Mr. Frank Moran:

It would be interesting to know if anybody has been able to avail, by chance, of the provisions of Circular 18/2020. The Department of public expenditure should be able to assist the committee on this. It should be able to say if anyone has benefited and how many people who might be able to. It will find it difficult because it will not be in a position to identify people who are in same-sex relationships. That number is, at best, speculative. However, the Department might be able to assist the committee with the number of people who would fall within the parameters. If we go back 30 years to 1995, that is 30 fortieths of service. There is then ten years between 1995 and entrants who came into the public service in 1985. There is only a ten-year period and then it does get a little bit more complex, because who is going to put their hands up? It strikes me that this question is really important because there are so many people who were in same-sex relationships but because homosexuality was not decriminalised until 1993, people in good employment, such as in the public service or teaching, could not have their identity known. Many people were in cohabitation relationships and maybe at some stage in the future the Law Reform Commission might need to look at that. Perhaps there is another group of people who, because of societal pressures and their own feelings on being out within families, groupings and so on, wanted to stay under the radar. Forty years ago, I did not come out to my friends or my family.

I was working in a Government Department and I was not going to put my employment at risk. Even in terms of changing employment and going to the Central Bank in the early nineties, it was not an issue. It is great that young people nowadays are absolutely free to be who they are, but there were very dark days 40 or 50 years ago. This is the cohort of people we are trying to ensure get a fair deal out of this legislation.