I’m left with lots of uncomfortable questions after meeting Cathal Ó Searcaigh, for the first time, a fortnight ago. Firstly, why so few commentators are taking up what he has said, since his interview was published. People love to throw stones in a frenzy of mass hysteria. But a complicated, human mess is harder to take sides on, perhaps. And mud sticks.

The man is as open as a book, transparent. He is, indeed, as childlike in spirit as he claims, and also, as he claims, very slow to anger. When I met him, on a very trying day, when he was withdrawing from the Late Late Show and fending off reporters, he was not in the least bit angry or frustrated; just a bit bothered and distracted. He is obliging to a fault, and far too trusting to be allowed out on his own. Really.
The premise of Fairytale Of Kathmandu is that this man’s shockingly dark secret was exposed by the film-maker. It was a truth so terrible that, when faced with the charges at the end, he blurted out a confession, in a darkened room, caught on the spot, defensive and shifty.
Now, having met him, I am completely flabbergasted that such a destructive film could be made about him. His blustering response to his accuser, Neasa Ní Chianán, is, I now see, complete stupefaction that someone who had known him for such a long time, could deliberately misinterpret him so profoundly. There was never any dark secret to reveal, to confront him with. There was the reality that he sometimes slept with young men, aged 18 to 30, and he would have, at any time, talked about it with the film-makers. He was completely non-defensive and, I believe, truthful, when I asked him some very personal and sharp questions – he took pains to communicate, to find the right words, worried that his English wasn’t as good as it could be.
When I first saw it, I was very angry at how the film had been made. If someone is being pilloried and vilified as a child abuser in a film, which is about as bad as it gets in this day and age, I need to know the facts, and the documentary was far too short on them.
I know, more than most, the damage child abusers do, and the twisted way they can shift the blame on to the children themselves, infecting them with a secret, suffocating shame, shattering their trust. Child abusers are masters at deception and coercion and manipulation. There is an extraordinary documentary called Capturing The Friedmans which sets the standard on how to tackle the subject in film. It is a brave and intelligent exploration of a family ripped apart by paedophilia. Meticulously respectful and honest, the film-maker openly discussed the thorny ethical issues involved, honoured one family member’s wishes not to be filmed, explored the lies and hysteria that engulfed the family, and left all the contradictions and paradoxes for us, the audience, to figure out for ourselves.
I was angry with Fairytale because I felt, instinctively, that Ó Searcaigh was simply not that kind of man. Not that he was blameless or a saint – far from it – but the severe lack of respect shown to him and the young men in the documentary, who have vociferously demanded to be cut from the film, obscures, not reveals, the truth. He was demonised; this film is as much about psychological projection as anything else. Firstly, one woman’s projection of hero or idol onto one man – and secondly, the downfall, her projection of demon on to him. The same man. Neither projection is true. He is just, as he says himself, human. An extraordinarily subjective text, Fairytale is, really, all about one person alone: the film-maker herself.
Truth is the first casualty of war, they say. The war against child abuse is one that I support, if one has to declare affiliation in such matters nowadays, but of course one has to fight that war with very unwarlike weapons: truth, respect, subtlety, discretion, patience.
Ó Searcaigh is in the firing line in this war because he sleeps with people decades younger than he is, who are poorer than he is. The difference in power makes a lot of people very uncomfortable, and of course Ó Searcaigh has to deal with that. He is, I believe, right to point out that there’s power at work in every relationship, in every culture. That’s worthy of a serious documentary, a really challenging and honest one.
The priest/pervert polarity is one I’ve written about before – it’s a particularly Christian, Catholic dynamic but of course it occurs in all religions, especially in ones with strict moral absolutes about sexuality. The more one is bound to severe strictures about sex, the more distorted the sexual impulse becomes, the more secret and furtive, the more obsessive and compulsive. To my mind, the (now sadly familiar) figure of the guilt-ridden priest stuck in a cycle, repeatedly offending and seeking absolution, demonstrates perfectly that pattern. It is the hypocrisy of the most piously, patronisingly devout men committing and covering up the worst of crimes that, rightly, provokes such rage and hostility in our society.
Someone who is literate and eloquent about sex and desire is not going to fall into that dynamic. People stupidly felt that, first it was priests, now it was artists, they’re all perverts now, hang the lot of them. But pay attention to context. Context is all. The warped hatred of sex in Judeo-Christian faith results in really conflicted tortured individuals, who do a lot of damage.
Ó Searcaigh is not that kind of man. I would be curious to compare the emotional damage done by the poet in Nepal, compared to that done by the film-maker. But of course the buck stops with him. He brought her there.
Having met him now, I believe him. I believe him when he says the young man who accuses him of playing with the feelings of “50 or 60” others in the film is lying.
I believe the second young man’s statement, that he was interviewed having just been told that Ó Searcaigh was “a bad man”, was never coming back, had used him, just like he had used countless others. I believe that, in his shock, he told the film-maker what she wanted to hear.
The third young man wrote a letter to Ó Searcaigh after he had done his damning interview, a clumsy but affectionate appeal for money and gifts. In response, not knowing what his correspondent had said on film, Ó Searcaigh laments how depressed he was in a letter. Of course, if the poet had been allowed to see the film, he wouldn’t have sent the letter – but it has been published by the Sunday Tribune to show that the “manipulative abuser” would stop at nothing to get the young man to change his story. One has to ask, however, who was manipulating who in this exchange.
These three young men’s statements form the film’s case for the prosecution, and each one is problematic in some way, from an outright lie to a disturbing distortion of context, rendering it manipulative and, in essence, lacking in objective truth. Of course, there is no such thing in human relations as objective truth. Neither is there in documentary film-making. It is, in the end, one person’s point of view. But, when two people disagree, one has to hear both sides to make up one’s own mind.