Decent people should support Herbert Mackey, says Frank O'Connor

[//Review: ‘Roger Casement: The Forged Diaries’//]

‘Poor Willie!’ Oscar Wilde once said when his brother was defending
him too enthusiastically. ‘He could compromise a steam engine.’

Dr. Herbert Mackey will forgive me if I sometimes feel the same way
about him and Roger Casement. He can take up such a good cause with
such enthusiasm as to give me grave doubts of it.

Yet I must advise my readers to buy his ‘Roger Casement: The Forged
Diaries’ which is published by Fallon at 4/6, though it contains all
the things that set my teeth on edge—irrelevant pictures of
evictions, attacks on people like Mr. Montgomery Hyde who, I fancy,
are quite as honest as Dr. Mackey and myself, and noisy anti-British
propaganda.

/Dirty business/

But the Casement Diaries are a dirty business. One cannot have British
government departments exhibiting documents which destroy the
character of a famous Irishman when the authenticity of the
documents has been repeatedly challenged, and if no one but
Dr. Mackey will keep up the fight, all decent people, Irlsn and
English, should support him.

This little book is valuable because it gets down to facts, and facts
are what is needed. The Editor of this paper once issued a request to
readers to identify a particular place in Dublin at which Casement is
supposed to have committed acts of indecency. The answer was clear:
there was no such place.

Dr. Mackey refers to a similar incident supposed to have taken place
at a certain hotel in Warrenpoint. According to him, there was no
such hotel.

/Case against/

He and I may be wrong when we see the forger's hand in a suspicious
passage, though I am afraid we are too often in agreement for this to
be possible, but there can be no question of error in matters of
external fact that anyone can check for himself.

I believe any one who reads this book will be satisfied that the
case against the authenticity of the Diaries is made, once for all.

But I have still to learn why our Department of Justice does not
appoint a Commission of Judges to produce an answer that the whole
world will accept. It is no trivial matter that on this fiftieth
anniversary of his execution Casement should receive common Justice
from the State he died to establish.


//The death of Marstrander//

A young scholar has written a bitter letter of protest against the
casual treatment of the deaths of Alf Sommerfelt. and Carl Marstrander
in Irish newspapers, and I have no doubt that many people sympathised
with him.

He might have mentioned the still more extraordinary fact that the
death of an equally famous Irish scholar, Father Grosjean, does not
even seem to have been reported. If there was a public service to
commemorate this great Jesuit, I, for one, have not heard of it.

The writer of the letter referred, too, to the death of Daniel
Corkery, but in Corkery's own “The Fortunes of the Irish Language,”
published by the Cultural Relations Committee of the Department of
External Affairs, I have looked in vain for a foreign name, as though
Zeuss, Ebel, Siegfried, Windisch, Storn, Thurneysen, Meyer, Bugge,
Marstrander, Sommerfelt and Grosjean—Oh, I could mention quite a few
more—had never lived at all.

/Our debt/

In this Issue of the “Sunday Independent” two famous Irish scholars
pay their tribute to Carl Marstrander, and my only complaint is that
it is still not enough. Was it not Marstrander who, during the
Norwegian resistance fight, communicated with his son In Ogam?

If the Cultural Relations Committee still exists, it might consider
commissioning even a brief history of Irish scholarship as a token of
the debt we owe to great European scholars. Gratitude apart, it would be a fascinating book.


//Dublin going to pieces//

I wonder if there was ever in history a city that went to pieces in
the same extraordinary way as Dublin has done in the last five
years. First, you notice an empty house in a fine street. Six months
later the windows are broken and it is standing derelict. No one seems
to know who owns it or why it has been left in this condition.

Then houses at either side become vacant as well.

Vast areas of the older city have been demolished, sufficient, one
would say, to provide Dublin with all the flats and office blocks it
will need for the next twenty years, but it is in the quiet squares
and streets of the south side that the real damage is being done.

As always, when people are keeping their mouths shut too tight, there
are ugly stories of chicanery and threats, but, even if it were all
the most honest transaction in the world it would be bad
business. The country simply doesn't have the money to rebuild on
this scale. A Minister has only to wave his magic wand for Fitzwilliam
Street to disappear, but when the Minister for Finance waves the same
wand to get American money the spell fails.


/Money to burn/

Beside where I live is the remains of a row of charming houses which
hnve been demolished to make way for a new office block and for a
week, day and night, poor wretches who must pay dear for a miserable
handful of kindling have. been watching hundreds of pounds worth of
timber going skyward in great bonfires.

Why should we borrow money who have money to burn?


//Design Centre in Kilkenny//

The Design Centre established by the Irish Exports Board in Kilkenny
may yet revolutionise the picture of Ireland that is entertained
abroad.

I am a moderately honest man; I have never yet pocketed anyone's
silver ware, but I did really want to walk off with a silver penal
cross from the Centre and might even have done it if the designer
hadn't been looking me straight in the eye, reading my thoughts.

If some Irish businessman will take up the design and manufacture from
it, it may help considerably in altering our trade balance.


/Noble front/

Naturally, in spite of the rain, I had to see Rothe's House, the only
Elizabethan town house left in Ireland.

It is being restored by a local committee with the aid of the Tourist
Board and staff from the Board of Works. (No, no! I have made a New
Year’s resolution to avoid further criticism of Mr Gibbons and his
National Monuments Committee. Why speak ill of the dead?) But I was
slightly taken aback by that noble Renaissance front, one side of it
beautifully restored and the other given over to a butcher’s shop
which is on a different level, whitewashed and utterly out of keeping.

Mind you, I admire the spirit of the owner in standing up to those who
want him to change his old shop for a fine free new one but why can
we never work these things in reverse?

Why couldn't the local butcher have been given a shop in Fitzwilliam
street in Dublin so that he could thumb his nose at a Minister's magic
wand, and why can we not export the Minister to Kilkenny, where his
magic wand might be of some use if waved over Mr. Brennan’s shop?

[Photograph with caption: The Rothe House, Kilkenny ... ‘given over to
a butcher’s shop ...’]

Sunday Independent, 1966-01-16, p. 10