'Cherishing All Her Children Equally': the Law and Politics of Irish Lesbian and Gay Citizenship

Abstract

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

Rewriting Desire: the Construction of Sexual Identity in Literary and Legal Discourse in Postcolonial Ireland

“…36. See further Flynn, 1995Flynn, , 1997. The plaintiff in this case claimed that the extant legislation which criminalized male same-sex activity was incompatible with the constitutional rights of gay men to equality, privacy and freedom of expression.…”

“…As Darian-Smith has noted: 'Law, alongside climate, geography, history and cultural practices, shapes the mythological imaginary of any one nation's ... identity' (DarianSmith, 1996: 297). The included subjects of Irish law in the postcolonial period have been male and heterosexual (Connelly, 1993;Flynn, 1997;Robinson, 1988). The grundnorm that is the Irish Constitution of 1937 was an exclusionary document which enshrined in law the then prevailing notions of a homogeneous Irish self.…”

Challenging the logic of progressive timeline, queering LGBT successes and failures in Ireland and Russia

“…This Bill stands on its own merits as a fundamental development in human rights which will put an end to unwarranted intrusion over a very long period into the private life of adults (cit. in Flynn, 1997: 502).…”

“…Starting from the 1970s, in Ireland, the Campaign for Homosexual Law Reform targeted existent pieces of legislation 1 that made certain forms of expression of male homosexual desire criminal (Flynn, 1997; O’Donnell, 2008: 2–3; Casey, 2018: 224). Protests, campaigning and legal suits were the activists’ strategies that led to eventual elimination of the law 20 years later in 1993.…”

“…1.This includes Sections 61 and 62 of the Offences Against the Person Act, 1861, and section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885, all belonging to the colonial legacy of Britain. Beginning in the 1970s, the law reportedly was rarely applied in exceptional cases (Flynn, 1997: 496–497).…”