Email from Dudgeon (July 2026)

I received an email from yourselves out of the blue on 1 July 2026, copied to a large number of apparently interested parties. It stated: “Your letters in The Irish Political Review have created serious doubts about authenticity since they do not cite independent witness evidence for the diaries’ existence. Can you eliminate those doubts?” 

Best wishes,

Paul R. Hyde, Jack Lane, John Martin, Philip O’Connor,

P.S. Kindly acknowledge receipt of this mail.”

I am not sure why I am being challenged but it was perhaps because I did not reply to a batch of Casement articles in the June issue of the Irish Political Review (IPR) and again in the July issue. Plainly somebody is itching for a fight although most of the territory has been gone over and positions long taken. Diary authenticity remains the standard opinion except in anti-revisionist circles.

The test of ‘independent witness evidence’ for authenticity, of course, is not one that historians can ever meet. We use whatever sources are available to make a reasoned assessment, ‘independent’ or not. The irony is you are happy to use non-independent, official sources if they seem to assist your case.

RA Butler, the Home Secretary in 1959, as is oft repeated, corrected his draft statement on what the US Ambassador Walter Page was shown and given in 1916 (photographs of two pages of manuscript diary). The obvious explanation is that Butler had read the actual papers and realised the draft was incorrect.

Some of those you describe as ‘independent’ are far from that such as Ben Allen, the Irish American journalist, that you and others often rely on. Allen was a self-described “rabid nationalist” (NLI 17601/1/4) and contradictory in his accounts of what he saw in 1916. Blinker Hall did show Allen some manuscript material that he agreed was not a diary although he says it was so-described. Later he was shown typed diary pages which did illustrate “the innuendo of perversions”.

In a letter which the IPR declined to publish (below/attached) I dealt with numerous areas of contention and with assertions by Paul Hyde and others. It may have been long but it was quite an original letter.

The IPR Editorial Team said in justification for its censorship: “He has submitted material to this magazine for publication that essentially rehashes points made in his book that assumes authenticity. We cannot see the point of publishing this material. He has not refuted the case for treating the ‘black diaries’ as forgeries and we see no point in repeating particulars from his book that have already been refuted here and elsewhere.”

I understand why it is so vital to counter authenticity of the Black Diaries. Previously the accusation that Casement was a homosexual was so damning in Catholic Ireland, it had to be denied ruthlessly and a saintly Casement installed instead. Mackey, Maloney, McCartan, Hobson, and even Yeats for a while, so averred. Patrick McCartan however felt so threatened he advised Hobson on 27 April 1937 (NLI 17604/3/15) that he would if necessary call on the IRA to deal with those telling tales:

“It seems there is one way to stop this – it is a rotten way but still – I shall pass the word to the I.R.A. to give Bigger or any other Irishman found spreading this yarn one warning. The English enemy can do as they please. It is their duty to protect their own government & one has to admire them for it…If Leslie or any other Irishman help to substantiate the charges against Casement, Maloney will have a lot more to say. Others who will say nothing may act. Some of the men involved in shooting Wilson on his own door step are yet alive & they will get all the facts from me.”

The first publication of three of Casement’s journals came in 1959 via Singleton Gates and Maurice Girodias in Paris. It lacked the highly sexualised and previously unheard of 1911 diary which I published in 2002 for the first and only time. The fightback continued but was more muted after new books by Brian Inglis and BL Reid.

By the 1990s with the publication of rival volumes by Angus Mitchell and Roger Sawyer on the 1910 Amazon Journals, homosexuality had been legalised in Ireland. It later became an admired identity but this left paedophilia ever more beyond the pale.

That Pearse and Casement were evidenced in their own words and writings as lusting over young boys and in the latter case grooming them into having sex ought to be devastating to the nationalist and separatist ideology.

It is as if John Mitchel was a racist or Sean Russell a Nazi!

And how could a Belfast GAA stadium be named after a paedo?

The iron law of the Irish exception was luckily available. Most writers who accept authenticity avoided condemnation. Two, Mary Kenny and Vincent Browne, in History Ireland and Village Magazine respectively (attached) did offer a balanced scorecard.

So deny, deny, deny, obfuscate has had to be the order of the day, especially amongst those who admire Casement’s Anglophobia and well-argued separatism – Martin Mansergh accurately described Casement “as a forerunner of Ireland’s independent foreign policy.” He has become second only to James Connolly in the foundational myths of nationalist and Republican Ireland now that globalism and GAA have replaced Catholicism.

Angus Mitchell, Mansergh and Paul Hyde and the IPR have all stated the diarist was a disgraceful pervert or a rampant homosexual paedophile so if Casement was the author he would have to be disowned and his project with him. Hence the intensity of the authenticity dispute which has reaching a crescendo in the pages of the IPR and other Athol Books publications. Some 250 articles on Casement and the diaries have been published over nearly 25 years.

The reality remains that there is not a scrap of evidence that the London authorities typed up, from scratch, a thousand daily diary entries with some 10,000 facts and later turned the typed pages into manuscript diaries. It simply defies common sense unless you believe in the all-powerful English. All that is on offer is perhaps a dozen alleged inconsistencies that can be explained to a reasonable reader, and a host of unevidenced assertions.

Yours sincerely

Jeff Dudgeon

Belfast

11 July 2026