Dan Boyle (Green Party)

In these Houses of the Oireachtas we have the sometimes dubious privilege of passing much legislation. Some Bills are quite regular in how they come to us and concern the daily running of the State. They are finance and social welfare legislation. Some Bills are amendments to previous Acts seen through time and circumstance to be in need of change, or where the original tends to be seen as flawed. Some Bills have an emergency nature and we have seen more than enough in recent years dealing with the banking crisis and the financial position. Some legislation helps to define who we are as a society and this is one such Bill.

As it is defining legislation, it does not come without controversy. There are those in our society who say: "Thus far and no further", and there are those who quite legitimately have the right to expect that we need to go further. My party sees this as stepping stone legislation and there will be further Bills to advance the continuing equality this legislation brings about. Nevertheless it is a significant leap forward and we should mark the effect it will have on society.

Most European countries have chosen to take a stepping stone approach in this respect. In France, Germany, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom and Finland, legislation is at the status of civil partnerships. Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Belgium and the Netherlands have legislation on full single-sex marriage. We should not see ourselves as unique in this regard and the process must be followed. I am proud that we are taking a significant step in that direction today.

As a society we must acknowledge our continuing immaturity in the area of sexuality. How sexuality is acknowledged, expressed, recognised and not celebrated in our society is something with which we must come to terms. For too many generations, many have had to endure a stigma that should never have been attached and, as legislators, we have ignored the problem for far too long. If there is anything in the debate we are having and the legislation we will pass today, it will be to remove from the shadows a stigma that should not have been placed to begin with. I can think of friends like Arthur Leahy in Cork who was involved in a television documentary in the 1970s, when it was first acknowledged that homosexuality existed in our country. It is a bit like the comment about "The Late Late Show" that sex did not exist before television. We have come a long way since but we still have a journey to travel. As a result of the repressed attitude to sexuality, where people were made to feel wrong if they had or expressed an inclination or felt part of a certain society, this Bill only goes some of the way towards redressing the imbalance. I took part in recent gay pride parades in Cork, where 2,000 people marched, and in Dublin, where 22,000 people marched, and I finally got a sense, as a public representative, that we are emerging from those shadows and finally creating a society where people do not have to live in an undergrowth produced by people who for far too long expressed a vision of our society that was never a reality.

The sexual repression we have experienced in the past 100 or 150 years is not a natural Irish inclination and is as far removed from the Brehon laws as could be.