Modern forensic techniques needed to fully test Casement’s ‘Black Diaries’

To mark the 50th anniversary of the repatriation of Roger Casement’s remains, writer Ryle Dwyer (Irish Examiner, February 23) called the ‘Black Diaries’ controversy “an irrelevant distraction over the greater part of a century”.

But these diaries portray Casement as not only gay, but as mentally unbalanced and with paedophile tendencies; they undermine his credibility as a witness to, and commentator on, the times in which he lived.

Dwyer referred to “exhaustive forensic tests”, which he believes establish the handwritten volumes as genuine. Perhaps he is under the spell of Roy Foster, Carroll professor of Irish history at Oxford, who made similar unwarranted claims on the diaries in his recent book on the 1916 generation, Vivid Faces.