It is not just Cathal Ó Searcaigh who should bear the burden of exploitation of vulnerable people, writes Vincent Browne
THE CONTROVERSY over Cathal Ó Searcaigh raises troubling questions not just for him but for many of the rest of us and for our culture. At the heart of the controversy is the issue of exploitation - a pervasive phenomenon. Sexual exploitation, economic exploitation, human exploitation.
It is uncontested that Ó Searcaigh had sex with young men/boys in Kathmandu, Nepal, and that subsequently he gave them gifts, gifts which to them may have seemed lavish. Given the wealth disparity between Ó Searcaigh and these young men/boys, there is at least a suspicion that he was exploiting them for his sexual gratification.
Such exploitation is not unique to Ó Searcaigh. It occurs most obviously through sex tourism, often involving very young boys and girls, exploited by mainly European males, indifferent to the emotional and psychological harm they may be causing. But there is more to it than that. There is sexual exploitation throughout our society and has always been. Indeed, arguably, it has been part of our culture.
Some readers may be acquainted with the second book of Samuel, a book that infects our civilisation, as does all of the Bible, however secular we may perceive our society to be. Chapter 11 of that book tells the story of David and Bathsheba - David being King David, an ancestor of Jesus, according to one of the gospels. David at the time was waging wars of genocide against the peoples surrounding Israel. He was back in Jerusalem and one morning he saw a beautiful woman, Bathsheba, having a bath in a neighbouring house. "And David sent messengers, and took her; and she came in unto him, and he lay with her; for she was purified from her uncleanness: and she returned unto her house. And the woman conceived, and sent and told David, and said, I am with child."
David's response was to send for her husband, Uriah, who was fighting David's genocidal wars. David inquired of him how the war was going and bid him go back to his house and, by inference, have sex with his wife - presumably to disguise the fact that she was pregnant by David.
But Uriah did not do that because of a sense of loyalty to his comrades at war, so David arranged for him to be sent back to the battle front, where, predictably, he was killed. Bathsheba then became one of David's wives.
The Lord, we are told, was upset about this but not that upset. David remains one of the great icons of the Old Testament.
There is sexual exploitation in many sexual encounters - heterosexual and homosexual - that are now commonplace; even sexual exploitation within marriage.
But it is not just sexual exploitation that arises from disparities of power and position. Exploitation is endemic in our social and economic relations, it is the engine that drove our recently departed economic success, it is what makes the modern capitalist world go around. It is what made fortunes for the developers in the construction boom, building houses at an exploitative cost for "ordinary" house buyers.
It manifests itself in "outsourcing", the euphemism for displacing workers paid a reasonable wage and replacing them with workers prepared to work for exploitative wages. Another euphemism is "restructuring", where workers who have built corporations to commanding heights are then "restructured" - ie, made redundant - because the bosses deem them surplus to further requirements.
You see this all over the place - in hotels, in restaurants, in private houses, in public houses, foreign workers being paid exploitative wages, while Irish workers, overwhelmingly women, clean up the mess of the bosses and the masters of the universe in the dark hours, also for exploitative wages. And it is deemed okay because it meets the threshold of the national minimum wage, the national minimum exploitative wage, one of the great achievements of the Progressive Democrats in government (€8.65 an hour - less than €330 for a 38-hour week, just over €17,000 a year). More than a fifth of the population live on incomes far lower than that and its equivalent.
Our relations with the Third World generally are hugely exploitative. We, in the First World, impose terms of trade that devastate their economies and societies, "reputable" corporations rob these countries' mineral wealth, notably in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where these same corporations feed war that has caused the death of well over five million people in the last decade. And having lured the Third World into the free movement of goods and capital we in Europe build fortresses around our own societies to keep out people from those societies European colonial powers ravaged not so long ago.
So it is not just Ó Searcaigh who should bear the burden of the exploitation of vulnerable people.
There are reservations about the TV documentary that has given rise to this controversy. The information and video footage was derived from an agreement with Ó Searcaigh to document his charitable work in Nepal.
The intrusion into his private doings, however exploitative and indefensible, is troubling. If the documentary maker simply informed the legal authorities in Nepal and at home about what she knew of Ó Searcaigh's doings, then that would be okay and probably obligatory. But to make it the subject of a sensational TV documentary?