Almost six years ago, historian Sinead McCoole published a biography of Lady Lavery, a woman who, aside from her attractive face appearing for many decades on our currency, until then had seemed largely peripheral to Irish history. McCoole, however, proposed that the American-born Hazel Lavery was a much more important figure than had hitherto been realised.
Not only was she deeply involved in negotiations between London and Dublin over the achievement of this country's independence, in addition she had been loved by a number of Irishmen not usually renowned for their amorous exploits. Specifically, letters cited by McCoole indicated that Hazel Lavery had an affair with Kevin O'Higgins, the Free State's minister for justice and external affairs, for several years before his death in 1927.
This revelation about O'Higgins caused considerable shock, since it indicated a totally different character to that previously accepted by generations of historians.
Here was a man renowned for his moral rectitude; he was, after all, gunned down on his way to attend Mass. Surely this practising Roman Catholic could not also have been an adulterer who wrote numerous passionate letters to Lady Lavery?
Curiously, despite the disquiet created by McCoole's biography, it was never suggested that the material on which she based her assertions about O'Higgins might be false. There were no denunciations of the Lavery correspondence as a forgery, no demands that it be subjected to forensic tests or submitted to handwriting experts. But why not? It might be that the letters were fake, deliberately placed in Lady Lavery's archive - along with a number of equally tender missives supposedly written to her by Michael Collins - as a means of discrediting these heroes of Ireland's struggle for independence.
Might not the entire notion of the Lavery/O'Higgins affair in fact be a dastardly plot concocted by the British authorities?
WERE IT ever to be proposed, the sheer silliness of this theory would guarantee its immediate dismissal. But a similar argument - that certain diaries attributed to Sir Roger Casement were actually written by the British as a way of ensuring his execution in 1916 - somehow still enjoys wide acceptance.
Last week, the latest investigation into Casement's so-called Black Diaries declared that these documents were from his own hand and thereby confirmed that their author was homosexual.
However, as some participants in the second part of RTÉ television's The Ghost of Roger Casement were only too eager to show, the conspiracy theory retains its popularity in some circles. Rather than accept the investigation's results, one academic preferred to take refuge in quoting W.B. Yeats: "There is no truth save that in thine own heart" even though this damaged his own cause since it would mean all theories about Casement have equal validity.
The forgery theory appears to provide an ideal outlet for two abiding traits in the Irish psyche: anti-British sentiment and homophobia.
It is just about possible that the diaries were an elaborate concoction by the British authorities, even though in the middle of the first World War they would have had many more pressing demands on their time.
It is, however, frankly ludicrous to imagine that almost 80 years later the successors of those authorities should have any interest in maintaining this fraud.
Similarly, why should Dr Audrey Giles, who earlier this year examined the Black Diaries and pronounced on their authenticity, have had any interest in concealing the truth about a forgery?
And yet Dr Giles's credentials have been queried by those who prefer to believe in an ongoing British conspiracy; they point out that she once worked for Scotland Yard, as though this means she must subsequently be incapable of objective judgment about matters pertaining to Ireland.
THE IDEA of a British conspiracy is consoling because it means that the question of Casement's sexuality need never be examined. But the truth is that even if the diaries are a forgery - which now seems very unlikely - Casement might still have been homosexual. The argument most often advanced against this possibility, that he never mentioned the subject even to his closest friends who were shocked when they heard of the diaries' contents, can be dismissed with ease.
Did O'Higgins chat to friends about his affair with Lady Lavery?
Did the 60-year old Lady Gregory talk to W.B. Yeats in 1912 about her intense romance with the New York lawyer John Quinn?
Given the mores of the period, a display of homosexual impulses would have ruined Casement's career - and meant that the valuable work he was able to do in exposing colonial corruption and abuse would not have taken place.
It is for this work that Casement deserves to be remembered. Debate about the man's sexuality is an irrelevance, indicative more of our own foolish preoccupations than of his.
And specifically with regard to his status as a patriot, given Casement's behaviour in 1916, he deserves to be far more vulnerable to accusations of incompetence than of homosexuality.
Mary Holland is on leave