Sir, - John Waters's column of July 28th is an offence to the intelligence, morality and innate sense of justice of decent citizens, but the perversion rendered to Arthur Miller's powerful moral play, The Crucible, is particularly unsettling. The collective bewilderment involved in the spectacle of public humiliation of any high officeholder (past or present) is not helped by intellectual sloppiness, patronising moral flippancy and bogus pseudo-psychology from a respected daily paper. However, it is positively objectionable that Arthur Miller should be conscripted to this specious purpose and the legacy of The Crucible so casually plundered in the process.
In The Crucible Miller consciously dramatised the reality of institutional evil in a society which had become adept at diminishing the reality of evil, whose moral sense had become abysmally warped by arbitrary, wanton power. The Crucible links institutional corruption in 20thcentury American society to the Salem Witch Trials of 1692: the fate of good Americans could be (and was) barbarically oppressed by the same venal forces as the victims of the Salem Trials were. Such was the impact of The Crucible that Miller was tried for contempt by Congress in 1957 and found guilty (the charge was expediently quashed on a technicality later). The Crucible is a very serious dramatisation of the consequences of arrogant, unrestrained power in any society.
However, there are earnest questions about the Flood and Moriarty Tribunals that the public deserve to see explored in a respected daily newspaper, especially with the wisdom of hindsight following the beef tribunal. These questions are as follows:
(1) Is the net gain from the current tribunals going to exceed the net drain on the public purse arising from the excessive fees to the legal personnel employed by the tribunal?
(2) Who sets these fees and how precisely are these fees calculated?
(3) Why are these fees apparently linked to the everyday fees of barristers and solicitors who operate in the everyday court, system where the subject of justice is private and commercial, and not about the business of "public service".
(4) Since the business of these tribunals are specifically all about "public service", why are the fees not linked to the fees and salaries paid to other public servants of similar professional status such as those working in the Chief State Solicitors' office and the Attorney General's office, for example, whose work is similarly of a "public service" nature?
These are the questions we require to have probed by reputable daily papers, not the luxurious indulgence of ranting journalists who take the liberty to skew the legacy of one of the finest and most serious moral dramatists of our century in support of a nefarious moral argument, logically warped and intellectually banal.
Arthur Miller is neither intellectually trite nor morally slack. The Crucible may mirror events in this State today, but not in the way presented by John Waters. John Waters should stick to The Teletubbies (whose merits he recently devoted a full column to) for intellectual inspiration and comfort and refrain from traducing the integrity of serious playwrights of Arthur Miller's calibre. - Yours, etc., Bernadette Lowry,
Castlewood Park, Dublin 6.