Church of Ireland Archdeacon of Dublin Gordon Linney has said he believed "the State should enact legislation to allow gay people to have registered stable relationships with all the benefits and rights that go with that status such as inheritance law and so forth".
But he would not advocate marriage for such relationships. It was "a term with very special dimensions and meaning".
Speaking on the theme of "Human Sexuality - A Christian Response", in Dublin last night, he said that for the church homosexuality was "a very difficult and complex issue".
He added: "The Roman Catholic tradition, along with Protestant fundamentalism, has taken a very strong and definite stand.
"My own Anglican Communion struggles and suffers," he said, referring to the controversy over gay clergy which is convulsing Anglicanism worldwide.
"But I have to ask how people who are so certain about homosexuality being evil could have been so indifferent and even devious when it came to facing up to the issue of child abuse."
He asked how it was "so many people are so exercised about the gay issue" while being indifferent to homelessness, deprivation, paramilitary violence in the North, or the greed of multinationals who exploit the poor of the Third World and deny medicines to AIDS victims in Africa. He said "almost all of us are guilty by association with the same big multinationals because their profits are demanded by our pension funds".
He believed the explanation lay in the fact that "we like to feel we are moral when it does not cost us anything - when someone else bears the pain".