I'm as tolerant as the next guy, but...

Isn’t it great that we have strong and courageous people to stand up for our youth against the poets and perverts that are trying to drag them into a morass of sexual licentiousness and libertarianism.

It was with copious joy that I read that the Fine Gael spokesman on education, that giant among the pygmies of contemporary Irish culture, Brian Hayes, had asked the Minister for Education, Mary Hanafin, what she thought of the appropriateness – or otherwise! – of the inclusion of poems by the Donegal poet Cathal O Searcaigh on the Leaving Cert syllabus.
For those who have not been following the story, a new documentary on the poet deals with the fact that O Searcaigh had sex with a number of teenage boys in Nepal. What he did was and is perfectly legal in that country. But as we all know, that doesn’t matter. No. What’s important is that we have a system here in Ireland of trying and, where appropriate, hanging by the media – and in that respect, for fucking fellas who are less than half his age, O Searcaigh merely got what he deserved. He has been hung, drawn and quartered. Naturally.
And it’s not over yet, because – when it was suggested that maybe O Searcaigh should be drummed off the curriculum as well – that fragrant flower of Irish womanhood, Mary Hanafin, gave the kind of answer that we’d all want to hear in circumstances such as these.
It isn’t up to me, she said, but we all know how important it is for teenagers to have Positive Role Models. The issue, she added with exactly the degree of gravitas required, will be discussed at the next meeting of the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment, which takes place in March. Well, that’s it then. This august body must, of course, do the right thing and remove any trace of this unseemly man from the Leaving Cert course, to protect the minds and hearts of our vulnerable little 17, 18 and 19 year-olds from corruption. The poor, innocent craythurs.
Now, while they’re at it, it’s surely the duty of the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment to do the job properly by issuing a comprehensive list of authors that young Irish people are Recommended Not To Read. After all, many writers make very bad role models – very bad indeed. How are the youth of Ireland meant to distinguish, if they are not forewarned?
If they need a bit of a hand, of course I am ready to do my civic duty: I am willing and able to give them a dig-out by naming and shaming the worst of the worst, the poets, novelists and others who have done things that the likes of Mary Hanafin would never even dream of doing, even in their most wildly abandoned erotic nightmares. With the modern Bishops running like lily-livered old girls away from controversy, someone has got to step into the breach. This is not a time for faint hearts.
Here, then, is my first draft of the list that should be issued…
Brendan Behan was an alcoholic, a drunk and a lout – with a taste for young lads of God knows what age. He’s first on the OUT list.
William Butler Yeats was a dirty old man, who lusted after young flesh. OK it was girls he was after, but even in his dotage he was fantasising about having it off with young ones. And besides he was an occultist and a weirdo. Out.
Oscar Wilde. Don’t even start me on him. A faggot who liked nothing more than trawling for rent boys, and if they happened to be on the young side, all the better. Out.
James Joyce. Did you ever read those disgraceful letters that he wrote to yer one, Nora Barnacle. There was always something fishy about him. A pervert, he got his kicks out of sniffing knickers and worse. Out.
James Clarence Mangan – another drunk, depressive and oddball, he consumed vast quantities of laudanum and killed himself in the process. My Dark Rosaleen, my arse. Out.
Flann O’Brien. A total waster conning the State by pretending to go to work, while he spent half his life in the boozer. A serious alco – and he didn’t like policemen. Out.
Edna O’Brien. A promiscuous little tart, who tried to corrupt a whole generation of young Irish country girls and turn them against the church and the State. Out.

Now it is important to establish that there is nothing parochial about this – that we are not just in the business of tramping on fellas from up the road. We want to clean things up generally – to remove entirely the poison that filthy-minded writers represent from the body politic of Ireland. There’s a few Brits, Americans and other foreigners who will have to go too.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. An opium addict who wrote some of his greatest poems under the influence of laudanum. Out.
Percy Bysshe Shelley. Imposed himself on a 16-year-old whom he married. Tried to get her to have sex with one of his mates. Left her after three years and committed adultery with the woman who wrote Frankenstein. Left a series of dead children in his wake. Out.
Lord Byron. Mad, bad and dangerous to know, he was a drunk, a bisexual, a womaniser and a pursuer of teenage girls. And of teenage boys too. Out.
John Keats, another druggie, drinker and he’d have been a womaniser proper if only he’d lived longer. Out.
Jesus, I’m only getting started, and I’m tired. Maybe I need reinforcements. Maybe we need a big team to name the names and shame the shameless.
I’m thinking of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson (well, I’m convinced she was a lesbian), Rimbaud, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner (an alcoholic who used his eminence to fuck a young writer by the name of Joan Williams), Jean Genet, Dorothy Parker (an alcoholic and a leftie, she had an abortion and didn’t even hide it), F. Scott Fitzgerald, Richard Yates, William Burroughs (junkie and queer), James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Hunter Thompson, Edmund White (have you read A Boy’s Own Story? Filth), Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath (what kind of role model was she?), Kingsley Amis – what a ginormous gaggle of degenerates…
Are these the kind of role models we want for the good upstanding children of Ireland? Ban them all, I say. And if they’re alive, make them wear a big scarlet O painted on their dirty raincoats. O for Outed.
One other thing. It is quite clear from all that has been written about the O'Searcaigh case that no one should ever attempt to have sex with anyone, where there is an “imbalance of power”. I agree. I always thought British royalty should be banned from having sex – well, now there is a cast-iron justification since there is an imbalance of power between them and every other citizen of the UK that is clearly impossible to rectify.
And as for rock stars fucking groupies, Irish poets screwing American students and property developers and politicians on the prowl for hot young trophy pussy – they should all be locked up.
Hey, I’m as tolerant as the next guy, but…