WHAT TO DO WITH A GAY TRAITOR?

6 July 2026

I’ve just finished ready Rory Carroll’s impressive story of the end of the life of Sir Roger Casement – Irish hero to some, British traitor to others. 

In brief, Casement had an extraordinary career exposing the ghastly treatment of rubber workers  in the Congo and Peru but then turned his hand to supporting the campaign for Irish Independence. During World War I he attempted to enlist German support for an uprising as well as recruiting Irish POWs from German prison camps and didn’t do particularly well on either front. On returning to Ireland to try and stop any uprising because of the lack of German help, he was captured just days before the Easter Rebellion, taken to London, tried for treason and hung.

What made his case particularly interesting was the fact that he was gay, kept very detailed diaries about his sexual activities, and this was used to discredit him. Of course, since the moment the diaries came into public view there has been debate about whether they are forgeries created by the British Government. Carroll concludes that they were real. And if so, one can see the tension for both sides of the battle for Ireland. When Casemont’s body was repatriated to Dublin in the 1960s, the  position was that that diaries had to be fake. In conservative Catholic Ireland of the time, who would want to celebrate this Protestant turned Catholic martyr if he was gay? Since then, Ireland has a voted for marriage equality and had an openly gay leader but for those who might now find his sexuality irrelevant to his political life, there’s the issue that most of Casement’s partners were paid and underage. Does one cancel a hero (in the eyes of some at least)  because of their unacceptable and illegal sexual practices?

Carroll’s work is a well written piece of history but it did make me reflect on the Craig Silvey case. Cancelled now because he’s pleaded guilty to possessing and distributing child exploitation material, does this mean his books can no longer be read? Can one separate the book from the author? There’s a very thoughtful piece in the June Monthly by Kristin Kruath who considered herself a friend of Silvey’s. She concluded that all she could do was put his books in the recycling bin with the hope that would be made into new paper for people to tell new stories. Children’s author Penni Russon has also written a sensitive piece for The Conversation where she considers questions such as whether to take his books out of libraries and what to tell children about someone who might be their favourite author: https://theconversation.com/craig-silvey-has-pled-guilty-to-child-exploitation-what-do-we-do-with-his-books-282153

I’m not attempting to say that the  Casemont and Silvey scenarios are the same but I’m using these stories to consider the vexed question of what we do about public people with terrible flaws. Luckily, I was never a Harry Potter fan so I didn’t have to decide whether to take those books off my shelves because of JK Rowland’s anti-trans stance but I pity the children (and adults) who face that choice.