3 MAY 1957, Page 7

No doubt the Home Office will try to argue, as

it has done before, that Casement ought not thus to be put on trial a second time. But as Mr. Christopher Hollis has pointed out in the Observer, it is not Casement who is on trial; it is the Home Office. On trial, too, are all the men concerned in the ugly business of smearing Case- ment in 1916: Blackwell, Thomson, and the imbuvable Birkenhead.