Fintan Warfield (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

David has been a towering political campaigner, academic and historian. He is the longest serving Member of this House for good reason. I recall reading that his love of performance came partly from his first experiences in the Players Theatre at Trinity College Dublin, but I think it was a meeting of the Sexual Liberation Movement, SLM, in 1973 that seeded his gay rights activism. Like most gay men and women, he knew he was gay from the age of nine, and once described going to bed crying and praying it was all a mistake – meet your sister, by the way - and said losing himself in books had helped him forget he was different. Some of his college friends at the time convinced him in 1961 to go to Bartley Dunne's and that was his first exposure to Dublin's gay subculture. I think it was the meeting of the Sexual Liberation Movement 12 years later that profoundly impacted on Irish society eventually but also on him. SLM included among its members Edmund Lynch, rest in peace, rest in power-----