A Liberating Party

As we mark the 40th anniversary of the Dublin Pride Parade and the 30th anniversary of decriminalisation, Tonie Walsh traces the evolution of Ireland’s largest and oldest LGBTQ+ Pride festival.

Credit: Thomas Anthony O’Shea

“Homosexuals Are Revolting”, “Lesbian Love” and “We Are Human Sexuals Too” were some of the standout placards at Dublin’s first LGBTQ+ Pride demo on June 27, 1974. Organised by the newly-formed Sexual Liberation Movement (SLM) and the Union for Sexual Freedoms in Ireland (USFI), the demo consisted of two women and eight men protesting outside the British Embassy in Ballsbridge.

Across the Irish Sea, members of Sappho, Gay Liberation Front and the Campaign for Homosexual Equality were also marching in Britain’s first Pride Parade.

“The embassy was chosen in order to draw attention to the source of the prevailing anti-gay legislation, a hangover from British colonial days,” recalls Senator David Norris, then a member of SLM and an English language lecturer at Trinity College. He would go on in later years to successfully sue the Irish government over the offending laws.

Credit: Don Wood

Also among the group that day was Belfast activist, Jeff Dudgeon (28), who two years earlier was instrumental in setting up the Gay Liberation Society (GLS) in Belfast, Ireland’s first LGBTQ+ campaigning organisation. In similar fashion to Norris, Dudgeon would challenge the UK government on the legality of the Victorian anti-gay legislation, ultimately succeeding at the European Court of Human Rights.

Emboldened by their picket of the embassy and without any form of stewarding or police protection, that brave little group then marched the three kilometre journey into town to picket the Department of Justice at St Stephen’s Green. Surviving photos of the event suggest feigned indifference and bemusement on the part of an Irish public utterly unprepared for such an event.

One of SLM’s co-founders and fierce queer around town, Hugo McManus, was just shy of his 22nd birthday: “We were very innocent, but also quite brazen!”

In subsequent years, Gay Pride Week, as it was then known, was marked by press statements from the Irish Gay Rights Movement in Dublin and Cork and occasional zaps of shopping centres in Dublin by members of the agit-prop radical queer group, Gays Against Repression.

The human and economic resources necessary to mount a full week of quite public Pride activity only became available through the establishment of Dublin’s Hirschfeld Centre in 1979. That year, there was a release of pink balloons and leafleting at St Stephen’s Green, a picnic in Phoenix Park and a pub zap- designed to see how many bars would refuse you service for being gay or lesbian. The following year, I went on my first Pride demo; a fresh-faced 19 year-old, angry and eager to change the world. Some 16 of us, bedecked in pink triangles, wandered in pairs around the city centre, palming shoppers with leaflets about the Stonewall Riots and the need for law change.

With the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement still in its infancy, there were very few publicly out men and women and certainly not enough people to warrant a formal march. Apart from cinema screenings and music gigs, early ’80s Dublin Pride typically involved an afternoon leaflet drop around town and the ubiquitous pub zap, followed by a picnic on Sunday in Merrion Square. Everything would change in 1983. Recurring homophobic violence (tacitly encouraged by the RUC in Northern Ireland), along with the murders of Charles Self and Declan Flynn in Dublin and John Roche in Cork, pushed people’s anger and fear to the limit. It was a time of considerable poverty and ugly, fractious campaigns around criminal justice, bodily integrity, taxation, gendered violence and gay law reform. When Declan Flynn’s killers walked free, it was the catalyst for the largest ever demonstration on the island of Ireland protesting violence against women and gay people. Significantly, it was the first time that radical community groups, left-field political parties and such, rallied in considerable numbers for their LGBTQ+ brothers and sisters.

News reports of the time describe anything between 400 and 800 people. The actual number is irrelevant to all but historians. What is important is the transformative impact of the Fairview Park march on Dublin Pride. It accelerated the desire and need for a parade, although we didn’t even call it that. The ‘Gay Rights Protest March’ on ‘Pink Carnation Day’, June 25, 1983, attracted groups from all over the island, among them the newly-established Galway Gay Collective and Cork Gay Collective.

Credit: Hugo McManus

“We were reclaiming Dublin’s dangerous streets and sending a signal that we mattered...

I’ve always wanted to imagine there were several hundred on that first, proper, Dublin Pride Parade but a recent scan of previously unpublished photographs suggest less than 100 on the actual street. However, there was at least the same number again spectating from the safety of the pavement.

“It was very poorly attended,’ recalls Noel Walsh, one of the National Gay Federation (NGF) organisers. “Many people didn’t see the merit of a parade. There was still a lot of fear about. I was shitting myself when we went down Grafton Street but was elated by the time we got to O’Connell Street.”

Maura Molloy is a former director of Dublin Pride with a lifetime of activism stretching back to 1979. She was central to organising the Fairview Park march and recalls the 1983 parade, her first Irish Pride, with “awe at the resilience of participants” following all the trauma of the Declan Flynn murder trial.

At the GPO that day, Cathal Kerrigan, myself and Ireland’s most public lesbian, Joni Crone, addressed the assembly. People were angry, fearful, resolute, joyous, proud. We were reclaiming Dublin’s dangerous streets and sending a signal that we mattered. If only for one day, we were determined to have our day in the sun; and it was a literally sunny, warm day that befitted the positivity and optimism on view. Joni closed the proceedings with a solemn declaration of liberation and rededicated the GPO as the Gay Person’s Organisation.

The 1984 parade, organised by the National Gay Federation, Dublin Lesbian and Gay Men’s Collective and Liberate Irish Lesbians was led by cheerleaders, Izzy Kamikaze and Ciarán McKinney, with a small increase in numbers and just as much chaos. Arriving at the GPO, we commandeered a reviewing stand set up for the National Children’s Day parade (taking place the following day). The absence of traffic management and police control led a couple of irate motorists to attempt driving through the throng. In the melée, Joan McCarthy of the Cork Lesbian Collective was one of two people bruised and beaten back by angry drivers.

Andrew Flood of the Workers Solidarity Movement remembers his first Pride march from that period “when the numbers had grown to over a hundred but even then a gang of small kids shouted insults and threw stones” as the march made its way downtown.

Emigration, exhaustion and a new horror in our midst all combined to take the parade off the streets from 1986 onwards. People’s energies were needed elsewhere, trying to preempt a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions as AIDS upended our world. The loss of the Hirschfeld Centre in 1987 also impacted on Dublin Pride’s fortunes.

Apart from the picnic, my last notable Pride events of the ‘80s were a condom picket outside the Vatican Embassy during Pride 1987 and a Kiss-In at Leinster House in 1988, both cogent reminders of the pressing concerns of the time; safer sex and decriminalisation.

It was after attending Belfast’s first Pride Parade in 1991 that Izzy Kamikaze and fellow members of ACT UP Dublin, Barry Quirke and Eoin Freeney, determined to reinstate the parade the following year. Dragged up as the ‘Zombie Lesbian Vampire From Hell’, Izzy remembers getting into her queer vampire outfit “with my heart in my mouth; I was afraid nobody would come”. In any event, several hundred exuberant marchers answered the call, setting off for the first time from Parnell Square, which has now become the traditional start point of the parade.

Buoyed up by this success and with decriminalisation imminent, almost a thousand people participated in the 1993 parade. It was the first parade to include a float and sound system, organised by another HIV/AIDS activist, Karl Hayden. With savage good timing, the Dáil repealed all the old British anti-gay legislation two days before the parade. As we made our way down Dame Street, people shouted: “What did we want? Law Reform! When did we get it? Yesterday!”

Credit: Kieran Rose

After the speechifying on the steps of the old Central Bank, Izzy took a bolt cutters and proceeded to release street performer, Thom McGinty, aka The Diceman, from his ball and chain of oppression. Dressed as a prisoner and free at last, Thom proceeded to strip down to his leather jockstrap and even whipped that off.

Post-decriminalisation, it became much easier to access statutory funding. LGBTQ+ non-governmental services flourished, as did so many cultural and social events. The late ‘90s brought an increasing amount of anti-discrimination and equality measures. Conversations around diversity and social inclusion also took root in earnest. After considerable soul-searching, the Dublin Pride parade of 1999 featured significant transgender participation.

Throughout the early decades of the new millennium, Dublin Pride’s outreach extended to groups as diverse as Pavee Point LGBT Travellers, the Asexual Society and immigrants affected by Direct Provision. With Dublin City Council funding and corporate sponsorship more assured, the festival has been able to scale up its ambition, hosting a day-long, family-centric party at Merrion Square but also paying this year to shut down Luas for a few hours as the parade crosses the the city. And why not, you may well ask? It’s the single biggest socio-cultural event on the island, after Dublin’s St Patrick’s Day parade.

Traversing half a century, the tone and scale of Dublin Pride has inevitably evolved to suit the prevailing mood and concerns of each successive generation. Right now, some of those concerns include the contested involvement of the corporate sector and the participation of the Garda and Defence Forces. However we negotiate their participation, it’s also good to remember that Pride does not have to be a binary choice between protest and party.

In spite of all we’ve achieved, we live in an imperfect world. Women and men continue to be victimised by homophobia and transphobia. It’s hard to imagine in 2023 but fear, self-loathing and isolation remain all too real for some, even in our larger urban centres with brilliant support systems and embedded social structures.

For the lucky among us, Pride offers a moment’s reflection that we can share with the rest of the city. An exquisite, joyous opportunity for young and old alike to savour the distance we’ve come, to remember our brothers and sisters who never made it this far, and to remind ourselves of the unfinished revolution that brought us out onto the streets in the first place.