My heart sank when I read this week that the Fairytale Of Kathmandu saga has life in it yet.

According to the Donegal Democrat, papers have been lodged in the High Court by Neasa Ní Chianáin against RTÉ and Paddy Bushe, claiming that she has been defamed in a film that Bushe made about the making of her controversial documentary, Fairytale of Kathmandu, about Cathal Ó Searcaigh’s life in Nepal. He went back to Kathmandu, interviewed some of the people that had originally featured in it, who were highly critical of Ní Chianáin, and extracts of it were shown on TG4.
When litigation starts, on a topic that is as divisive and complex as this, my first reaction, as a commentator on the scandal, and as someone who interviewed Ó Searcaigh in these pages, is to run to the hills, say nothing, and observe the tsunami wreak havoc on the plains below. When someone is willing to sue, it silences criticism. Paddy Bushe can say nothing to the press now, except to confirm to me that a “monkish silence” is necessary on his part from now on. Whatever interest I may have had in listening to Ní Chianáin’s side of the story, and finally getting to calmly put to her all the questions I’ve stored up since I was so outraged by (what I perceived as) her film’s bias, has disappeared. Once an interpersonal struggle reaches the courts, especially one as fraught as the broken friendship between Ní Chianáin and Ó Searcaigh, it becomes sharply, acidly polarized. Fuzzy, complex ambiguity, the stuff of life, has a hard time being acknowledged. Everyone has to take sides, like children in a messy divorce.
I am not even going to begin to speculate as to the likely costs Neasa Ní Chianáin and Paddy Bushe, a poet and an amateur film-maker, are going to have to cover somehow between them. But in order to establish the truth about this case, one has to go back to the original film, and establish what exactly happened in Kathmandu. Thus, I cannot see how an Irish court could succeed in enabling justice to be done without either decamping to Kathmandu for a sitting, or hiring a charter flight and bringing all the Nepalese witnesses over to Ireland. Either way, none could be compelled to give evidence; it’s a civil case, not a criminal one. So will it be down to looking at the programmes again and trying to make some kind of judgement based on that flimsy evidence?
Without hearing all the witnesses in this story, it’s hard to know how a jury can decide one way or another. Just as in the original film and its aftermath, there are no winners, only losers. Even if, by some miracle, everyone involved, the entire production team of Fairytale, everyone in RTÉ who commissioned it and debated the ethics of broadcasting it, the counsellors who allowed their sessions to be filmed, the young men who appeared in the film without having signed consent forms, the hotel manager, the other translators, Ó Searcaigh and his friends and supporters, were able to sit down calmly and tell their version of events to each other in a methodical fact-checking way, the truth would still be next to impossible to pin down, in my opinion.
On the radio recently there was an interview with one of the devisers of the Invisible Gorilla experiment (url.ie/72s5), in which levels of human perception and intuition were tested, by asking viewers of a short film to perform a simple task. The film showed a number of people, three dressed in white, three in black, bouncing a basketball and passing it to each other. The task was simply to record the number of times the white team passed the ball. At the end of the film, participants in the test were asked if they’d noticed anything unusual. Half the people tested answered no, despite the fact that half-way through the film, a gorilla walked into the middle of the shot, beat his chest, and walked off. The people who missed seeing the gorilla were astonished, and some went so far as to believe they’d been tricked, so incredulous were they that they had missed something so obvious.
It may seem vapid to some that I argue for the appreciation of ambiguity and complexity in this column, in a world which, increasingly, demands strident clear opinions and statements defining exactly where one stands on an issue. It would be easy to take a potshot at Ní Chianáin now, considering that, to a large degree she succeeded, in having an enormously damaging portrayal of Ó Searcaigh broadcast in the first place. But I have no doubt that she sees herself as a victim in all this, and has no comprehension of the motives of those defending someone whom she considers to be a child molester. In addition, being one of the few who has actually watched the film, which Bushe made with all the good intentions of defending his friend and establishing the truth (and which has so offended Ní Chianán), I am not sure that everyone who appeared in his film was as meticulous with the truth as they could have been, so convinced were they that their friend Ó Searcaigh had been unfairly attacked, and so eager were they to put things right for him.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. So many people with good intentions are hurting and wounded in this sorry tale, and if it reaches the courts, the wounding will continue. Will the reputations of anyone involved be changed one jot by a public trial? The only way I can make sense of it is if I look at it in archetypal terms. Is it the age-old female versus male archetypal struggle, such as Hera and Zeus? The fierce maternal protector of children, versus the philandering force of creativity and adventure? Is it a David and Goliath struggle, with both Ó Searcaigh and Ní Chianán able to see themselves in the role of David? Has the wound that the Catholic Church inflicted on our children been so damaging that we have lost perspective, and see child abuse wherever we look, even between consenting adults? Or has the gay male subculture become so permissive and hedonistic, that we have lost sight of decent values?
Perhaps something is being acted out here that is bigger than the individuals caught up in it. It’s almost as if we’re watching the drama unfold, keeping our eye on the white team or the black team, and missing the gorilla slap bang in the middle of the stage, taunting us.