Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party)

I am grateful to be able to wake up every morning beside the man I love, a man I am able to call my husband because of a decision of the Irish people, and we are able to enjoy wide-ranging protections across a whole raft of law and policy in our own country. I am grateful but I do not take it for granted because even though we have seen protections extended, gays and lesbians around the world have seen the erosion of their rights too. We have seen progress reversed. That reversal of progress has happened in countries not too distant from Ireland. When I visited Poland as equality Minister I met some of the local LGBTI+ groups who told me how the human rights institution of that state, something like the Ombudsman for Children, had been weaponised by the far-right government at the time as a tool to attack LGBTI+ youth groups which were working with young people under the age of 18.

In Hungary, we saw how the government attempted to suppress the very expression of the LGBTI+ community through trying to ban the Pride parade but we also saw the response 200,000 Hungarians gave to their government on the streets of Budapest.

I do not take progress for granted in Ireland either. We have seen significant increases in homophobic abuse and attacks on our streets. This is backed up by Garda statistics on hate crime. This situation is getting worse. We see increasingly a toxic atmosphere for gay and lesbian citizens online. The Minister of State, Deputy Butler, spoke eloquently about the impact of that. We know it is getting worse.

We must also recognise the failure to meet the diverse healthcare needs of our trans and intersex community in the health services. We must recognise how even the discussion of the provision of that healthcare gets polluted by ideological attacks, rather than focusing on the healthcare needs of a very small and vulnerable part of our community.

As we undertake statements on Pride today, I hope we can avoid any sense of complacency in this Chamber and any sense of back-slapping but instead focus on the unfinished work: the threats to freedom of expression; the absence of the right to marry; the ever-present threat of death that millions of gay, lesbian and trans people face all over the world every single day; and in Ireland, the unfinished provision of health supports for trans and intersex people that this Government must act on in its term of office.

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