Fintan Warfield (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

-----who was responsible for introducing David to that group, I believe, as well as Mary Dorcey, Hugo McManus, Margaret McWilliams and Michael Kerrigan.The SLM campaigned on a wide platform of reform around abortion, divorce, contraception and gay rights. With Belfast's Gay Liberation Society, SLM hosted Ireland's first symposium on homosexuality in February 1974. Within a year of that, there were organisations right across the island, including in Belfast and Dublin. The Senator was instrumental in founding the Irish gay rights movement.

The Senator was the first gay Irishman to appear on television. He expressed his aim of abolishing Victorian legislation and with then Senator Mary Robinson as senior counsel, the case would take 11 years to wind its way from the High Court to the Supreme Court and eventually to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Along the way, the Senator continued to champion the needs and rights of Ireland's embattled sexual minorities by founding the National Gay Federation, now the LGBT Federation. In 1979, the Senator advanced a personal bank loan to help to open the Hirschfeld Centre, Dublin's second attempt at an LGBT community resource centre. At the time, it was one of the first of its kind in the world.

As others have mentioned, the Senator has been a champion for the people in Palestine and Gaza, for Dublin's metro, for North Great George's Street and the preservation society; the list goes on and on. He has been a huge inspiration to me and so many others. I hope in his retirement he enjoys a newfound freedom. He will now have the time to finish the things he has not yet finished.