Shag Off, Minister.

Max McGuinness defends Cathal O'Searcaigh.

Amid the ongoing jeremiad against poet Cathal O'Searcaigh, it is time that we remind ourselves about the difference between public and private morality.

For actions can be wrong in two different ways.

There are actions we might disapprove of – like adultery, rudeness and dishonesty in most contexts. The consequences of these actions may be very damaging to others but there is no justification for getting the state involved. This is private morality. We might not like it but there's nothing we can or should be able to do about it aside from asserting how we feel. It might be wrong but it would be even more wrong to infringe individual liberty and privacy by insisting that society impose a punishment.

Then there is public morality, enshrined in law, which governs behaviour that causes actual harm to others without their consent.

Over the years, acts once deemed to be part of public morality have rightly shifted to the rubric of private morality. The decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1993 was perhaps the most important example of this trend. In a liberal society, it is of course important to tolerate bigots who still insist that homosexuality is evil – but never again will they be able to impose their prejudice on the rest of us.

But now the Minister for Education Mary Hanafin seems to want to do their bidding, announcing last week that she was "shocked and appalled" to discover that O'Searcaigh has been...having sex with men.

In a piece of hypocritical buck-passing that is typical of our craven, untalented political class, Hanafin has asked something called the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment to figure out whether this dirty old man's pieces of run-off-the-mill Gaeilgeoirism should be removed from the Leaving Cert Irish syllabus.

"Ms Hanafin stressed she would have no role in this process," reported The Irish Times last week. Erm...no role apart from "asking" some quango "whether" kiddies should be exposed to the gloomy sonnets of a chap who has been busy "shocking and appalling" our Minister for Education. Apparently a compulsory question about the life of the poet could cause difficulty. After all, if the candidate wrote "Hómógnéasach ramhar mór is ea O'Searcaigh agus déanann sé rudaí go h-uafásach le buachaillí óga sa Nepál", you'd have to give him full marks wouldn't you? And we can't have that.

What about teaching Oscar Wilde? There's some pretty salacious stuff in those trial transcripts – the whole sharabang of queer depravity, and wasn't Bosie awfully young to be carrying on with a man in his forties? But that's okay because Wilde is dead. And gays cannot get at you from beyond the grave. Hanafin's reasoning can thus be summarised in the following equation: Dead pederasts = okay; Live pederasts = bad.

O'Searcaigh appears to have broken no law, apart from Nepal's medieval statute on homosexuality. No public figure has had the nerve to deliver an Archbishop of Canterbury-style outburst and say that we have to "respect different cultures". But I await some such piece of  multicultural foolishness as soon as the implications of Irish law on sexual offences become clearer. This perversely seems to leave open the possibility of prosecuting O'Searcaigh for breaking the Nepalese law on homosexuality.

If the Garda investigation into O'Searcaigh ever led to a prosecution, the trial could well be one of the major events in contemporary legal history – pitting righteous universalism against nihilistic relativism. It is not an exagerration to say that if Irish justices ruled in favour of the latter, it would be a direct rebuke to Enlightenment principles and provoke an existential crisis in Western civilisation.

But Hanafin's reactionary statement last week has already shown how little confidence we can have in our politicians to stick up for the values of our society.

By declaring herself "shocked and appalled", Hanafin consciously tried to move homosexuality from being a case of private morality back to being a part of public morality. If she had privately said that she found O'Searcaigh's behaviour distasteful, as most people do, that would have been alright. But by impugning the morality of a private citizen in the Dáil – a citizen who is not suspected of committing a crime under Irish law – Hanafin has done something unacceptable. She has used the legislature as a bully pulpit, as a place to air her own prejudices towards one man before cowardly insisting that the consequent censorship of O'Searcaigh's poetry will have nothing to do with her.

She should resign. But she won't – and, thanks to our national complacency, this outrage has gone completely unremarked. The country has been so wrapped up in debating what O'Searcaigh did in a Kathmandu hotel room that we have missed the real scandal. A government minister has used her office to attack the private moral choices of one man. If anyone now has questions to answer about ethics, it's Hanafin, not O'Searcaigh.

Comments

[Dog Haus]

hi there,

Thought you might like this.

A fast-paced satire on Bertie, very good lyrics.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0Tk83ArUqo

[if it doesn’t come up just type ‘bertie song’ into YouTube]

All the best

[Karl]

"this dirty old man's pieces of run-off-the-mill Gaeilgeoirism"

Ah here. He might be a dirty old man, but he's not run of the mill. One of the better Irish language poets.

Plus when I did Irish in school it was well known that he was gay, and partly known that he was a pederast. The people who set the curriculum had to have known... so why change now? Political shammery, once more.

Good article.

[Jay Lyden]

Great piece Max. Resign? Surely you'd only be called to resign from political office in this country if you, say, got hammered at the races, drove the wrong way down a motorway, nearly crashed into an ambulance, and battered your missus? What is infuriating is not even so much the moral complacency of our elected leaders, but how selective it is. Hanafin's comments are the backward bleatings of a bland zero.

[Fin]

I know the piece is more a condemnation of the minister's behaviour but there's also a strong suggestion through it that what O'Searcaigh has done is perfectly ok and that anyone who has a problem with it is somehow living in the past. The man used his money and power over very innocent and very very vulnerable boys for sexual gratification. What he did was wrong, and I mean morally rather than legally. If he'd done it over here it'd be wrong, if he'd done it with girls it'd be wrong. Please don't make this a liberal v conservative old world type argument.

[Max McGuinness]

Fin,

I never wanted to suggest that O'Searcaigh's actions were perfectly ok. They were undoubtedly wrong in a very strong moral sense.

My fundamental point is that the state should never regulate private moral behaviour. It would be deplorable if, for example, a 50 year-old man impregnated a 17 year-old girl and then refused to bring up the child. But, aside from insisting that the man pays child support, the state should not get involved.

By condemning O'Searcaigh's conduct in her official capacity as Minister, within the official confines of the Dáil chamber, before raising the prospect of removing O'Searcaigh's poems from the Leaving Cert., Hanafin is asserting the right of the state to judge individuals' private moral behaviour. That is reactionary and unacceptable.

Max.

[alex]

Fund raising in Ireland and then distributing the money only to young lads who are prepared to "put out" How do you describe that? Private or public morality?

[julianna kenny]

It is an issue of public morality. Also what he did was illegal under Irish Law and he can be prosecuted because of this . Age of consent is 17 . It is also illegal under Nepalese Law - sex between men is not legal there , whatever we may feel about it that is their law and it applies to the boys who have now been put under a microscope first by neasa and now by cathals friends via liam gaskin pr work on his behalf. He said he had sex with several of the boys.I suppose he is Ireland s answer to avante garde posturing
as gaeilge. his attitude to his nepalese ''sons'' wife was particularly offensive - on so many levels.

[Lou Walsh]

We have seen the director of the movie being blamed , the young men themselves and now a government minister being blamed....in between all this the general public have been blamed for being hypocritical etc , etc......

....this is a classic case of someone having their cage rattled.....

[kenny byrne]

Cathal O'Searcaigh has been betrayed by the film-maker neighbour and so-called 'friend'.

How quick people are to put a label on other people who are 'different' or have 'different tastes'.

The British have a 'keen sense of rumour', like nothing better than a sexual scandal, to see a celebrity fall from grace. Are the Irish the same?

This is one of the big evils in our day ---- the rumour mill, the malicious press, and the dark cynicism of people's minds.

Getting back to O'Searcaigh; he appears to have over-stepped the mark, over egged his pudding by having so many young sex partners. I hope he sobers up, and I hope he chooses his 'friends' more carefully in the future.

Lastly, I hope the Irish public don't hound him or make him into a non-person, someone to ignore and feel superior to.

kenny byrne