Just a handful of Irish politicians could be described as thoroughly likeable. Fewer still are regarded with widespread affection and respect. And how many have been truly
instrumental in creating a better, fairer, more equal Ireland? Well, Senator David Norris is all three.
Before meeting him, I was inundated with requests to send greetings and asked to say “thank you” to him for what he has contributed to Irish society. During our interview, the senator was stopped more than once by well-wishers.
An enormously popular man, David Norris was born in what was then the Belgian Congo. His father, John, was chief engineer for Lever Brothers, and his mother, Aida Fitzpatrick, collected wild animals. Educated at Trinity College in Dublin, Norris excelled in academia. He went on to lecturte and tutor in the English department. He is a highly regarded Joyce scholar, and is the founder of The James Joyce Centre in Dublin.
He was first elected to the Seanad in 1987 and has retained his seat ever since. His passions range from human rights to architectural preservation. He is a man of deep Christian faith; is erudite on a huge number of topics; has an actor’s gift for accents; and unlike many politicians, is forthright in his opinions.
Norris is, of course, best known for the activist work that lead to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Ireland in 1993. Since then, the senator has tirelessly promoted LGBT rights; without his pioneering efforts, it is impossible to imagine that same sex marriage would be legal in Ireland.
Anne Sexton: Does the referendum feel like the culmination of decades of struggle for you?
David Norris: Yes, in a way. The tough battles were the early ones, when everyone was against us. I spoke to RTÉ in the ’70s and suggested they put a gay character in Glenroe and they had paroxysms of laughter. The idea of a gay character in an Irish soap was just an anathema: it was seen as ridiculous and terribly funny.
How did it feel to be at the receiving end of that prejudice?
Irish people were always decent, compassionate and tolerant. I’ve always believed that. They didn’t really support the law that criminalised homosexuality. But social attitudes were awkward. That was because there was a tremendous veil of silence over the whole subject. Nowadays you wouldn’t believe it, but the word ‘homosexual’ was unspeakable, literally unspeakable. If you said it, conversation would stop. Bang! Silence. It wasn’t mentioned in the newspapers, wasn’t mentioned on radio, on television. There was complete and absolute silence.
How did the media report on the consitutional case you took?
That’s the nub of it. This great silence was pre-the court case and it was as a result of the Church. This church law transposed homosexuality for the first time into criminal law when Henry VIII grabbed the monasteries. He took over the ecclesiastical courts and willy-nilly this matter became a matter for the criminal courts. The way in which it was described in church courts was as ‘that high crime so horrible it must not be mentioned among Christians'.
So it was, literally, the love that dare not speak its name?
It dare not speak its name. You’d get a severe slap! That’s why, for example, in EM Forster’s novel [Maurice] that was published posthumously, the character Maurice explains to his doctor that he thinks he is an ‘unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort'. That was the only formulation he had to describe homosexuality. It is a different world we are living in.
It’s rather odd to think that our laws against homosexuality went back to Henry VIII.
Oh, they go further back than that. They go back to the Romans, although they practised homosexuality quite widely. Justinian banned homosexuality and instituted legal penalties for it. As I explained to the court when they asked me about this, Justinian was quite justified in that period, because he was advised by his soothsayers that there was a direct causal relationship and correlation between acts of buggery and earthquakes.
Christian fundamentalists in America believe much the same thing. Recently, rightwing conservatives blamed California’s drought on God’s wrath because of gay rights.
Really? (Laughs) Fundamental Christians believe all kinds of absurd and completely contradictory things, and there is no logic in what they say, no understanding of the world in which we live, and absolutely no acceptance of the basic tenets of science. How can you deal with that? There is no arguing.
They often don’t seem particularly Christian either.
They are not at all Christian. Jesus Christ never once mentioned homosexuality, which tells you how high it was in his priorities. But coming back to the other thing – you’re quite right to point out. ‘What about the legal case?’ That was one of the points of the court case – to blow the veil of silence away. Mary Robinson handled the technical legal aspects. I went to New York and dug up some legal precedents and so on. She did all the fine legal work.
It must have been a dramatic case...
I decided it was to be theatre. I wanted to showcase international witnesses. So we got people like Professor John Spiegel, who was the president of the American Psychiatric Association at the time when they removed homosexuality from classification as an illness. We had Professor DJ West, Regis Professor of Psychiatry, I think in Cambridge. We had Rose Robertson who was the founder of Parents’ Enquiry, a group for the parents of gay kids. We had Dr Joseph O’Leary, a very brilliant theologian but one who took an independent line in these matters. We had Father Michéal McGreal, the Jesuit. He appeared not as a Jesuit, but as a sociologist. So day, after day, after day there was a headline in all the newspapers about the evidence that these people were giving in the flesh. That really started people talking.
You brought out the big guns.
We did. Then the judgement by – I can’t remember his name – Herbie something or other, a nice man. He was the only Protestant on the High Court: they fished him out so it wouldn’t look like it was a Catholic ruling. He gave what appeared to be a charter of gay rights – he said there were a surprising number of gay people in the country; that they weren’t mentally deficient; that they weren’t child molesters. It was like a charter of gay rights until he came to the end, when he said, nevertheless despite all this, given the Christian and democratic nature of the State, I have to find for the State. That was a bit of a stinker. I was caught by RTÉ outside and I said, ‘Well, that’s his opinion, double or quits – we’ll appeal to the Supreme Court'.
Which you duly did...
We went to the Supreme Court which was a really interesting exercise because the Chief Justice Tom O’Higgins misdirected himself in law. In the Supreme Court all you are allowed to adjudicate on is the facts that are disclosed in the first case and legal points arising therefrom. But he went off on a tremendous wander about the importance of marriage and gay people being a source of disease and that there were a lot of people who were kind of on the margins and the criminal law could push them over. It was all absolute rubbish unconnected with the case. Two gobshites of judges signed his judgement but didn’t add any explanation. Two dissented. They were very good – McCarthy and Henchy.
Two justices signed off and two dissented?
Yes. Henchy made the point that of course I had won, because the government had singularly failed to introduce any evidence of any kind or to discredit my evidence. We lost. However, it was an honourable loss with two good dissenting judges. Then we set off to Europe. They found that there had been a gross abuse of my human rights. But they said that the request to the Irish government to change the law was sufficient amendment. It was very much an establishment thing. I wasn’t allowed to open my mouth. It was all the lawyers talking to each other. You are very graciously allowed to sit in the room as long as you keep your mouth shut. It’s not a terribly democratic process. But we won – by one vote.
You argued it was a privacy issue. That’s how Roe vs Wade [the case which legalised abortion] passed in the States. Was that part of your inspiration?
No, we were just looking around for something to hang it on. Initially in the gay groups that I was involved in founding, we had a legal section which defended people who got into trouble with the police. They were usually respectable, professional people ashamed to identify themselves as gay. They went trawling around Phoenix Park and the Quays. They were easy prey for the police. Our original idea was to get one of them to enter a constitutional defence but the last thing people like that wanted was publicity. They didn’t want their family and friends to know. So we eventually decided to build a case around my experience.
Was there a particular trigger?
I had been at lunch one day with my aunt in Switzers restaurant and collapsed. They thought it was a heart attack. When I got to Baggot Street Hospital I was given all the tests. They said my heart was absolutely sound – it was a serious panic attack as the result of stress. They sent me off to a psychiatrist, and the minute I mentioned I was gay, he said it was having an effect on my mental health because of the criminal law in the country. He said, ‘I advise you to go and live in the south of France’. That just made me more and more angry. My father was English. My mother is from a very old Gaelic Irish family that goes back to the period before Christ in this country. We survived the Christians, we survived the Danes, we survived the Normans, we survived the Cromwellians and I was buggered if I was going to be put out of my own country simply for being a fairy.
Was being the public face of the court case stressful?
Some people were antagonised. They would have been a minority. I thought they were mad anyway. I used to get a lot of hate mail, which specified what they’d like to do to me. You always knew when you were getting a crank – 17 pages of ruled paper in green biro underlined in red with misquotations from the bible.
One said I was a dirty fucking perv and all this sort of stuff and he’d like to come around and stick a submachine gun up my arse and pull the trigger. Then he said, ‘But I suppose you’d fucking enjoy that too!’
What about the mothers of Ireland?
A foul-mouthed woman rang me up and used every conceivable form of filth and then said, in a very po-faced voice, ‘And what sort of example are you for my two poor children?’ And I thought, ‘With a foul-mouthed old bitch of a mother like you, they don’t need any example'. I didn’t take it too seriously. I knew we were right.
In terms of stress, the Presidential campaign must have been even worse that the court cases!
It was the filthiest campaign that has ever been. It was open season — anybody, any newspaper, any broadcaster, could manufacture any kind of lie and publish it. I was bewildered. Day after day after day, there were new lies. It was utterly shocking. The others got one belt each — I got it every single day right from the beginning. A family in Mayo of born- again revivalist Christians established a website that was supposed to be my presidential campaign website and used it to shower abuse and vulgarity on me.
What was the worst of the abuse?
Anything you could think of was said about me in the media: I was an alcoholic, I was a cocaine addict, I was blind; I had seduced students in Trinity — utter lies and garbage. I was a pension and social welfare cheat — I had actually given a pension back that I contributed to the State because of the mess the country was in. I had abused the Senate to get passports for lovers. They printed a photograph of myself and my ‘lover’ and said I had got his passport for him and gloated about it, and that I had done nothing for any other asylum seekers. It was an utter, absolute black and white lie. The person I got the passport for, I had met three times. He wasn’t a friend – I didn’t know him. And far from not taking an interest in asylum seekers, I had 182 files from different cases I had been involved in. They didn’t care. They didn’t do research, they thought, ‘Oh we have this story, let’s print it and see him deny it'.
What about suing?
I have sued them. I have won a series of actions.
I didn’t realise that.
Well, you didn’t realise because they cough up the money, but they put the apology on page 32 and it is the size of a fingernail. I’m waiting for the last three to be resolved. Look at the way RTÉ paid off John Waters. I am four and half years into a libel action with them because they allowed Helen Lucy Burke to say I advocated parents having sex with their own children. They didn’t cough up over that, but they paid out €85,000 in a couple of days after Panti Bliss' comments on the Brendan O'Connor Show.
Some of what was written about you was so ridiculous that many people simply did not believe it. But there may have been some who did.
It causes an atmosphere of doubt – a cloud over your head. A lot of it was purely homophobic.
Would you consider running for the Presidency again?
No! I’d be too old and the viciousness of the last campaign triggered liver cancer. They treated the cancer for a year, and then they operated. I said to the surgeon, I felt that going in there I had a 30 per cent chance of coming out alive, and he said, ‘If that'. Then I had a liver transplant, which is another very big operation. That has slowed me down a bit. People were well-disposed but allowed the media to mislead them.
Why do you think we’ve gone from that in 2011 to the result of the referendum in 2015?
2015 was the people. The Iona Institute is a self- appointed body and has no proper foundation. In England they would not be allowed to call themselves an institute – you have to have some kind of professional background; you have to produce research. Not only do they not produce research, they have consistently been condemned by the people who create research for misquoting their results. They are a tiny, unelected, unaccountable group of fundamentalist Roman Catholics.
It must have been very difficult reading lies about yourself.
It was very aggravating. But remember, I have to put up with Ronan Mullen in the Senate and Jim Walsh and Feargal Quinn. Feargal is a very charming man but he has signed all these really unspeakable amendments Mullen and Walsh put down that would have created an apartheid society, allowing people to refuse services and goods to people if they felt they were homosexual.
Asher’s Bakery in Northern Ireland were found guilty of discrimination...
I wouldn’t have taken that case. I wouldn’t have asked them to make the cake. When somebody is so fundamentally anti-gay how do you know they wouldn’t put in a very powerful laxative in the cake? Or a hairdresser – how do you know they wouldn’t burn the skull off you?
You introduced one of the first civil partnership bills.
I picked marriage apart and deconstructed it to see what were the positive advantages to individuals, and I reassembled it in a package, calling it civil partnership. I put down the first civil or domestic partnership bill in 2003 I think [It was 2004 – Ed]. We had a debate on that and it was left on the order paper. That led to the political parties’ proposals and eventually to the one that went through, the Fianna Fail one. That was very defective because for example, it didn’t treat with children at all or with adoption. Gay people could always adopt, but they could only adopt singly. That meant if the adoptive parent died the child was left in limbo, a stranger to the surviving, nurturing parent. The home was described as the ‘family home’ for heterosexual people, whether they were married or living together – whereas for gay people it was described as the ‘shared home'. You share a home with a dog or a parrot. That’s why I called it the ‘dog’s licence'. I said, ‘This isn’t a proper legislation about human relationships, it’s a dog’s licence'.
So, you were unhappy with it!
It is the responsibility of an Independent to push the government in a certain direction. Yes, the civil partnership bill was a move in the right direction. However, it was extremely defective. To greet it with a chorus of acclamation was mad. I came out strongly against it. I said to Dermot Ahern he didn’t have the balls of a titmouse!
If the civil partnership bill had been closer to civil marriage would we gotten to marriage equality as quickly?
It wouldn’t have been as easy. A lot of people said, ‘What’s the difference? Why aren’t you happy with that?’ Would married people be satisfied with it if we were supposed to be equal? Now we’re left with the problem of the civil and human rights of gay people all over the world. In the majority of the planet it is highly dangerous to be gay.
What are you working on at the moment?
I’m going to put forward a motion about the city of Dublin. I’ve been working with John Halligan. I’ve met some of the people in the Right To Die campaign. He will introduce the Bill when it’s finished in the Dáil. I am very pro-life. I enjoy life, but if my life became an absolute misery and a curse, I would take a shovelful of pills. It’s nobody’s business but my own.
Any other campaigns worth fighting for?
The abortion issue needs to be looked it. The law should allow the choice in the case of fatal foetal abnormality, rape and incest. I made that point when the Bill was going through and put down amendments. They were voted down. Repealing the 8th Amendment is the next big social fight. It is not as easy a sell as love and marriage. But it’s very important. It should never have been put in the Constitution.
You wonder how did they manage to get it through?
The church to which I belong, the Church of Ireland, opposed it. It was madness. If you concentrate on the essential, such as the case of a 12 or 13 year old girl who is raped; the case of a woman who has a foetus with fatal abnormalities; or the case of incest... how on earth does anyone have the arrogance to say to those people, ‘You must carry this pregnancy to term'. It is unbelievably arrogant.
Around 4,000 Irish women access abortion in the UK every year. It's an emotive issue, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of courage in the Dáil.
Oh no! They are terrified of it – most politicians are. They were given a battering last time. Not very many politicians are visionaries. Most of them are workaday people. They look after their constituency and try to ensure that they retain their seat in the next election.
What do you think are the chances of Right to Die legislation being introduced?
I think it will be resisted and will be tested. There are real fears about old dears being pressurised into taking the jump so that the kids can inherit.
The assumption being that it's an issue that is open to abuse.
Yes, but there are ways around that. It’s only an issue that affects a small number of people. Most people die reasonably comfortably. My brother died two months ago. He just stopped breathing. That’s a very nice way to go and I hope that’s what happens to myself. You can never tell what way you’re going to go, or what ridiculous posture you’ll be in when you croak. There’s not much dignity in death. The 19th century idea of expiring from a broken heart on a chaise longue surrounded by black tulips — it very rarely works like that!