Confusing gays with abusers
Added on November 18, 2004
Thursday November 18th 2004
Sir - Your front-page story headlined 'Gay sex ring at seminary revealed in Ferns report' suggests that an age-old confusion about homosexuality and paedophilia is not altogether extinct. The only references to alleged victims of sexual abuses in the body of the article specify "a minor" and "boys", all of which suggest that the perpetrators were, if anything, paedophiles - not 'gays'.
Voluntary homosexual activity between adults (clerical or otherwise), although technically illegal in the 1970s, would hardly merit a full-blown official investigation 30 years later. After 1980, of course, any 'gay' goings-on were nobody's business but that of the adult and willing participants in due privacy.
The focus of the Ferns Report, according to your article, being centred on the 1970s and 1980s, one has to conclude that its essence will not be concerned, therefore, with clerical frolics between adult 'gays' but rather with involuntary sexual activity forced on minors by clerical paedophiles.
In any case, as the co-author of your Ferns Report story, David Quinn (Religious Affairs Correspondent) must surely have already gleaned from his current stint at the open hearings of the Ryan Investigation into child abuse in industrial schools, just as a bee will follow honey, so too will the paedophile - not the 'gay' - gravitate towards a life that renders children (not adults) into states of fear, ripe for the picking.
One intriguing point from your story is that the forthcoming Ferns Report will name and shame both dead and unconvicted alleged abusers, something the Ryan Investigation committee has studiously refused to countenance.
No doubt, there are those who live in hope that such official reports and investigations will put an end to the barbarous practice of incarcerating children in single-gender institutions once and for all. The rest of us will, I'm afraid, continue looking out for flying elephants.
Brendan Quinn,
The Palms,
Roebuck,
Dublin 14
? Irish Independent
http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/ & http://www.unison.ie/