David Norris (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House and commend Senator Warfield on this very important Bill.

I wish to make two points right at the head. The first concerns the definition of "professional". I was horrified to hear of the Brazilian church where an attempt was made to convert a young Brazilian person. They are wonderful people. They are also so physically beautiful. They are a great adornment to the gay community in this country. I was really horrified by what happened. Despite the fairly lengthy and exhaustive list of people who are described as "professional", I wonder whether the person in charge of the church in question would be caught by it. I am not sure it all.

The Minister said we need an evidence base to establish the prevalence of conversion therapy. That would be very interesting. It will be a very useful guide but one case is too many. We already have evidence of at least one and perhaps quite a few others. I have a very large volume of email correspondence from people all over Ireland. This is not a Dublin problem. It affects every county of our Republic.

I remember when the therapy was called "aversion therapy". I remember very severe things being done. There were utterly disgusting. They used to put a volumetric analyser on a man's penis and show him pictures of men engaging in sexual activity. If there was any volumetric change indicating an erection, he got a hell of an electric shock. There were other practices in which one was given emetics. There was one success; one man died. He certainly stopped being gay; there is no doubt about that but he was a death. If one wants to go to that extreme, that it what occurs.

Aversion therapies or conversion therapies were practised in America. There were two poster boys – wonderful, masculine, handsome men – and everything was going swimmingly until, of course, they eloped together. That was the end of that one. I grew up during a period of these kinds of practices.

A lot of this stuff is religious now. As a religious, churchgoing, practising Christian, I find it utterly disgusting. When I was a teenager, Archbishop Fisher was the Archbishop of Canterbury. He was a dreary oul' fool and a horrible snob but it did not cost me a thought to think that. I thought the man was just so ignorant, stupid and wrong. In the New Testament, Jesus Christ never once mentions homosexuality, good, bad or indifferent. That is how important it was to Jesus so I do not know where the Jesus freaks are coming from.

I remember dealing with somebody in the Hirschfeld Centre and before that in 46 Parnell Square who had been through the therapy. He came from a wealthy farming family in Kilkenny. They referred him and he was given aversion therapy. It totally scrambled his mind. He was a real walking casualty but he was so brave and wonderful in the way he fought against this. It very deeply affected the rest of his life so he was really a casualty. This is brainwashing. It has been condemned by all reputable psychotherapy bodies. It has absolutely no credibility whatever. On the religious side, the intention is to inflict feelings of shamefulness and sinfulness in the people. How crippling this is for vulnerable young people. How crushing the effect on young people to be given the impression that they are sinful, shameful and disgusting.

Conversion therapy is the male equivalent of female genital mutilation.It is precisely the same kind of thing. It is a savage attack on somebody, whether a man or a woman. I would like to end by putting a human face before people today by putting on the record three emails which I received, chosen from among many. This is from a man who wrote to me. He says:

I have personal interest in seeing this bill become law as I have direct experience of reparative or conversion therapy both as a young teenager and in to my early 20’s. Whilst I am grateful that my own experience has not had a lasting impact on my own emotional wellbeing, having worked through this incredible therapy, I have a number of friends for whom this has had a lasting impact. As a teenager I was subject to a form of 'therapeutic' intervention which sought to change my sexual orientation and included spiritual intervention using exorcism. This was deeply distressing and disturbing to me as a young person and I should never have been subjected to this form of religious or therapeutic abuse.

As a young adult I attended group therapy and ‘specialised’ courses entirely focused on changing my sexual orientation. As a young Christian I felt that there was no alternative and that my faith and my sexual orientation could not be reconciled, fortunately I learned that this was in fact not the case for the future.

Conversion therapy is underpinned by assumptions that sexual orientation or a trans identity are wrong and immoral. Banning such therapy gives a clear message that in Ireland these approaches are wrong and dangerous to the wellbeing of individuals who are LGBT.

The next email is even more stark. It is from a young woman from Galway. She says:

I, myself, am a lesbian. I have never been so proud of this country as when gay marriage was passed by referendum - I grew up in the countryside and believed it was an immutable fact that people did not care about me, would not care if I died, did not like me, or people like me.

The referendum passing was part of the reason I came out. My aunt got married to a lovely woman, and was happier than I’d ever seen her. [...]

From the age of sixteen, I had a friend from America who I knew as Ace, who was the same age. Ace would tell people I was his girlfriend to keep his gay identity a secret, and at times I would do the same. Ace let slip to his mother that he was gay, and shortly after was sent to conversion therapy. When I was nineteen, I learned from social media that Ace committed suicide. I cannot describe in words the sickly emptiness it left in my life, although Ace and I had not spoken in almost a year. [...]

Had I not been so lucky, I could have been in his position. It is a real possibility that had my luck been different, I could have been butchered by a gruelling, hate-based faux-psychological process designed to murder a human being by mutilation of the soul, inch by inch by inch.

I will briefly make reference to a final letter.

I am a very proud lesbian woman. When I came out to my parents I was forced into religious rituals of ‘getting rid of the gay’ in me. Safe to say that I am still very much gay but still petrified to ever come out to anyone in my family or ever be myself around them.

My experience has changed my life in many ways and I don’t want any child to grow up and face the cruel, inhumane, illogical and scary process of conversion therapy.

I commend Senator Warfield and all the rest of us who signed this important Bill.