All conspiracy theories require a germ of truth, and this one is no exception. It is accepted that British intelligence officers Basil Thomson and Reginald Hall did hawk around material intended to discredit Casement, writesEunan O'Halpin
Recent years have seen an upsurge of interest in Roger Casement, inspired by a group convinced that he was the victim of a fantastically elaborate and long-lived conspiracy by the British intelligence services to brand him a homosexual. This was allegedly done through circulating forged homoerotic extracts from a diary or diaries in Britain and the US before and during his trial for treason in 1916. The incriminating material was designed to complement genuine diaries supposedly found amongst Casement's effects. The aim was to portray Casement, widely regarded as a crusading humanitarian because of his pre-first World War investigative work in the rubber plantations of the Congo and in South America, as a sexual pervert who preyed on the very victims of colonialism whose cause he championed.
This would soften calls for a reprieve from execution by people impressed by his extraordinary humanitarian work. Recent proponents of the forgery thesis have carried the matter forward by suggesting that, after 1945, Britain kept the Casement slander going in order to safeguard her rubber supplies during decolonisation.
All good conspiracy theories require a germ of truth, and this one is no exception. It is accepted that Basil Thomson and Reginald Hall, senior British intelligence officers, did hawk around material intended to discredit Casement, and even their greatest admirers acknowledge this as a shoddy act.
Casement was clearly going to be convicted anyway: he had conspired with Britain's enemy, Germany, to organise an Irish rebellion, and he had attempted, with pathetic results, to suborn Irish prisoners of war in Germany from their loyalty to the crown. The question is, was the diary material genuine or fake?
If the former, then for Hall and Thomson its use was an each-way bet, since even if Casement was saved from the gallows he would be utterly discredited in the eyes of the Irish separatist movement. If the latter, why leave so much fake evidence lying around for future generations to pore over, after it had done its work and Casement had been executed?
And why go to such fantastic lengths - as the forgers would have had to have done - to interpolate, for example, falsities into genuine Casement writings, and to fabricate diaries of such length and complexity? Why not just bribe a rent boy to say Casement propositioned him, or forge a single incriminating letter?
The forgery case has a roly-poly quality: easy to attack on specifics, it nevertheless has a knack of regaining equilibrium. Any counter-arguments are either ignored or, if necessary, absorbed into the theory. The reason for this is straightforward: the theory is essentially an article of belief, not susceptible to conventional historical analysis. Efforts to bring closure to the matter in recent years through scientific tests have, predictably, done nothing to dissuade the true believers. Handwriting examiners and paper specialists (unfortunately British, and therefore open to not so sotto voce charges of a lack of impartiality) have examined the disputed texts, the paper, the inks and the bindings of the various disputed diaries. The most recent of such investigations, organised by Bill McCormack, once again concluded that there was no evidence of forgery in the material inspected.
In Roger Casement in Death, Bill McCormack focuses on the forger theorists' bible, Dr William Maloney's The Forged Casement Diaries, published by the Talbot Press in 1936. Using correspondence in the National Library and in the US, McCormack shows that The Forged Casement Diaries was the outcome of a carefully planned but rather carelessly executed scheme by three men, all seasoned plotters, with the Scottish doctor Maloney as their willing tool .
These were veteran Clan na Gael man Joe McGarrity of Philadelphia; the pro-Treaty but otherwise strongly republican Dr Patrick McCartan, then living in the US; and Bulmer Hobson, once a leading figure in the IRB and in the 1930s an official in a semi-sinecure in Dublin. Theirs were the hands that planned and financed the book which Maloney was to write.
To crown this exercise, they arranged for the deposit in the National Library of a carefully arranged collection of Casement's papers and accompanying correspondence, designed to convince future researchers of the truth of the forgery case.
Not content with attempting to stack the deck for historians of the controversy, McCartan also intended to discourage any public criticism of the work, remarking to McGarrity that if necessary he would set the fearsome Sean Russell of the IRA on any old friends of Casement who dared to question the forgery thesis.
McCormack's dissection of the making of The Forged Casement Diaries is compelling. He is less convincing in two other respects: while Maloney's own narrative of his career exhibits inconsistencies and embroidery, the suggestion that he might have been a British agent provocateur is far-fetched on the evidence available. Secondly, McCormack's use of Freudian and post-Freudian analytical tools to probe the psyches of the two main protagonists in this book, the absent Casement and the faintly fraudulent Maloney, is complicated but not persuasive.
Bill McCormack rightly contrasts the vigour with which the forgery theorists proclaim every minor inconsistency and interpolation in the contested texts as proof positive of forgery, with their thoroughly slapdash and selective approach to other evidence.
His argument is clear: those who set high standards of accuracy should also meet them. Yet, whether by accident or by mischievous design, his own introduction to the volume is misdated by an entire year. What is post- Freudian Ireland to make of that?
Eunan O'Halpin is professor of Contemporary Irish History at TCD. His edition of MI5 and Ireland 1939-1945: The Official History, will be published by Irish Academic Press in November
Roger Casement in Death: Or Haunting the Free State . By W.J.
McCormack. University College Dublin Press, 240 pp.
€44