I remember sitting in Cornucopia Cafe in Dublin on a Monday morning with my phone, notepad and a copy of a weekend newspaper in hand. The front-page headline screamed: “Church anger as gay campaign targets schools.”
It was 2004, barely a year since we’d opened BeLonG To LGBT youth services. The “campaign” they were talking about was ours. It wasn’t even a campaign – we had just received a grant to develop some LGBTQ+ affirmative materials for young people, which an industrious journalist got wind of and called some bishops for comment.
Thomas Flynn, bishop of Achonry and member of the council for education of the Irish Episcopal Conference, told the paper: “I am not sure there are many teenagers who are gays ... I would be afraid that young people who feel different from their peers, for whatever reason, would identify with this campaign even if they are not that way inclined.”
It seemed like everything I was warned about when setting up BeLonG To was coming to pass – that both church and media would have a field day. Even within the adult LGBTQ+ community at the time there were reservations about setting up a high-profile professional organisation for queer teens. The brutality with which the Christian churches and the State had treated the queer community had left deep scars and the awful trope that gay men were a danger to young people was, in 2004, a mainstream, widely shared belief.
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Confronted with that headline on that Monday morning I had no playbook to follow – but I put one foot in front of the other and began what was to become our first defiant pushback against conservative religious ideology. I got on the phone and called the National Parents Council, the National Youth Council, the Union of Students in Ireland and the Department of Education (who funded us) and asked for their help.
Despite continued negative media and calls in the Dáil to defund the organisation, these national and government bodies rallied behind us and confidently came out to support the rights of LGBTQ+ youth to access support and information. In the face of what could have escalated into a serious crisis, we sowed the seeds for how to engage with hardline Christian conservatism. That following year, we launched the campaign.
You see, LGBTQ+ young people have always been in the crosshairs of the religious and far right. In 1990, while arguing against the decriminalisation of homosexuality, Family Solidarity (an extreme Catholic group) suggested that “if the laws against homosexual acts are repealed and the age of consent were made the same for all, then the lawmakers would give a clear message to the young: Homosexual behaviour is normal and acceptable and society does not mind which alternative you choose.”
During the marriage equality referendum, those opposed to equality based their arguments firmly on debunked fears for children and young people.
Today, regrettably, the rhetoric has ramped up again. Calling public servants, librarians and teachers “perverts” and “predators” online and offlineis a standard practice by certain groups.
This Pride week, the National Library of Ireland has announced the availability of my archive, tracing my work over the past two decades to help make Ireland a kinder and more equal place for communities pushed to the margins, including the LGBTQ+ community. Collecting these materials from attics around the country, at this moment in 2024, when much of my current work is about combating toxic, hateful narratives, has allowed me to reflect on how our campaigning history can be brought into our current experiences.
What we as a community are now experiencing in terms of the rise in homophobic and transphobic hate and violence is devastating, it is organised and it is international. Only this week we learned about the horrific violence experienced by Natasha O’Brien when she bravely stood up to Cathal Crotty’s homophobic slurs on the streets of Limerick.
And this weekend Wicklow Pride was forced to cancel its LGBTQ+ Rainbow Ball due to organisers receiving abusive messages to their home.
Looking at the worrying rise in aggressive homophobic and transphobic disinformation targeting our schools we can see that these actions come directly from international far-right playbooks. In 2022 in the United States, in 2023 in the UK. in 2024 in Ireland, far-right organisers use the same “how to” guides to promote violent anti-LGBTQ+ actions in our libraries and schools and on our streets.
But this is not our first rodeo.
We have dealt with this bigotry in various forms for generations, like a nightmare that re-emerges just when you think it is gone. In the face of this pushback against our human rights, we need the hope that springs from knowing that this is not the first time we have faced many of today’s challenges.
We want an Ireland where love and kindness guide us in our day-to-day lives and in our Government’s decision making.
In 2004 when I asked mainstream national bodies to lead with kindness and support LGBT young people, they did. In 2015 when BeLonG To asked the country to “change forever what it means to grow up LGBT in Ireland”, you did by voting yes to marriage equality. We know from research from Parable Research and the Hope and Courage Collective that the vast majority of the Irish people want a kind society, but need more confidence to take action. We know that solidarity works. When LGBTQ+ people stand with Palestine, people of the global majority, Muslim people, disabled people, Traveller and Roma people, young and old, huge leaps forward are possible.
We saw this in the late 1990s when communities came together to create our equality legislation, and we see it today as groups come together again to combat hate. We are on the right track. We know that building unlikely alliances works.
An LGBTQ+ youth organisation building a close alliance with the National Association of Principals and Deputy Principals (most of whom worked in Catholic schools) seemed unlikely – but many of the protections put in place for LGBTQ+ youth sprang from those relationships.
But so many great advocates and activists burn out from fighting what can feel like a lonely uphill battle. These are people in civil society groups, but also those pushing for change within government bodies, businesses, schools and your neighbourhoods. We need to build communities of care for these people and a culture where being brave to stand up for what is right is valued and rewarded.
Dr Michael Barron is executive director of the Rowan Trust. The Michael Barron Papers are now available at the National Library of Ireland
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