Ireland's Big Gay Presidential Farce

With an almost preternatural synchronicity, this week’s New Yorker contains a fine essay, occasioned by the publication of two new biographies, on rise and fall of Ireland’s gayest star, Oscar Wilde, just - as misfortune would have it - another gay Irish literary star has become a political martyr to his own passions.

Unlike Wilde, who found fame in Britain and the US, David Norris’s celebrity is a purely Irish affair: A Joycean scholar at Trinity College, Dublin, who retired into politics after the English Department decided it needed him to be more postmodern in orientation (Trinity’s English Department in the early 1990s echoed of Cambridge in the 1950s and felt rather behind the critical times), Norris was Ireland’s pre-eminent celebrity don. Think Simon Schama crossed with Graham Norton – all the while chewing gum and ventriloquizing Ulysees or Finnegan’s Wake.

He was and is quite the performer.

But more significantly, Norris was one of the saviors of Georgian Dublin when philistine developers and carnal politicians decided that there was more profit to destroying the city’s architectural heritage than restoring it; and, above all, he was, as an independent Senator in the upper house of parliament, a relentless advocate for liberty and a scourge of the political establishment.

I’m not sure if the establishment sought revenge (so many of Ireland’s establishment are still counting their losses from the country’s asteroidal property crash that they count for naught), but when Norris decided to launch his presidential campaign on March 14, it didn’t take long for some journalists to begin asking whether Norris was the right kind of homosexual to be Ireland’s first gay president (or as Norris preferred to say “a president who happens to be gay”).

The first indictment came from a wide ranging and unwisely frank interview Norris gave to the Irish political magazine Magill in 2002, which became the focus of media attention for the following quote: “I cannot understand how anybody could find children of either sex the slightest bit attractive sexually… but in terms of classic paedophilia, as practiced by the Greeks for example, where it is an older man introducing a younger man or boy to adult life, I think that there can be something to be said for it.”

Norris certainly wouldn’t be the first academic in the British Isles to hold these views; Plato’s Symposium appears to have given the all male environs of Oxbridge much succor in the 19^th and early 20^th century; but to some in the Irish media and many in the public, this seemed to be splitting hairs after 20 years of endless revelations about Catholic paedophilia in the Irish priesthood.

And, as college in Ireland means specializing in medicine or law or history from year one, there is no systematic exposure to the classics or classical culture through a liberal arts curriculum; all this talk of the ancient Greeks would have sounded vague at best, self-serving and casuistical at worst. Nevertheless, even though Britain’s prurient Daily Mail wheeled out a prominent Irish sex abuse survivor to denounce Norris, this mother of all political career-sinking storms did not sink his campaign. After the furore died down, he was still ahead in the polls – and twice as popular as his nearest rival.

But what could be justified as high-minded academic discourse suddenly had all-too-much political relevance. On July 30, two of Norris’s key campaign workers resigned and it quickly emerged that he had written a letter pleading for clemency for a former lover, Israeli human rights activist Ezra Yizhak Nawi, after Nawi had been charged with the statutory rape of a 15-year old boy in 1997. Nawi claimed that the boy told him he was 16, which would have made their relationship legally consensual (it was the boys family that pursued the prosecution), but the law is the law.

Norris ended his campaign on August 2, saying he had made a “human error…to help a person I loved dearly.” He finished with the words of Samuel Beckett: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” In an interview, yesterday, on RTE Radio News, Nawi expressed his sorrow that Norris had paid a terrible price for his devotion. “It is the Irish people's loss. He could have been a politician on a global level.”

In a thin but remarkable ex post facto rendition of Edward Carson, Wilde’s fierce interrogator in the Marquess of Queensbury’s libel trial, Irish Times columnist John Waters wrote “Isn’t it interesting the way the [Magill] interview turned out to be a kind of insurance policy when the details of his legal intervention on behalf of his convicted lover rapist emerged?”

“Had it been down to the investigative exertions of most of the media, the facts that have become public in the past week might not have emerged until after the presidential election, by which time the president of Ireland might have been a man who had failed to fully disclose to a foreign court the nature of his relationship with a convicted rapist.”

Others see Waters as one of the chief instigators of a media witch-hunt. And, in a new twist, wild accusations are flying that Israel is behind the release of the Nawi letter, on the grounds that it’s existence was revealed on an Irish blog with a pro-Israeli agenda (the liberal-left in Ireland is very, very pro-Palestinian).

No matter; no politician could survive such an act of friendship, gay or straight.

I was lucky enough to have Norris as a lecturer 20 odd years ago, and I worked on one of his Senate campaigns in the lowliest of positions, as a student – not, I hasten to add through all the necessary throat clearing, because I was or am gay, or even in agreement with everything he stood or stands for. He simply struck me as an honorable man trying to make Irish politics and society less dishonorable – and there is nothing quite so persuasive as the mischief made with a rapier wit. Norris was more of an Irish Diogenes than a Plato, to cite, again, those wild, corrupting Greeks.

I chatted with Norris, briefly, in the dining room of the Irish parliament (known as the Dáil) several years ago, and he was as much the jovial literary wiseacre as ever, a man with immense passion for life. Which is why the echoes of Wilde channeled this week by the New Yorker’s Alex Ross, sound a fitting political epitaph:

“In the poem “Hélas!,” published in 1881, [Wilde] wistfully imagines a life of ‘austere control,’ in which he ‘might have trod / The sunlit heights, and from life’s dissonance / Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God.’ But he tastes “the honey of romance” and loses his footing.”