Post-Decriminlisation Reflections

Senator David Norris

“There’s been a revolution in terms of LGBT rights in Ireland. But I will also say that, at the core, Irish people were always compassionate, decent and tolerant.”

“We started preparing a case against criminalisation in 1974. I was running the legal section of the Irish Gay Rights Movement.

I thought at first we’d persuade one of the people who was being charged under the criminal law to take a constitutional defence. But of course they wouldn’t because the last thing they wanted was any more publicity. They wanted it all to go away. So we built a case around myself.

It was a very lengthy process. First of all we went to the High Court. We had international witnesses from all over the world. Every day it was some star witness, so it was on the front page of every newspaper.

And then we got a judgement. The first part was like a charter of gay rights. The judge said there were a surprisingly large number of gay people in Ireland, that they weren’t child molesters, that they weren’t mentally sick, they weren’t less intelligent. All those kinds of things. And then at the very end he said: ‘Nevertheless, despite all this, because of the Christian and democratic nature of the State, I have to find against the plaintiff’.

Ailbhe Smyth

“It’s very difficult to describe to anybody who wasn’t around at that time just how profoundly invisible we were.”

At the Supreme Court, we got a divided judgement, 3-2. Mr Justice Henchy quite rightly said that since the government had singularly failed to produce any evidence whatsoever, I’d won a walkover. So it was a moral victory. The government went after me for costs, and they were awarded £75,000, which of course I didn’t have. It was more than I’d paid for my house.

So I said, ‘Oh well, forget that, we’ll go off to Europe’. We went to Europe, and we won, but by a margin of only one vote, with the Irish Church voting against us.

Four or five years passed. Taoiseach Albert Reynolds was questioned about it and said it ‘wasn’t a priority’, which was rather odd, because it was a major breach of human rights. Eventually Máire Geoghegan-Quinn came in as Minister for Justice. I had been campaigning behind the scenes, writing personal letters to all the political parties.

Phil Moore was also introduced to Máire Geoghegan-Quinn. She was the mother of a gay son, and she was really marvellous. Her intervention was very significant.

When the legislation was passed, I felt fully Irish for the first time in my life. There’s been a revolution in terms of LGBT rights in Ireland. But I will also say that, at the core, Irish people were always compassionate, decent and tolerant.

In terms of equal rights in Ireland, I think we’re almost there. I think we’ve got to look outward now and raise our concerns at the very many brutal regimes around the world that still persecute, torture and murder gay people. The only thing we have is moral pressure. Direct provision is also a real problem.

Witnessing the equality of young gay people is the reward for the work. I remember that at the first Pride march I was on, there were nine of us. It’s a brave new world, but it’s important to remember that all gay people got was what they were entitled to.”

“I didn’t come out until shortly before decriminalisation, and that was because it was so immensely difficult to say you were gay in Ireland, particularly for a woman. The word ‘lesbian’ was completely unused, people flinched and shied away and went white in the face if it was mentioned.

It’s very difficult to describe to anybody who wasn’t around at that time just how totally, profoundly invisible we were. The criminalisation of homosexuality didn’t apply to lesbians, but at the same time there was a stigma that was even more profound than any law could ever have been for women, and particularly for women who had children. When the fight for decriminalisation started, of course men and women recognised that this would be important for all of us.

Lifting that burden was enormous. It meant so much psychologically and socially. There was an almost immediate lightening of the atmosphere. It affected all of us, it affected our communities; it affected the way in which we thought about ourselves and spoke about ourselves; whether we were visible or not in public.

It was absolutely immediate. But it didn’t mean that you could go round holding hands and kissing your girlfriend; it wasn’t that kind of immediate. But it is that very deep psychological release and freedom, which takes some time to digest, and some time to get used to.

I think Marriage Equality was another huge turning point for Irish society. I think for lesbians and gays, we had already come to the conclusion that we were completely equal, but what happened with the referendum is that Irish society as a whole agreed. Acknowledging that we have just as much a right to marry and have a family as heterosexuals was a very major turn in general Irish consciousness.

I think something that was equally important, which happened at the same time, was the Gender Recognition Act just six weeks later. While none of this has meant that lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people live our lives absolutely without difficulty, both of those things indicated a massive cultural shift. The extent to which LGBT people are othered by our society now is very much less than it was before.”

“When the Norris case was at the High Court in 1977, it was really eerie down there. There were very few journalists, but it was fascinating. I was in the court most of the time, covering it for In Dublin magazine.

The way the media covered it seemed tame and distant. And the strange thing that happened next was the Supreme Court judgement. The Chief Justice Tom O’Higgins delivered a judgement that was not based on any evidence, and the small amount of attention that was paid to that was astonishing.

You really felt in those years that this was not on anyone’s agenda and the Irish government did not know what to do once the European Court had decided criminalisation was in fact in breach of human rights.

It was extraordinary how empty the Dáil chamber was when Máire Geoghegan-Quinn put through the legislation. They didn’t want to talk about it. We were somehow not to be discussed; we were to be kept secret. They were going to change the law because Europe had told them to do so. So a lot of gay people were left underwhelmed and bewildered. It wasn’t as though the police had been arresting people, so the change in the law looked like a technical thing. Things went on very much as before, but Ireland itself didn’t have to live with the shame of having this legislation on the statute books.

Colm Tóibín

“It was extraordinary how empty the Dáil chamber was when Máire Geoghegan-Quinn put through the legislation.”

The experience of being gay in Ireland involved gradual change. Decriminalisation was a milestone, but the other milestone was going to have to be a serious debate in Ireland about the fact that we wanted to be treated as equal citizens. In the strange way that Ireland works, in order to get anything at all, you’ve to get about five small things first.

It’s difficult to pinpoint where the shift occurred, but Ireland is different in one way to other countries in that the change came privately, within families, before it came publicly. People went home at Christmas and said to their mother or their sister, ‘Look, I’m gay’. And the general response was, ‘You’re one of this family. And don’t tell your father until after Christmas’. So gradually, it became totally personal in Ireland before it became political.

For all gay people in Ireland, the Marriage Equality Referendum represents an extraordinary moment of pure personal liberation. With decriminalisation, the change in legislation was the Irish government giving in to European pressure. There was something mean about it; the fact that they had delayed for five years to do it, the fact that they didn’t give it any great debate, the fact that they didn’t say it was something that needed to be done long before.

Decriminalisation was brought about by David Norris and I think the important thing was that David didn’t disappear. With his position in the Senate and his general popularity in the Dáil, by appearing on chat shows, by being seen as a very goodhumoured, decent man, he carried all that burden himself very gracefully. I think he appeared with even more gusto and I think that mattered.

I think that everyone who’s gay knows that the real dangers lie in the teenage years, and that’s something that really needs to be tackled. It’s a lonely old business. It may not be as lonely as it was, but that doesn’t mean that the word ‘gay’ isn’t a term of abuse in certain schools. It’s a mark that never leaves you.”

My involvement in the gay rights movement in Ireland started in the 1970s. I met my first open lesbians in Paris and I thought, ‘I have to discover a better world when I come back to Dublin’.

I got involved right from the beginning, after seeing a poster on a lamp post about a meeting of the Sexual Liberation Movement. There were six of us – three lesbians and three gay men, meeting in Trinity.

Mary Dorcey

“People have said it’s come out of nowhere, but it hasn’t. It’s taken 40 years.”

I spoke at the first ever Women’s Week in UCD in 1974 and I made a passionate speech about gay rights, coming out as a lesbian. From that time, I realised that gay life was the best-kept secret in history, almost.

That speech was headlined across the Irish Times, so my mother, all her friends and the whole neighbourhood knew.

The hardest part for me at the time in retrospect was that my mother was ostracised. All but one of her neighbours just stopped speaking to her. They crossed the road.

I became conscious of how much suffering the secrecy had caused – immense personal suffering. I committed myself then to speaking out about it, wherever I was, wherever I went.

The silence, the level of repression was just incredible. Gay men were criminalised, but at least that made it public knowledge if you like. Lesbians weren’t even mentioned. It was literally unmentionable. It was seen as so disgusting and so appalling that the word lesbian couldn’t be pronounced.

A lot of gay women pretended to be friends and their parents accepted them as that. Never touching in public, never hugging another woman in case someone might guess, never having a photo of your girlfriend up in the house. That was still going on until a few years ago.

Many of us have survived, and many of us have flourished, but just as many, through drink and drugs and suicide and general unhappiness, have not. Because being a gay person meant losing your family and friends, and being completely ostracised.

David Norris did extraordinary work in getting homosexuality decriminalised, but it has to be said that the Women’s Liberation Movement was the biggest influence in changing things for lesbians. I always thought you couldn’t separate those two demands – the rights of women and the rights of lesbians – because in any society where lesbians are refused civil rights, so are women.

It’s absolutely fantastic that we now have equal rights as gays and lesbians and we can marry, and raise and adopt children, and that we have transgender rights as well. People have said it’s come out of nowhere, but it hasn’t. It’s taken 40 years. For a long time, sex that didn’t lead to reproduction was a sin. So if that was the case, nobody could accept homosexuality.

Things have gone a bit quiet now, and I think we’re in the process of transition. A lot of my lesbian friends, both middleaged and younger, are raising children and that’s going to be a massive change.”

When I was in secondary school, it was still illegal to be gay. So much positive change has happened since then, it seems like a bygone era.

Donal Óg Cusack

“So much positive change has happened since then, it seems like a bygone era.”

I think a lot of things have changed for the better, from the marriage referendum to the Taoiseach of Ireland being a gay man, and that not being perceived in any particular way.

The marriage referendum was great, people said it was an overwhelming result, and I think it probably was, but it still amazes me that almost three-quarters of a million people voted against gay marriage. It was 62 per cent to 38 per cent, so when you think about it, if you lined ten people up, four wouldn’t want to give someone the right to marry the person they love. While there’s been great progress, it just reminds me that we need to ensure that nobody gets complacent.

I wouldn’t say that decriminalisation had anything close to the massive impact, joy or special feeling that was around the day of the Marriage Equality Referendum. I remember walking around Cork and there was just a feeling of liberation on the streets. There was so much joy and relief.

When I went public about my sexuality, I genuinely knew it wasn’t going to be a big issue for me. Having said that, I remember getting stick from some people in the terraces. I’m very conscious not to make little of it, but I always felt that for anyone that had an issue with my sexuality, it was more of a reflection on them rather than anything to do with myself. And I firmly believe that.

I definitely had a long period where I thought, ‘It’s just who I am. Why do I have to come out? Why do I have to talk to people about this?’ I went through that phase of just not wanting the hassle. But looking back, I’m very happy that I used the profile I had in that way.

I think when players are open it’s good for the sport because people need role models, but I understand it’s up to everybody, and there’s no right or wrong way. Maybe it’s just how my mind is, but I don’t think your sexuality is an issue. That’s the way I want to live my life.”

Rory O’Neill (aka Panti Bliss)

“You had to reject the real world and enter this illegal, underground one.”

“I guess the thing younger people might not grasp is how difficult it was to find other gays before decriminalisation. There was no Internet or any of that, and because of criminalisation, everything was shaded and hidden.

People ask me, ‘Did the gays get arrested?’ Well, not really. It’s not like the police were sort of sweeping through hairdressers on Saturdays, arresting colourists. It wasn’t like that. But it was in the ether.

Because homosexuality was illegal, there was no protection in law for your working rights. So if somebody at work fired you because you were ‘a fucking queer’, there was nothing you could do about it. It just added to the secrecy.

But part of me loved it in a way. Just to go to a gay club then needed a lot of courage. You had to reject the real world and enter this illegal, underground one. Of course, that was super exciting to me when I was 19.

It’s almost difficult to describe the change in atmosphere around being gay in Ireland over the past 25 years, because it’s so dramatic. But I will say that the Marriage Equality Referendum was much more powerful than I anticipated.

In terms of equality for LGBTs in Ireland, I think minorities always have to agitate a little and make sure that their voices are heard. Because if you don’t, and you sit back, the majority kind of forget that you’re there.

I get satisfaction from looking at young people today, but I also resent them, which is hilarious! I’m like, ‘God, these young whippersnappers. Why aren’t they around to David Norris’ house with bunches of flowers?’ It’s so good that it’s different for them.”