Source:  Joe My God

Sir Roger Casement was executed for treason in 1916, and is now a hero of Irish nationalism.  The legal basis of his conviction was very weak.  There were many appeals for clemency supported by public figures, including Conan Doyle and Bernard Shaw. 

Clemency was refused and public support was weakened by deliberate government leaks of the fact that Casement was an active homosexual.

This had not emerged at his trial and was irrelevant to his case.  But he was not ashamed of it.  His barrister, Serjeant Sullivan, disclosed after his death that “Casement not only admitted to me that he was a homosexual, but gloried in it, saying that many of the great men in history had been of that persuasion.  He was proud of it.  If the matter came up in court, he wanted me to impress on the jury the fact that it was rather a distinguished thing to be.” (R MacColl, Roger Casement).

The presiding judge was a friend of the artist Sir John Lavery and commissioned from him a vast canvas, ten feet by seven feet, depicting the trial, and all those present in Court.  The painting was bequeathed to the Royal Courts of Justice in London (where the trial had taken place, in what is now Court 34).  But the Lord Chief Justice refused to have it hung in public, and so it was tucked away in a private room there.  Eventually, it was given to the King’s Inns in Dublin on indefinite loan, where it can be seen today.

See A Rare Document of Irish History: ‘High Treason’ by Sir John Lavery (John McGuiggan) Irish Arts Review Yearbook, Vol. 15 (1999), pp. 157-159

Photograph taken in Basrah, Iraq, on 15 April 1990.

The placard was from a government orchestrated demonstration which was over by the time I found it.  But I never felt unwelcome in Iraq, although the invasion of Kuwait and the taking of every foreigner hostage was only a few weeks away.  The political propaganda (including the massive images of Saddam Hussein all over the place, including the holiest Muslim centres) went on as, I suspect, it still does elsewhere, on another level entirely, while everyday life and courtesy continued beneath it.

Jan Moir has got into a spot of bother over a poisonous article she wrote in the Daily Mail.  It managed, simultaneously, to misrepresent facts (saying, contrary to the result of an autopsy, that Stephen Gateley’s death was not “by any yardstick, a natural one”), to insult the memory of a famous and much loved person the day before his funeral, and to insinuate, with a wild concatenation of non sequiturs, that a healthy and happy gay person is a contradiction in terms.

She has got into a spot of bother as a result.

The comments on her article, from a variety of Daily Mail readers posting long before the scandal became widespread, show that even her own readership thought that her article was wrong in fact, unfair in judgment, and in the worst possible taste.

The wider world of non Daily Mail readers took an equally hostile view (click on my title for one example) and more than 21,000 complaints were lodged with the Press Complaints Commission.  This is, according to the PCC itself, “by far the highest number of complaints ever received about a single article in the history of the commission”.

At first, the PCC told complainants (as reported by them on the internet) that it would not consider their complaints because they were not related to Stephen Gateley.

Since then, the PCC seems to have realised that this would expose it as a bit of a paper tiger.  The PCC is the press’s attempt to regulate itself, so that nobody else does.  However, regulating yourself requires special qualities of independence and courage, since the easy thing is to back your colleagues through thick and thin - both because you know them so well, and because you have more contact with them than you do with the complaining outside world.

The editor of the Daily Mail, Paul Dacre, is chairman of the Press Complaints Commission’s Editors’ Code of Practice Committee. He was appointed to this role after 9 years as a member of the Press Complaints Commission itself. When he was appointed he said:

“I am a passionate supporter of the principle of self-regulation, press freedom and a code which reflects both the concerns of newspapers and needs of the public which it serves.”

Unpicking this quotation:  (a) Self-regulation is not independent regulation.  (b) It is abuse of press freedom which the Code is supposed to prevent.  And (c) note that he puts the newspapers’ interests ahead of public need in the way he describes the purpose of the Code.

You get the picture, anyway.  The PCC is not, by any means, an independent body. It is umbilically linked to the newspapers it is supposed to regulate.

Let’s see if it proves to be fearless and impartial in this case.