Madam, - Roger Casement "has been accused of being a homosexual", writes M.M. Ireland (August 18th); such a status has been widely accepted for years. Anyway, people are no longer so "accused", as was proven by the civic dinner earlier this month in Belfast's City Hall when nearly 400 gays and lesbians were invited to celebrate gay pride week and themselves.
Vincent Browne's assertion that Casement "was probably a paedophile" (Opinion, August 11th) is relatively new. I suspect any evidence to support that allegation comes from my book Roger Casement: The Black Diaries - with a Study of his Background, Sexuality and Irish Political Life, published two years ago.
In the 1911 diary, not previously available, and the biography, readers were enabled to observe several occasions when Casement's behaviour moved into the unacceptable. These involved the importuning and sexualising of two young teenagers, Teddy Biddy in Barbados and José Gonzalez in Peru. Otherwise his self-recorded penchant was for young men who were plainly eager for sexual contact.
If one must categorise a person's sexual mode at a hundred years' distance, Casement was not a paedophile but might best be described as a pederast, the casual French expression that, in its particularity, means both homosexual and someone keen on teenage boys. Paedophile is generally taken to mean someone interested in pre-pubescent children.
The debate over the authenticity of the Casement diaries is also largely concluded. Even such a key proponent of the forgery theory as the former government press officer Eoin Neeson has come out in print in your newspaper as accepting the recent forensic test results.
The danger for those who respect and applaud Casement has been that the remaining forgery theorists, having an idealised view of the man, perhaps accept that he was gay but assert instead that the "forging" diarist was variously "a psychopathic predator" and a "pederastic exploiter" (Angus Mitchell), or someone who "had absolutely no conscience in regard to his own sexual life" (Martin Mansergh). But, as he was the diarist, these descriptions apply to Casement!
It is one thing to argue forgery but another to regard the diarist as a sexual monster; indeed it is quite perilous if that person is proven to be one and the same man whom Dr Mansergh has also stated it was "legitimate to co-opt. . .as a forerunner of Ireland's independent foreign policy". It is probably therefore time for Dr Mansergh to say if he accepts the results of the forensic studies which he was instrumental in setting up.
Vincent Browne, to make the reasonable point that one can still have a good side after downloading child porn, calls Casement in aid. But if you believe in such simple-minded descriptions of the man's sexual character, his whole reputation and most of his life's work starts falling below the acceptable.
Also, not unreasonably for unionists, he becomes more of a bad person if a paedophile, this being a crime that can be added to commissioning the first and second batch of guns for the IRA.
Nothing is easy in the matter of Casement. He crosses so many barriers. - Yours, etc.,
JEFFREY DUDGEON, Belfast 9.