" in the matter.
Although he found no explanation for this in the file he presumes the inaction stemmed from a fear that, if the diary entries proved to be genuine, Casement's reputation would be damaged.
O'Brien believed, however, that if the diaries were genuine the British would "long since have produced them as triumphant vindication against its critics".
Their cited reason for not doing this, that they did not wish "to blacken a dead man's name", was to O'Brien "flimsy in the extreme" given their circulation of extracts from the diaries prior to Casement's execution in 1916.
It was against this background that O'Brien advised that the government would be safe in pressing for an independent investigation of the documents.
"There is also one very important reason why we should do so: that is because our failure to request the production of the diaries can be interpreted - and has been interpreted - as an implied recognition of the genuineness of the diaries.
"We are therefore by our silence doing real harm to Casement's name."
O'Brien suggested some approach might be made to the British Home Secretary, Rab Butler, requesting that the diaries be made available to an independent panel of experts.
Butler had the reputation of being "a more liberal-minded person and he is therefore more likely than his predecessors to agree to such an innovation."
O'Brien expected strong opposition from within the Home Office, but in the "less probable event" that Butler agreed to an expert assessment, he advised that it be made clear that any such commission "was enquiring only into the question of the genuineness or otherwise of certain passages in the diaries and not conducting an enquiry into Casement's moral life".
If this suggested line of approach was rejected by the Irish government on the ground of risk then an alternative would be to seek out Casement's surviving heirs "and inform them of our belief that the entries in question are forgeries".
They could then seek to recover the documents and have them assessed.
"If they do appear to be forgeries, of course, the independent commission can be set up and there will be no difficulty at all in obtaining the widest publicity - publicity which would undoubtedly have favourable political repercussions," Conor Cruise O'Brien wrote in his advice to the then government..
Such measured advice was far removed from the simplistic nationalist consensus which, with an air of infallibility, had presumed for 40 years that the homosexual passages in the diaries had definitely been forged.
By May 1959 the London embassy was confiding to Dublin that "there would seem to be little doubt that British official opinion is convinced of the genuineness of both the diaries as a whole and of the indecent passages." Handwriting experts had attested to their authenticity and some senior civil servants had come to the same conclusion.
A.W. Snelling, Assistant Under Secretary in the Commonwealth Relations Office, had been reading the original diaries.
He had at first "been tempted by the theory that the homosexual incidents described in the diaries had never, in fact, taken place but were simply a form of sexual fantasy." He had, however excluded this possibility because of the evidence of entries in an account book recording payments by Casement to his accomplices.
Snelling had added that "the diaries, if taken at their face value, recorded a progressive decline in Casement's character since the homosexual incidents referred to were relatively few in the diaries for the earlier years but became continuously more numerous in the later volumes."
As historians in latter years came to reject the conspiracy theory and to accept that the diaries were the work of Casement, Irish politicians ought to have felt some indebtedness to how sophisticated and prudent was the advice which they had received from civil servants over many years.
It was presumably this advice which had saved them from wholeheartedly joining the conspiracy theorists.
How impeccable and prescient that advice was can be gleaned from a letter written in 1956 by the then ambassador in London, F.H. Boland. He suggested that "it seems somewhat questionable whether the amount of emphasis placed by Casement's admirers on the issue of the diaries has not been overdone." Indeed it was almost the case that Casement's place in history had become dependent on the outcome of the controversy.
"Surely, from the national point of view the sounder and more balanced attitude to adopt is that Casement gave his life in the struggle to end British rule in Ireland; that he is entitled to the respect and gratitude of the Irish nation for so doing; and that we don't do any service to his memory by helping to perpetuate controversies about his personal character which bear no relation to what he did for Ireland, and only tend to obscure the grounds of his claim to an honoured place in Irish history."
Dr John Bowman is a broadcaster and historian