Madam, - Patrick O'Byrne (February 26th) asks, with reference to your Editorial of February 23rd, "What evidence is there to suggest [ Micheál Mac Liammóir] was a pederast?" A dear and close friend of mine who survived molestation in a monastic boarding school ("it was better than the beatings", he said) worked with Lady Gregory, Hilton Edwards and Mac Liammoir at the Gate Theatre.
He said pederasty there was rampant, but that he escaped because he was short and blonde. Edwards was considered the predator, but both he and Mac Liammóir liked their teenagers tall, dark and handsome. I personally knew someone else whose whose life was ruined by them (RIP, friend).
No one is immune from human frailty, but there is a heavy line between weakness and predation. It seems likely that Cathal O'Searcaigh crossed it, but instead of placing a spotlight on the need for strong, trenchant laws protecting children and minors from hypocritical predators, some commentators lionise the poet and award him victim status.
Sexual predation is deep and endemic in Ireland, together with its cousins - powerlessness, dysfunction, denial and suicide. I have met its victims among the Irish abroad. It is significant that most of the priests accused of pederasty in the US had Irish names.
Finally, the term "paedophilia" is inappropriate. The sexual abuse of minors has nothing to do with "philia", or brotherly love. It is an act of hatred toward the innocence of the child, an innocence stolen from the pederast in his own childhood. He may be pitied, but never enabled. - Yours, etc,
Dr DEIRDRE McNAMARA, New York, USA.
Madam, - Many commentators on the Ó Searcaigh controversy claim or imply that their views are not affected by the fact that Ó Searcaigh's sexual encounters were with boys rather than girls. The writer of your Editorial of February 23rd is one of these. However, the use of the words "pederasty" and "pederasts" belies this. The use of a word specific to men who are sexually attracted to adolescent boys (there is not even an equivalent word for men attracted to girls, let alone for women attracted to adolescents of either sex) indicates a deep-seated, albeit perhaps unconscious, prejudice, just as use of the word "mistress" indicates an underlying sexism.
Furthermore, some commentary, including the Editorial, suggests that the boys with whom Ó Searcaigh had sexual encounters were over the "age of consent" of 16 in Nepal; yet elsewhere it has been stated that sex between males is illegal in Nepal, in which case consent does not arise as rape and consensual sex are equated.
Whatever about Nepal, the Ireland in which Ó Searcaigh grew up was one that equated rape and consensual sex between men (the only difference being that the latter involved two criminals rather than one). In that Ireland men could not say "yes" to sex with other men, just as a married woman could not say "no" to sex with her husband.
It is also claimed that there is no suggestion of criminal conduct on Ó Searcaigh's part. However, the Sexual Offences (Jurisdiction) Act 1996 effectively allows for the enforcement of discriminatory laws, such as those in Nepal, in Ireland.
This, of course, reflects domestic sexual offences laws which provide for different ages of consent with respect to certain forms of sexual contact, depending on whether the participants are of the same or different genders. - Yours, etc,
SÉ D'ALTON, Palmerston Road, Dublin 6.