Pictured: GCN editor, Brian Finnegan. photo: Monika Karaliunaite

In a major victory for the Irish LGBT (lesbian gay bisexual transgender) equal rights movement, on April 14, the Convention on the Constitution voted overwhelmingly that the Irish government should legislate for gay marriage.

This landmark decision, combined with the growing visibility of gay people in Ireland, might lead the straight majority to believe that life for gays here has become plain sailing. The facts do not bear this out.
A week before the Convention on the Constitution cast its historic vote, Buzz O’Neill, a well-known event manager based in Dublin, was the victim of a serious homophobic assault outside The George, a gay bar on Dublin’s South George’s St.
“I went to head home at around 1.15am,” recalls O’Neill. “A bunch of guys in the taxi pulled up at the lights started shouting homophobic abuse at me. I responded because I wasn’t taking it. One of them spat at me from the car. Another got out and smacked me to the ground. Thankfully the bouncer at The George saw what was happening. He ran down and stopped it from going any further. He tried to detain the guy who attacked me, but he managed to get away.”
O’Neill is determined to pursue justice as far as he can, and will press charges if the attacker is found.
“The reaction the day after from friends and family and the general public, was one of shock that this kind of attack is still happening,” he says. “The reality is homophobic assaults are still going on – every day, all around the country.
“Since it happened, huge numbers of gay people have contacted me – people I’ve never met before – saying, ‘The same thing happened to me’. It’s massively under-reported.”
Anecdotal evidence that there are high levels of homophobic abuse and physical assaults in Ireland is corroborated by a readership survey carried out by Gay Community News (GCN) last February.
In this survey, 90.3% of respondents (780 people) said they had been verbally harassed in the past 12 months because they identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. 10.4% of respondents said that they had experienced physical violence.
“On one level,” Brian Finnegan, editor of GCN proffers, “compared to places like Uganda, for instance, or many African and Middle Eastern countries, we live in this bubble of acceptance in Ireland, where there are major steps being made towards gay marriage. But on the other hand, you’ve got non-acceptance. Many feel it’s permissible to be abusive to gay people. Because, if 91 per cent of respondents say they’ve been verbally abused, there’s obviously a huge sense of that being permissible in wider society.”
Both Finnegan and O’Neill see a link between homophobic abuse and the bigotry around gay marriage.
“The anti-gay marriage groups are responsible,” O’Neill charges. “They preach this rhetoric – that we’re ‘less than’, that we’re ‘not the same as’. Well, that kind of rhetoric isn’t just anti-gay marriage, it’s anti-gay. And it gives a mandate to the kind of people who attacked me. What those groups are preaching is hate rhetoric. They have to take responsibility for the message they’re preaching.
“I know we need free speech in a democracy,” he adds, “but it has to be fair. The stuff these bigots come out with… They quote unfounded American surveys, and they get away with talking an awful lot of crap that middle Ireland takes at face value. We need to get our side of it out there.”
“It’s interesting to look at what happened in France,” adds Finnegan. “In the lead-up to the French parliament voting on gay marriage a couple of weeks ago, there was a massive rise in vicious homophobic attacks. And historically – particularly in Dublin, because that’s where people are more easily identifiable as gay because they’re coming out of clubs like The George and The Dragon – you see spikes in homophobic attacks when there’s a spike in anti-gay rhetoric. This includes statements made by popes and others in the Catholic Church – and indeed other churches – such as the use of the term ‘intrinsically disordered’ to describe gay people, or the suggestion that gay adoption is tantamount to child abuse.
“These are huge global organisations, and essentially what they’re doing – underneath all of their talk about God’s idea of marriage – is giving permission to hate. They’re saying: gay people have chosen their lifestyles, and they are not as good as us. Anyone who is violently opposed to gay people can see that as a kind of permission.
“When that rhetoric is out there, and arguments about gay people not being good enough parents, or that gay people are damaging to children in some way – it gives an underlying sense of permission for people to be abusive.”
Both Finnegan and O’Neill identify schools as the real crucibles for change in this country.
“Homophobic attacks are not only about the corner of George’s Street on a drunken night,” Finnegan maintains. “Homophobic attacks are about what happens to children in schoolyards. And it’s not only about the physical, it’s about the verbal as well. The teenagers who do the bullying go home and see the news, and hear their parents talking about gay marriage, and saying, ‘I don’t think that gay people should be allowed to get married.’”
“When homophobic bullying is not being stopped in the schools,” adds O’Neill, “we’re in big trouble. And when teachers can’t be openly gay in their job in 2013 – that’s a disgrace.”
“Where’s the place that you start to change society?” concludes Finnegan. “I think beyond gay marriage, the next big fight is education. The majority of our schools are run by the Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church will heavily resist proper education around homosexuality.”

Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Helpline: 1890 929 539. Outhouse Dublin, the LGBT community centre on Capel St., run a weekly confidential police service. For info, call +353 (0)1 873 4999.