A handwriting expert for the Sunday Independent who visited Moscow this month told the High Court yesterday that on the balance of high probability Mr
Proinsias De Rossa wrote the signature on the so-called Moscow letter.
Mr Justice Carney and the jury had been told earlier that the letter, dated
September 15th, 1986, was allegedly from the WP to the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union seeking funds. Yesterday, Mr James Nash, who returned to Moscow to examine the letter on July 9th, said he was quite satisfied there was no evidence of forgery. He also considered it "highly probable" that the second signature on the letter was that of former WP general secretary, Mr Sean
Garland.
Mr Nash, who visited the Centre for the Preservation of Contemporary
Documents in Moscow, said he had earlier examined several specimen signatures of the two men.
He visited Moscow for the first time in November 1996 and returned on July
9th to re-examine the original of the letter. Following the second visit he was satisfied that "on the balance of high probability Mr De Rossa wrote the signature on the letter dated September 15th, 1986", he said.
Mr Nash, replying to Mr John McMenamin SC, for Independent Newspapers, said that in 1992 he was contacted by The Irish Times, by maybe John Armstrong, who asked if he would look at a fax copy document and compare it with handwriting on a document and one on a plain sheet of paper. He was asked to examine the signatures on the copy of the last page of the Moscow letter and express an opinion on their authorship. He was also asked to examine signatures. He prepared a report for The Irish Times. He made the point to Mr Armstrong that if the matter went to court he would have to examine the original document.
He expressed the opinion then that on the balance of probability Mr Sean
Garland and Mr Proinsias De Rossa would have written those signatures. On
November 16th, 1996, he visited the Centre for the Preservation of Contemporary
Documents in Moscow. He was accompanied by Mr Liam Collins of the Sunday
Independent and an interpreter. He had gone to examine the originals. Two documents were presented to him; the seven-page Moscow letter dated September
15th, 1986, and a two-page letter dated September 18th, 1986, with a signature of Sean Garland. The Moscow letter was on WP headed notepaper and had a watermark. He was not allowed to photograph the documents but they were photocopied. He was able to check the photocopies against the original. Because he was not satisfied with the quality of the copy, he requested that they be copied twice more.
Mr Nash said he had visited Barry's Hotel in Dublin on February 25th and was given a large number of documents with samples of Mr De Rossa's and Mr Garland's signatures. They included one headed "message from General Secretary Sean
Garland of the Workers' Party on the 40th anniversary of the battle of
Stalingrad". There were several letters either with the signature or the typewritten name of Sean Garland to Russian newspapers and magazines, including
Pravda and New Times, as well as letters from him to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. One 14-page document had Mr De Rossa's signature along the margins of 13 pages and on the bottom of the 14th page.
On January 21st this year, he received documents from McCann Fitzgerald solicitors with specimens of Mr De Rossa's signature. They included a joint
Department of Social Welfare/Department of Justice advice document bearing the signatures of Proinsias De Rossa and Nora Owen. When he visited Moscow earlier this month he reexamined both signatures on two letters from September 1986. He said Mr Garland's signature was "fluidly and freely written, and written with great speed". There was no evidence of hesitation or tremor and "in my opinion it was free of forgery". He said Mr Garland's signature had a "rubric" or final stroke which continued from the last letter of the signature. Mr Nash told the court it was "highly probable" that Mr Garland signed the letters.
Asked how signatures were forged, Mr Nash said in relation to stolen chequebooks and cards, it used to be possible to remove the signature on the strip of the cheque card using Milton, a sterilising fluid. Once that was done the forger could write a signature in his or her own hand. It was more difficult to do that now because better quality strips were used on cheque cards.
Mr De Rossa's signature on the Moscow letter was "fluent, freely written , signed with speed". There was no sign of hesitation, tremor or pen lift. He came to the conclusion that on the balance of probability Mr De Rossa was the writer of the signature on the letter dated September 15th, 1986.
"I am quite satisfied there was no evidence of forgery," said Mr Nash. He was mindful that it was a limited amount of writing but would put it as a matter of high probability that it was Mr De Rossa's signature. Mr Nash also told the court he was satisfied that it was "highly probable" the two letters found in the Moscow archive were typed on the same typewriter. Some of the letters in both documents had blockages where the typeface was not clear.