Sir, - One of the most disturbing aspects of the Sheedy case is the reluctance of its central figures to acknowledge that they did anything wrong. Clearly they are sincere in this, but their protestations serve only to underline the pervasive nature of the attitudes which have so undermined the egalitarian ideal in our society.
What is in question here is the unacknowledged, perhaps even unconscious, conspiracy of the "good". For it is true that good people, from good homes and good families, living at good addresses, attending good schools and securing good jobs form a powerful and privileged bloc which promotes its own interests and protects its acquired social and material dominance relentlessly from generation to generation. So, in time it becomes the most natural and even innocent thing in the world to "put in a word" to stir the compassion of a good judge and to prompt a well-meaning action from another good judge to ease the hardship of a young man from a good background, fallen into unhappy circumstances.
So what is actually wrong with this? What's wrong - and it's a grievous wrong - is that this compassion and this intervention is selective. It is based on privilege, on access, above all on connections - on the old system, expressed in the saying, "It's not what you know but who you know", which plays itself out endlessly across all the private schools, private clubs, private beaches, private hospital beds and sundry other private places in which a disproportionate share of our society's good things is acquired and preserved by all these good people.
Mr Justice Hamilton has done a mighty piece of work in facing this thing head on. He has reminded us of that lost ideal of cherishing all the children of the nation equally. Who will follow his lead ? Who will dare to take this further? Is it possible that we might look back on this affair as a turning point, as the day on which justice began to be done again in Ireland ? Let's hope so. - Yours, etc., Tony Devlin,
Rushbrook, Blanchardstown, Dublin 15.