The University Philosophical Society (the Phil) has publicly apologised for remarks made by a committee member in a speech at the finals of the Trinity Intervarsity debating competition on Saturday night.
The remarks were made by Phil Registrar James Johnston during the reading of the minutes, which are traditionally comedic in nature. In the speech, he made jokes about Caoimhe Meaney, the Chairperson of University College Cork’s Philosophical Society, that were deemed sexist by many in attendance.
Anger among some attendants led to interruptions between the final speeches, with several audience members complaining about the remarks. At the end of the debate, an apology was read out by Johnston.
In a post on Facebook, the Phil condemned the Registrar’s comments, stating: “It was a misuse of the platform given to him, a breach of the competition’s equity policy and was antithetical to the values to which the society aspires.”
The Phil said that “this is an incident we regret deeply. We offer our most sincere apologies to the individual who was wronged”.
The post also said that no other members of the Phil were consulted during the writing of the minutes.
In an email statement to The University Times, Meaney said: “These statements made were attacking my personality, online presence, and debating ability, and were allowed to continue despite calls from the audience for an apology to be issued immediately while this particular speech was ongoing.”
She said that she had left the room to “escape to the bathroom without the crowd seeing how much I had been crying” and that she missed the apology, which, she said, “was apparently about one sentence long”.
In an email statement to The University Times, Johnston said that he apologised “unreservedly” to Meaney and “the wider debating circuit” for his comments. “In my speech I made a number of directed, hurtful and mean-spirited remarks about a debater in the room which, though meant in jest, were not funny and simply nasty”, he said.
Meaney said that the circumstances around the apology “leaves me feeling that they don’t really care about what happened”.
“The apology made on Facebook was published two days after the final, and five hours after I messaged the president of the Phil to express my disappointment and upset that the Phil has remained silent about the whole affair, given that the apology of the registrar was made in a personal aspect”, she said.
The minutes are traditionally read out by either the Registrar of the Phil or the Record Secretary of the College Historical Society (the Hist). This year, the responsibility fell on the Phil’s Registrar.
In September, a debate on feminism in the Middle East was cancelled after a number of complaints were made about it being racially insensitive. In a post on its Facebook page, the Phil said that it had “become increasingly clear to us that the original motion is insensitive to the women that it concerns – those who are directly affected by it”.
The University Times revealed earlier this year that a number of past and present members of the Phil had concerns that the society was not doing enough to encourage gender inclusivity, after an all-male debate drew controversy. During the debate, a member of the audience, Sophie Furlong Tighe, was asked to stand up by Phil council member Pierce O’Meara.
Speaking to The University Times, Furlong Tighe described the event as “super humiliating” and added that “the culture within the Phil which this was allowed to happen in does deeply concern me, as a female competitive debater as well as just a member of the Phil”.
