Sir, - In her article (November 28th), Rosie Donovan repeats the well-known arguments of Eoin O Maille regarding the authenticity or otherwise of the so-called "Black Diary" for 1910. Their centrepiece is his comparison of its vocabulary with that of the "White Diary" for the same year. He finds that they differ to an unacceptable extent, from which he deduces forgery.
However, Mr O Maille has made the mistake of not comparing like with like. The two records were kept by Casement in different ways and for different purposes. The former was written in a standard desk-diary, which allowed just 203 x 97 mm to each day. This relatively small space was normally filled by Casement but very seldom exceeded. The text consists for the most part of informal jottings, usually in note form, to remind him of his day-today activities, often of a social kind, and was clearly intended for his own eyes only.
The latter, by contrast, is much more a journal than a diary. Its unlined pages (349 x 212 mm) are not divided into days and Casement on a single day would often write several pages, usually with long, carefully constructed sentences, and almost always related to his work. It is evident that he regarded it as an official record of his professional activities, which he would present to the Foreign Office on his return as the basis of his eventual report. In these circumstances it could not be expected that the vocabularies would have been identical.
On a separate matter, Mr O Maille poses a very curious question: "If the Black Diary existed, why wasn't it produced at Casement's trial?" But he has implied its existence in the previous paragraph by stating, perfectly correctly, that extracts from it were circulated during the trial by the British authority. It wasn't produced in evidence for the obvious reason that it would have been utterly irrelevant: the charge was treason, not sodomy.
Finally Mr O Maille proposes that "if Casement really wanted to keep an obscene diary, surely it would be so from start to finish, and would not repeat some of the "clean" stuff from "the other diary." This is naive. He didn't want "to keep an obscene diary." The homosexual passages are in fact very occasional, occupying much less than one per cent of the whole. They relate to just one of his many activities during the period - and not at all an important one. How could he have filled a volume with homosexual adventures? It would be far more remarkable for a villain of a forger to have gone to the immense labour of producing tens of thousands of words in Casement's hand that were 99 per cent innocuous. - Yours, etc., John Kilbracken,
Killegar, Co Leitrim.