Barry Ward (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)

I am very proud of what we have done as a country. That is not politics; that is people. When we look back ten years to what was done in this jurisdiction as regards the referendum on marriage equality, we have a basis on which to be proud for the fact that we recognised at that time that love is love and that equality of access to marriage was hugely important for everyone. I was part, as many people in these Houses were, of the campaign at that time, very much a civil society campaign as opposed to a political one. The friends I made during that campaign I still am friendly with and still work with. They are proud of what we did then; I am proud of what we did then. I am proud of the fact that we are for the most part progressive as regards Pride.

However, we have a long way to go, and Ireland still has major problems as to how it views the LGBTQ+ community, how it deals with them, how it treats them and how they are seen by the law. I heard the speech the Minister of State, Deputy Butler, gave. It was incredibly moving and heartfelt. I congratulate her on it. The staff in my office upstairs were watching as well. We were all moved by it. It is important, however, to look at this through the lens of people who are not treated equally by the law. Despite the will being expressed by the people ten years ago, we had this rearguard action to row back on some things. That is notwithstanding the fact that love is love and that we made this acknowledgment in 2015. Some people decided after the fact that, actually, we have gone too far and should start to undo things, or we have gone far enough and should not do any more. Both views are wrong, from my perspective.

I think, for example, of the hate speech legislation that we tried to introduce in the last session. It was shot down by people who opposed it for entirely spurious reasons, in my view. In fact, in this Chamber, I think last week, I had a disagreement with a Member about an aspect of that and the misrepresentation of the notion that within hate speech we are saying that everybody deserves certainly the right to free speech but also to express the responsibility that comes with free speech, that you do not use it to put upon other people or to do down other people or incite hatred against them.

When I talk about Pride, I also congratulate those people in Ireland who have consistently worked in this area. I have worked with many of them, but the reality is that there has been a chilling effect for those people involved in Pride. It has not necessarily come from within this country, but look at what happened in Hungary, within the European Union, and the decisions made by Victor Orbán's Government to suppress people involved in the Pride movement. I am delighted to see that people proceeded with that Pride march and that it was the best attended and the most supported one ever in Hungary, as I understand it. The power of people that comes behind that is hugely important because that is what this is all about. It is about people. It is about recognising that people are people and should have equal opportunity to enjoy their lives as they see fit.

Even in this country, however, we know that Pride was affected by decisions made in Washington DC of all places. There was a chilling effect at a corporate level for sponsorship of Pride parades. Dungarvan Pride, as the Minister of State will know, was cancelled as a result of that kind of thing. We know that many people pulled out of it because companies were afraid there would be repercussions from the Administration in Washington. How shameful is that, both for people who were afraid of doing something that is positive in every respect and for the Government in the United States that seems to have forced them to do it?

Again, however, let us not clap ourselves on the back too much because in this jurisdiction there is still not equality, particularly for families that fall outside the norm, as it is seen by the law here. The majority of children within families from the LGBTQ+ community, that part of our society, are prevented from having a legal relationship with one parent. I have raised this issue in the Chamber before. We made progress in May 2020 when the Children and Family Relationships Act was brought into law. It is a step in the right direction, but only a small number of children benefited from that. There are still many families that exist outside the parameters of that legislation, and only one parent is deemed to be the birth or biological parent.

That creates all kinds of problems for the children in relation to the other parent in terms of inheritance. Beyond that, for things like sending notes into school, approving medical appointments or vaccines and all the normal things that parents do with their children, many parents in the LGBTQ+ families in our society, who are the same as the rest of us and have the same love for their children and express the same responsibility, are prohibited, through a lack of action in this Chamber and by the Government, from being fully participative parents because we have not moved in the way we should have moved. We have not moved with the times. As good as we are here and inasmuch as we have made progress, there is so much more to do to recognise the equality of those families and to ensure they can enjoy life just as much as those families who are “normal”, as the law says.

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