Newsgroups: soc.motss From: rjwill6@snfc430.PacBell.COM (Roderic J. Williams) Subject: (The Guardian) "Shamrock Pink" [LONG] Date: Thu, 10 Feb 1994 13:48:43 -0800 (PST) X-Received: by usenet.pa.dec.com; id AA03417; Thu, 10 Feb 94 17:28:56 -0800 X-Received: from ns.PacBell.COM by inet-gw-1.pa.dec.com (5.65/13Jan94) id AA17934; Thu, 10 Feb 94 13:49:09 -0800 X-Received: from sleuth00.snfc430.PacBell.COM (sfsunprg03.snfc430.PacBell.COM) by ns.PacBell.COM (4.1/PacBell-02/03/94) id AA07625; Thu, 10 Feb 94 13:48:18 PST X-Received: from sfsunprg06.dbas_north by sleuth00.snfc430.PacBell.COM (4.1/SMI-4.1.3) id AA11284; Thu, 10 Feb 94 13:47:24 PST X-To: soc.motss.usenet (soc.motss) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL20] X-Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII X-Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Content-Length: 8910 From Tuesday's (2/8/94) Guardian (the British one), reproduced without permission... ------------------------------------------------ The Guardian February 8, 1994 SHAMROCK PINK Homophobic Ireland? The Irish have a lot to teach straight Britain as parliament prepares to vote on the age of consent. Alexandra Duval Smith on a nation which no longer fears its gay citizens by ALEXANDRA DUVAL SMITH "WHAT do we want? Equality! When did we get it? Yesterday." That victory cry echoed through the streets of Dublin on June 26 last year as 700 people on the city's Lesbian and Gay Pride march celebrated the legalisation of homosexuality and a common age of consent of 17. The march to change had been a long one. It dated back to 1988 when David Norris, a Trinity College lecturer, won a judgment at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg against the Irish ban on homosexual sex. But Strasbourg's ruling that it was a breach of human rights for homosexuality to be illegal did not compel the Irish government to introduce reform to the extent that it eventually did. Not only was a common age of consent introduced without the issue going to a vote in the Dail, but no exception was allowed for the armed forces or merchant navy; and sexual orientation was incorporated in the Unfair Dismissals Act. Three years earlier, a new law, the Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act, had been drawn up. Only four other countries in the world, none of them in Europe, have similar laws to protect homosexuals from harassment and attacks. Twenty-one-year-old Junior Larkin felt the tide of change most acutely when, just before last Christmas, he went to Holyhead for a day with members of the Dublin Youth Group - a social organisation for gays and lesbians under 25, which has doubled in size to 100 members since decriminalisation. "We got off the ferry in Britain and it suddenly dawned on me that we were illegal again. The girls and boys holding hands and showing affection in public were committing an offence - most were under 21, and even those that weren't could have been Community News, a monthly gay rights publication. "It's quite different here now. You see same sex couples holding hands in Grafton Street, right in the centre of Dublin. People do stop and stare but it's with curiosity, not malice," he says. In common with most western countries, Irish law does not contain the offence of gross indecency - under which British gay men are prosecuted for consenting sex, even in private. In Britain, prosecutions will continue to be brought under this law, whether British MPs vote for a gay age of consent of 16 or 18 when the issue comes to Parliament. In Ireland, a desire to improve legislation inherited from Britain after independence has helped fuel the impetus for change. The case that David Norris took to Strasbourg with Mary Robinson, now president of Ireland, as his barrister, challenged a British ban dating from 1855 which was incorporated in Irish law in 1922 and never amended. "After we won our case in Strasbourg, the Irish parliament could have turned to Britain for a model of legislation. But there is a view here that we want to dump botched British reforms of pernicious laws. We want to move away from this thing in the British psyche which seems to need to discriminate. That isn't true of us. Neither do we have the temerity to imply, as the British do with their higher age of consent for gay sex, that our men are the most sexually immature in Europe," says Norris, who is now a senator. Nevertheless, Ireland is hardly the home of legal laissez-faire. It has recent memories of bans on books and contraception, and the X-case of the 14-year-old girl who was prevented from travelling to Britain for an abortion. A referendum on divorce is scheduled to be held in November, but few expect the population to fly in the face of Roman Catholic teaching when they go to the ballot box. On the homosexual issue, however, the Roman Catholic church has refrained from being obstructive, says Chris Robson of Glen - the Gay and Lesbian Equality Network - which leads the campaign for an equal criminal law in Ireland. "We talked and wrote to all the churches, asking them for no more than neutrality on the issue. They took the point. In Ireland, the churches have given up dogmatism. They see that people have changed since the pill; since it became possible for people to see sex as more than procreative," he says. According to Robson, the most energetic campaign against law reform has come from a US-backed fundamentalist group, Family Solidarity, which also fights abortion. The Roman Catholic church's public neutrality on the issue has not affected its own gay priests. According to one rural priest who regularly visits Dublin to take advantage of its gay scene and who asked to remain anonymous, "We are still all in the closet and expect it to stay that way. We are answerable to the Vatican, after all. In a way, because most Roman Catholics treat the doctrine as advisory rather than dogmatic, they can live with it. Italy, for example, is a good Catholic country with a common age of consent of 16." Joan Rippingale, the protestant mother of a 23-year-old gay man, is a counsellor for Parents' Enquiry, a support group for the mothers and fathers of Irish lesbians and gay men. "I am in my fifties and had a strict, puritanical background in which homosexuality was never mentioned. There is still a lot of that in Northern Ireland, with the Rev Ian Paisley's 'Save Ulster from Sodomy' campaign. But I don't think that the Roman Catholics in Ireland who ring me are really struggling with any religious conflict over their child's homosexuality. However, they used to be very worried about the illegality of the thing." Because of the Unionists' hard line on homosexuality and the danger that they would scupper any move to lower the age of consent in Britain from 21, gay campaigners in London have asked politicians to exclude Northern Ireland from Westminster's impending vote on the subject. One of the greatest contrasts remains between the cities - Dublin and Cork - and rural Ireland. In Dublin, the pink punt is at work in the pockets of lesbians and gays in the arts, business and media worlds. There are night-clubs where the unusually cohesive lesbian and gay communities dance together; a newly-refurbished pub in the centre called the George; there are two saunas, and one more on the way; the gay and lesbian Hirschfeld Centre i n Temple Bar; a monthly newspaper; and gay societies at University College and Trinity College. Apart from one lesbian and gay restaurant in Cork and a few gay-friendly B&Bs, rural Ireland offers little. A gay journalist at RTE, who asked to remain anonymous, says: "I am 'out' at work and things have certainly got more relaxed in Dublin since the law changed. But when I go home to the countryside, all that is known about me is that I am a bachelor. Since I am in my forties, they may make assumptions about my sexuality but nothing will ever be said." Even in Dublin, where people who are openly gay are beginning to come to the fore - the novelist Emma Donoghue and the lesbian pop group Zrazy among them - some classic problems remain, including assaults in cruising areas and discrimination. "I am considered a pretty good lecturer," says Norris, "but I have never been promoted. They used to say I couldn't possibly be ambitious if I was devoting so much time to the gay cause. If I had been on the golf course, they would never have said such a thing." By and large, however, Ireland is riding on a tide of reform that is palpable. Arthur Leahy, who helps run the Other Place, a Cork restaurant with a large gay clientele, says there is an air of change sweeping through Irish society: "Identity, sexuality and security are hard to quantify but people are proud to see Ireland leading the way. They feel stronger because decriminalisation is a statement of intent in a bigger way than just in the rule of the law." Chris Robson says health education had become considerably easier. "There used to be funding but it didn't last long - one scheme in Cork was helped to the tune of pounds 700 - a subsidy for printing leaflets - but that was withdrawn when the authorities received legal advice that they were supporting an illegal activity. That can't happen anymore." Paul Jordan, auditor of University College Dublin's gay and lesbian group said: "We spent years playing charades with the authorities - putting up condom machines only to see them taken down the next day. Now the college installs them and takes the profits. We are pleased though that for our Pride Week this year, we have managed to push Guinness to sponsor us to the tune of a keg and half."