Sir, - Normally I wouldn't waste your readers' time, yours or my own responding to a letter such as that of Mr John Goodwillie (August 25th) if it weren't that - albeit unwittingly - he raised an important point.
It is that the allegations against Casement were not simply that he was homosexual, as seems to be given wrongful and increasing currency nowadays.
He was hounded by the claim that his own diaries recorded him practising perverse and degenerate behaviours, sometimes several times a day and with many people, often juvenile.
Obviously if the "Black Diaries" are false, so are the allegations of depravity. In that case the question of homosexuality just doesn't arise.
Nonetheless your correspondent complained that it is "outrageous...in the year 2001" for me to use "homophobic words like 'degeneracy' and 'perversion' to describe homosexual practices".
My article contained no reference to "homosexual practices". It clearly referred only to the allegations concerning the "Black Diaries".
Notwithstanding the abysmal current climate of "political correctness" in which loving the sinner is not enough and one is expected to accept the sin as well, the words complained of by your correspondent correctly describe those allegations. That is so whether such behaviour is practised (in the year 2001 or any other time), by homo- or by hetero-sexuals.
When words - or names - are taken out of context, have a particularist meaning they do not possess attributed to them and, in that guise, are made a basis for "outrage" and wrongful and intemperate attack on whoever used them properly, we have reached yet another landfall of Mr Lemuel Gulliver. - Yours, etc.,
Eoin Neeson, Blackrock, Co Dublin.