The Burkean –
Another Irish institution was put on notice this month with allegations of sexual impropriety emerging, this time in the swank environs of Trinity College debating.
Centring on the twin TCD debating societies (The Hist and The Phil), the scandal aired long pent up tensions over advances made on younger female members by older males and the power dynamics at play.
Exposed by the campus rag University Times, the revelations come as very little shock to anyone with an ear to the ground of GMB decorum. Made ironic by the ostensibly anti-sexist outlook adopted by both groupings, the allegations (and they are just allegations whatever one reads into them) come on the back of a slow boiling putsch within the debating scene by the campus left under the guise of anti-racist initiatives.
The general gist is that certain senior male members of the debating circuit were using their positions of authority to create effective harems out of junior female members with many women feeling creeped out at the repeated hamfisted advances and subsequent vendettas held.
With the two societies ritualistically tarnished as misogynistic, the mini-scandal calls into question the very viability of the co-mingling of the genders on campus in such a sexually loose environment.
While existing on arguably the most effete campus in the country, the debating scene quietly facilitates the more libidinal impulses of Ireland’s most progressive men.
Sufficeth to say some of the spicier stories around Irish colleges are too steamy for print with the chronic bonking often earning the scorn of us serial monogamists here at The Burkean.
For a reactionary publication which calls Trinners its alma matter, the hullaballoo is akin to Manna from Heaven, watching the implosion of an institutional pontoon bridge of our elites over an issue as mundane as the managing of sexual relations between members.
In recent years, we have seen up-and-coming stars get their wings clipped in various low level metoo scandals, even once for the mild sexual peccadillo of flirting poorly with a female activist on Tinder.
If our future elites cannot regulate the basic interaction between men and women, how do we expect them to govern the country in 20 years hence. A relative storm in a teacup such as the sexual goings on of Trinity debating society is a litmus test to what our ruling elite will look like in 20/30 years.
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