Centre for European Law, King's College, London LESBIANS AND GAY MEN present a challenge to Ireland's traditional t social ordering as a result of their distance from that order and their simultaneous proximity to it. Both the supposed difference of lesbians and gay men and the way that their mere presence disputes the inevitability of that existing social system generate major tensions within the imagined homogeneity of Irish society. However, lesbians and gay men are not alien to that society. They are born into families in Ireland, brought up in Irish communities, educated in Irish schools and are apparently as Irish as those around them. This familiarity amplifies the problems that the existence of lesbians and gay men implicitly produce for a homophobic social structure that values conformity. However, recently there has been a wave of legal and social reforms in Ireland relating to sexual orientation. In less than a decade the Irish legal
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.