Ten years ago this week, the Sexual Offences Bill, decriminalising homosexual acts between consenting adults over 17, passed into law.
Its passage, following a case brought successfully by Senator David Norris and argued by Mrs Mary Robinson to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), marked an important milestone in the liberalisation of this State. The US Supreme Court has belatedly followed the ECHR's example by overturning Texas anti-sodomy laws and in recent days the UK has promised to grant gay couples the legal rights normally attached to marriage.
A decade on, Ireland should go beyond mere toleration of gay lifestyles to the vindication of their rights as equal citizens by implementing the recommendations of the National Economic and Social Forum (NESF) report on gay, lesbian and bisexual rights. Two member-states of the EU, the Netherlands and Belgium, have legalised gay marriage, and Canada's federal government has just committed itself to do so. Such a move, however, would still be hugely controversial in Ireland.
That reality, however, should not inhibit more immediate moves to help the increasing numbers of couples in long-term informal relationships, whether homosexual or heterosexual. The death or illness of a partner is traumatic enough without the added vulnerability that comes with society's refusal to recognise and protect the mutual commitments and responsibilities that help to bind such relationships. Their stability and strength are important to the cohesion of society. Nor is there any reason to believe that establishing for such couples some of the rights associated with marriage would undermine marriage itself.
The NESF recommends that it should be possible for a partner to nominate a beneficiary for pensions and inheritance purposes; to designate a next-of-kin for medical reasons; to nominate a partner as co-parent or guardian of a child; and it supports the right of a non-EU partner to live and work in this country. It also recommends the civil recognition of long-term relationships, although it should be possible to extend many of the rights without requiring formal registration. The property rights of those sharing homes, acknowledged already in a limited way, should also be strengthened.
Simultaneously extending such rights to heterosexual couples, for whom these issues are just as problematic, could make such a move less controversial. This Coalition shows no willingness, however, to take up the torch of social reform so bravely brandished by Mrs Maire Geoghegan-Quinn a decade ago.