David Norris (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Acting Chairman very much. We had a remarkable legal team, which included Mary McAleese and Mary Robinson, now two former Presidents of Ireland. It also included Garret Cooney and Paul Carney. We lost in the High Court but it was really good judgment. Mr. Justice McWilliam accepted all the evidence we introduced. This is a principal theme I added in. I insisted on having expert witnesses from all over the world to end the silence, and it worked. We were on the front page of the newspapers day after day. That was a remarkable achievement. We had Professor John Spiegel, who was head of the American Psychiatric Association when it removed homosexuality's classification as an illness, and we had Donald West, regius professor of forensic psychiatry at the University of Cambridge. Then, however, Mr. Justice McWilliam took a swerve and said that nevertheless, despite all this, he had to find against the plaintiff because of the Christian and democratic nature of the State. We then went off to the Supreme Court where we actually got a divided judgement, three judges to two. The Chief Justice misdirected himself in law and two other eejits signed his judgment, but there were two very important dissenting judgments which dealt with privacy and withlocus standi, which were made by Mr. Justice McCarthy and Mr. Justice Henchy. I then remember Míne Bean Uí Chribín saying to me that she knew me, that I would not be satisfied with homosexual decriminalisation and that the next thing I would want would be homosexual marriage. I said that was a wonderful idea, I thanked her and told her that she should let me know if she had any further ideas.

I then put down the first Civil Partnership Bill in 2004. The Government followed it up with a Bill which I denounced as a dog licence. I am absolutely unabashed because, although I know there is somebody in the Gallery who lambasted me for it, it is the role of a human rights activist to go for the gold, not to accept any crumb that falls from the table of government. There were 179 differences between the Bills. The language was nastily anti-gay in that legislation.

Máire Geoghegan-Quinn was wonderful. The Opposition put down mean-minded amendments that were discriminatory. She listened and said - and this is the golden rule - that as Minister for Justice, she would need clear, cogent and factual reasons for accepting any discriminatory amendments, that she had not found such and that, therefore, she would not accept the amendments. This is a good day. I would also like to mention the late Dr. Noel Browne, who was the first person to speak about homosexuality. I would like to solemnly thank my colleagues in the Gallery for the wonderful work they did.