Couldn’t have put it better myself – so I won’t

Letter of the week/month, courtesy as always of the glorious Irish Times letters page which should probably be required reading:

Madam, – In last Saturday’s edition, Quentin Fottrell rightly insisted that the controversy surrounding Cathal Ó Searcaigh’s behaviour in Nepal can only be clouded by his being gay, and a well-known poet. Neither fact should be relevant to the discussion of the central ethical issues.

However, the esteemed poet Máire Mac an tSaoi and the eminent artist Pauline Bewick took the rather surprising step of phoning the Joe Duffy Show last week, motivated, it would appear, primarily by Ó Searcaigh’s poetic and personal standing (he is a member of Aosdána, for example), and their desire to come to the aid of a colleague and friend.

I was baffled by the moral ambiguity reflected in their contributions, though they were both clearly uncomfortable with some aspects of the information that has come into the public domain. That they should be upset by the actions of Neasa Ní Chianáin I can understand. Having discovered what was going on in Kathmandu it was, in my opinion, incumbent on her to report her concerns to the relevant authorities in Nepal and in Ireland, and she should be commended for doing so. But as she had begun the project as a friend of Ó Searcaigh, her position has indeed been weakened by the decision to complete the film and make commercial gain from it.

This, however, should be seen as a side issue. The object of concern must be the boys (as young as 16, and Ó Searcaigh himself refers to them as “boys”) who were initiated into sexual relations by a 52-year-old man; boys who were poor, but who had lived in a protective community where they were unlikely to have had any knowledge of the permissive sexual mores of the West.

This was a man who came bearing gifts: the promise of an education, a future, funded in part by contributions from the great and the good of the artistic establishment in Ireland.

Pauline Bewick referred to the Nepali boys as “adults”; I doubt if there are many Irish mothers who regard their 16-year-old offspring as “adults”: they are scarcely beyond childhood, and at a particularly vulnerable stage in their development. Both Bewick and Mac an tSaoi as mothers were, I imagine, in the happy position to know that their teenage children, comfortable in circumstances and well protected – like my own – were unlikely to be sexually seduced by powerful, wealthy, ageing men. I would have expected that as mothers, as well as artists, they would have been directed their compassion primarily towards those who lacked power in this situation, those who through poverty or ignorance would have been ill-prepared to resist advances.

Whether the person offering the prospect of a better future while taking sexual favours is a likeable poet or a grouchy office clerk is hardly material; there was something more than a little disquieting in the pleading by Ó Searcaigh’s artistic colleagues that he is a nice, gentle soul, a gifted intellectual, whom they personally know and like, and their failure to condemn, at the very least, the confusion between his benevolent activity and personal sexual gratification.

Many of us denounced the Catholic Church establishment for closing ranks in the face of the indefensible: the abuse of innocence. Let us be spared a similar reaction on the part of our intellectual and artistic élite. – Yours, etc,

Prof GERALDINE SHERIDAN, Coolbane, Castleconnell, Co Limerick.