Abstract
How did Ireland go from a country in which male same-sex sex was illegal until 1993 to becoming the first country in the world to legalise gay marriage via a constitutional referendum? This question has occupied commentators and historians alike since that momentous vote in 2015, and Patrick McDonagh provides a nuanced and detailed answer in his well-researched and engaging book.
Of course, Ireland is the central theatre of analysis in this study, but McDonagh’s is a thoroughly European book. Not only was it written at the European University Institute in Florence, originally as McDonagh’s doctoral thesis, but the influence of Europe and its evolving institutions reverberate throughout this book. Its date range reflects this, beginning in 1973 when the Republic of Ireland joined the European Economic Community, and ending 20 years later when the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Bill was passed, decriminalising sex between men and introducing an equal age of consent for heterosexuals and homosexuals. This change in the law, a major historical development which Gay and Lesbian Activism in the Republic of Ireland seeks to explain, occurred in part because of pressure from Europe. In 1988, the European Court of Human Rights had agreed with Irish complainant David Norris in his assertion that Ireland’s criminalisation of sex between men violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (namely the right to respect for family and private life). A change in Irish Law was required, Strasbourg had decided.
As McDonagh demonstrates, it was not simply the top–down supranational level at which European influences impacted Irish queer history. Solidarity campaigns were active across the continent. Belgian gay organisations were lobbying the Irish embassy in Brussels to decriminalise male same-sex sex from at least 1975, 5 years before the Dutch parliament formally condemned the Irish state and called on them to change the laws around homosexuality (pp. 35, 105). The International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) played an important part in ensuring that attention continued to be paid to Ireland, thanks in part to transnational Irish activists. Cathal Kerrigan who had been born in Ireland but moved to Amsterdam in the early 1990s, for example, was integral in persuading ILGA to ‘send a delegation to the Irish Embassy’ in Brussels to lobby for the decriminalisation of male homosexual sex during its regional conference there in December 1992 (p. 150). As similarly embattled queer activists in the United Kingdom were discovering, European networks (both formal and informal) were invaluable to a movement aimed at changing anti-gay legislation.
This balance between the formal and the informal is key to McDonagh’s analysis. He is interested not only in how Irish laws changed dramatically over the course of 20 years – laying the groundwork for the momentous change which occurred in May 2015 when Ireland ‘became the first country in the world to legalise same-sex marriage by popular vote’ (p. 1). Alongside this, McDonagh seeks to explain the social and cultural changes which accompanied and at times prompted such changes. To do this, he draws on a wide variety of source material from political and personal papers to oral history interviews. Throughout, McDonagh is attentive to media sources, particularly television programmes, news reports and documentaries. As a result, the reader is furnished with a well-rounded view of the changing political and cultural consensus on gay rights. That political consensus moved from a reluctance to make concessions to decriminalisation, via a remarkable moment in which Gay Health Action were thanked in Seanad Éireann for their public health work on AIDS, despite homosexual acts between men still being illegal in Ireland.
Documenting the changing cultural attitudes towards homosexuality is one of the major achievements of this book. The coverage of the 2015 referendum often lapsed into simplistic narratives which understood late twentieth-century Ireland as being defined by an all-encompassing homophobia. To be sure, anti-gay attitudes were alive and well in Ireland during this period, as McDonagh documents. But he offers a more nuanced picture of Irish cultural attitudes towards homosexuality. When the state broadcaster RTÉ hosted an interview with lesbian activist Joni Crone in February 1980, reactions were more mixed than one might expect. Predictably, the reactionary League of Decency ‘viewed Crone’s interview as “the latest RTÉ attack on Catholic morality”’, but others responded more positively. One caller to the programme thought that Crone ‘came across as a very nice person and will surely help many people of both sexes’ (p. 51).
McDonagh joins the growing cannon of queer historians who are careful to extend their attention beyond capital cities. If Matt Cook and Alison Oram have exemplified the ‘queer beyond London’ approach, then McDonagh’s book is a fine example of a queer history beyond Dublin, continuing along the trail which Orla Egan blazed with Queer Republic of Cork. Chapter 3 of Gay and Lesbian Activism in the Republic of Ireland is dedicated to ‘provincial activism’ in Cork and Galway. By decentring Dublin and casting historical attention elsewhere, alternative chronologies, flash points and case studies emerge, a fact which activists on the ground in these locales were only too aware of themselves. Tom McClean of the National Gay Federation, for example, suggested that the first National Gay Conference held in Cork in 1981 ‘will, I feel, become to the gay rights movement in Ireland what Stonewall is to the gay liberation movement worldwide’ (p. 73). The importance which provincial activism played within the Irish gay and lesbian movement is reflected in the fact that McDonagh does not silo these groups. Particular attention is paid to them in Chapter 3, but queer experiences beyond Dublin (mostly from Cork and Galway) are attended to throughout the book.
This wide-reaching book achieves its goal of offering ‘a story of how Irish gay and lesbian individuals refused to continue to accept the status quo with regard to homo sexuality’ (p. 4). More than this, it explains how these activists provided public health campaigning during the AIDS epidemic when the Irish government was silent on the subject, created social and organisational hubs for lesbians and gay men in cities across Ireland, founded much needed advice and information lines such as the Irish Gay Rights Movement’s Tel-A-Friend service founded in 1974 (with its own dedicated Lesbian Line) or Gay Information Cork founded 11 years later. It also points to the development of a growing queer ‘market’ whose pink pounds were increasingly attractive to businesses and the state alike. Visibility is perhaps the major theme of the book, and a concluding chapter drawing the book’s various thematic analyses together would have been welcome. Even without such a chapter, Gay and Lesbian Activism in the Republic of Ireland is sure to become the go-to volume for anyone interested in the diverse and fast-paced history of queer rights in Ireland.