Madam, - I was puzzled by Fintan O'Toole's comparison between the current Cathal Ó Searcaigh controversy and that concerning Michael Ledwith in 2003. There is in his piece (Opinion, March, 18th), as in much commentary on the issue, a failure to put it in a wider context.
Ledwith was a key member of staff in a seminary run by one of the most powerful institutions in Ireland, and indeed the world: the Catholic Church. He consequently betrayed the trust of the institution as well as the parents of the young men in his care. Furthermore, the Catholic Church's position on homosexuality is well known - that it is evil, a position that Ledwith probably had to inculcate in the seminarians in his trust. Ledwith therefore was not only abusing his institutional position, but contradicting that institution's public position on homosexuality. Despite this he was protected by the church until the story broke and even then the church's own institutional procedures dealt with the matter.
Ó Searcaigh, on the other hand, is part of no such institution whose values he has to uphold and teach, nor does he have the resources or protection it affords. He is a private individual, an Irish-language poet who openly and publicly embraces his homosexuality. This in itself, in the context of Irish society, makes him a vulnerable target, aside from the rights or wrongs of his behaviour. He does not have the institutional procedures of the Church to deal with his case, thus relieving him somewhat of the pressures of media interest, but rather is being subjected alone to the court of public opinion, the nearest we have to a contemporary lynch-mob.
Ireland is a homophobic society. The Catholic Church's aggressively expressed position on homosexuality, reports showing increasing homophobic school bullying, street attacks on gay people, and the heated nature of the controversies over gay marriage and adoption are only some examples of the truth of that statement. Homophobia is therefore the context which frames the Ó Searcaigh case and the inordinate media and public interest in the affair provides, I would venture, further proof of that. That individual commentators do not make express homophobic statements cannot deny this fact. It is Mr O'Toole who is being disingenuous and living in denial by claiming otherwise.
Ó Searcaigh's behaviour in Nepal was quite reprehensible. But can this excuse the highly questionable ethics of the other parties involved? The documentary maker, for betraying her subject's trust and for thrusting the young men involved into a scandal that was not of their making; RTÉ, for shamelessly milking the film for publicity; the media, for thier unending hounding of a man who did not, it is important to emphasise, break any law. All of these parties, not just Cathal Ó Searcaigh, should hang their heads in shame.
And what have the young men and boys involved, and their families, gained from it, they being the supposed centre of everyone's concern? Most likely the opprobrium and ostracism of their equally homophobic society, which the recently announced police investigation there suggests. Facile comparisons such as Mr O'Toole's add nothing to resolving any of these moral and ethical contradictions. - Yours, etc,
BARRY CANNON, Park Terrace, Dublin 8.
Madam, - For the coterie of artistic luminaries and aging liberals who have chosen to "protect" Cathal Ó Searcaigh, and indeed Mr Ó Searcaigh's own justifications, there is only one word, "arrogance". - Yours, etc,
M.G. SALTER, Kilmacanogue, Co Wicklow.