‘Before I would have held my husband’s hand walking around the streets. But now I wouldn’t’

Recently in the Oireachtas, Pádraig Rice of LGBT Ireland delivered a presentation called A Year of Hate. Representing the Coalition Against Hate Crime, 22 civil society organisations, he was briefing TDs and Senators who were considering Ireland’s first hate crime legislation. The presentation featured a year of headlines from Gay Community News (GCN). “If you look through GCN over the last year,” Rice says, “at least once a month there’s an account of a horrific homophobic attack.”

A number of recent attacks have not just had an impact on the individuals involved, but on the LGBTQ+ community more generally. In 2021, a man pleaded guilty at the Dublin Circuit Court to assault causing harm in a knife attack against a trans woman in Dublin city.

In April 2022, two murders in Sligo sent shock waves through the LGBTQ+ community when Aidan Moffitt and Michael Snee were killed, and another man, Anthony Burke, was stabbed in the face. A man in his 20s was arrested and charged with all three offences.

The same month, a gay man, Evan Somers, was attacked and assaulted on Dame Street, in Dublin, sustaining multiple fractures to his ankle and eye socket. Somers was enjoying a night out in Ireland’s biggest and most well-known LGBTQ+ venue, The George, before the attack.

Tony O’Reilly obituary: Ireland’s first business superstar whose spectacular fall led to bankruptcy

---

Cliff Taylor: Pay close attention to what Intel does next. It’s a test case for Ireland

---

How Ireland drinks now: Teetotallers, wine-o’clockers and ex-drinkers

---

In May 2022, a lesbian couple were attacked while waiting for a bus in Dublin. In August 2022, Mark Sheehan was also returning home from a night out in The George, when he was verbally abused with homophobic slurs and assaulted. In November, a Dublin drag queen, Alexis McQueen, was attacked on Dame Street, hit with glass and sustained cuts to their head. Last month, David Babington, a gay man celebrating a friend’s birthday in Cork city, was attacked and assaulted by another man shouting homophobic abuse.

On one level, these attacks feel at odds with a more inclusive tendency in Irish life. Ireland has one of the most progressive legislative contexts for LGBTQ+ rights in the world, and the evolution has been rapid. For most of the 20th century, Irish society was a cold place for anyone who was different. Social norms, honed by the Catholic Church, demanded a strong adherence to “traditional” morality. Same-sex activity between men was decriminalised only in 1993, following a long legal campaign fought by Senator David Norris.

[ Are Irish streets safe for LGBTQ+ people? ‘He punched me and kicked me down the stairs’ ]

[ Attacks on LGBTQI+ people prompt call for robust hate crime laws ]

In 2015, Ireland became the first country in the world to pass marriage equality by popular vote. It was carried by 62 per cent of the voting electorate, and the national conversation the marriage equality movement provoked also did a lot to neutralise societal homophobia. That same year, following a 20-year battle by Dr Lydia Foy to have her gender recognised, the Gender Recognition Act was signed into law, allowing people to change their gender on government documents. Simultaneously, the visibility of LGBTQ+ people in Irish society has grown across politics, media, sport and the arts.

The progressive, welcoming attitudes of the majority of Irish people have not changed in recent years. But fundamental to the optimism after the 2015 marriage equality referendum was a newfound sense of safety. As the eighth anniversary of the referendum approaches, a number of factors – not least violent attacks – have contributed to a growing unease in the community around safety and hate speech. “Before I would have held my husband’s hand walking around the streets,” says Rice. “But now I wouldn’t, or I’d look over my shoulder ... There’s definitely been a change in the mood ... I’m part of an LGBT running club and we even had a chat last night about how we need to look out for each other and care for each other’s safety when we’re out and about ... ‘We can’t have that person walk alone.’”

Why is this happening? Since 2015, a global pattern has emerged in which long-fought-for LGBTQ+ rights and freedoms are being targeted. “Strongman” leaders in many countries have targeted the LGBTQ+ community with draconian legislation. In Hungary, a law was passed making it illegal to provide information about LGBTQ+ issues to under-18s. In Russia, a similar law was passed banning so-called LGBTQ+ “propaganda” aimed at adults. In Poland, resolutions characterised as creating “LGBT-free zones” were adopted in dozens of municipalities. Meanwhile, across the United States there have been more than 200 anti-LGBTQ+ bills, including the Florida Parental Rights in Education Act, the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law, which restricts classroom discussions of sexual orientation or gender identity. Other bills across the US seek to outlaw public drag performances or prohibit trans healthcare. The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA) Europe’s 2023 report found that 2022 was “the most violent year” for LGBTQ+ people across Europe and Central Asia in the past decade.

Negative online discourse is especially targeted at the minority within a minority: transgender and non-binary people. In the UK in particular, a disinformation narrative that depicts trans men as unwitting victims of a trend and trans women as a threat to women and children has found a home in some mainstream media. “[Trans people] are a tiny minority but they’re constantly debated on television, questioned, undermined, ridiculed,” says Rice. “It’s become that kind of polarising, wedge issue in many ways.”

Aoife Martin, a writer and activist, has felt a big change in the atmosphere since she came out as a trans woman in 2016. It feels awful, she says, to be treated as a threat for merely existing. “It’s coming back to ‘these people can’t be trusted with children’, which is just an obscene thing to say about somebody. [It’s] how people talked about gay people 20 years ago ... It’s just horrific. In 2016, that wasn’t a part of the narrative. It has snuck in there.”

Online hate and disinformation have real-world consequences, she says. Martin knows of trans friends who have experienced verbal abuse on the street and another who received death threats. Another trans person she knows was due to give a talk at a local library but was bombarded with social media abuse. “They ended up having to do the talk online, because they couldn’t guarantee her safety.”

I’ve said before that the bravest thing a trans person can do sometimes is just step outside the door

—  Aoife Martin

Martin left Twitter because of the ongoing abuse she received. At one point, a prominent anti-trans activist posted a picture of her, misgendering her and saying cruel things. “And the media aren’t entirely blameless,” she says. “One of the most disgusting letters I ever read about trans people was in The Irish Times.”

In Martin’s opinion, many of those commenting on trans rights do not themselves know trans people. “It’s just an intellectual exercise to them. We’re not real people to them. We’re not human beings. If they saw what trans people have to go through to be themselves ... even with all the love and support in the world, it’s a very, very difficult journey.”

[ Most LGBTQ+ teens have heard homophobic remarks from school staff - report ]

She believes that most people are accepting of trans people but the divisive rhetoric and real-world assaults have made her warier than she once was. “I still wear a mask now, for Covid reasons, but also, partially, for safety reasons, as an extra layer of protection ... I’ve said before that the bravest thing a trans person can do sometimes is just step outside the door ... It’s not hard to be affected by the sense of growing hostility. I’m generally a pretty laid-back person but obviously the fear is there at a subconscious level. For a while I’ve had bad dreams about certain anti-trans people and being attacked.”

For the LGBTQ+ community, transphobia is an important standalone issue. But it is also used tactically by some on the right, as an entry point through which the broader tapestry of LGBTQ+ rights can be unpicked. Online and offline across the world, the focus has expanded from trans people to drag performers and anyone who is gender nonconforming, to gay people more generally. On a daily basis, trolls accuse well-known members of the LGBTQ+ community of being “groomers” and a threat to children. This is the type of slur that reminds LGBTQ+ people of the type of abuse their community faced in the past. It prompted the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which monitors and researches extremism, hate and discrimination, to publish a January report on the “mainstreaming” of the slur.

In some ways, to me, it almost feels worse than the 80s. In the 80s, these people weren’t so bold. They weren’t screaming ‘paedophile’ at you

—  Rory O’Neill

Rory O’Neill, also known as the drag queen Panti Bliss, rose to mainstream fame during the marriage equality referendum and presides over two bars in Dublin city centre, Pantibar and Pennylane. O’Neill is competing on RTÉ’s Dancing with the Stars with great success, and yet he is also contending with a new level of homophobic and transphobic harassment. “In some ways, to me, it almost feels worse than the 80s,” he says. “In the 80s, these people weren’t so bold. They weren’t screaming ‘paedophile’ at you. Without social media and the internet, there wasn’t this cross-pollination of ideas all being rolled into one horrible fascistic mess.”

O’Neill experiences daily abuse online. In 2018, a brick was thrown through Pantibar’s window. Last year, homophobic graffiti was sprayed beside the bar. O’Neill has also noticed a change in the tone of the hate mail he receives: “In the years running up to the referendum when the discourse was in the air, most of the people who’d sit down and write a letter, it was all religious conservative stuff – a miraculous medal, and praying for my soul – whereas now it’s ‘stay away from kids’, ‘paedos like you should be strung up’.”

Online abuse that may not reach the broader public is a subject of frequent discussion in the LGBTQ+ community. “We were just talking about the increased level of hate we’re getting on our [LGBT Ireland] social media accounts,” says Pádraig Rice. “It’s been an onslaught of awful things ... up to threats of murder ... It’s extreme speech that would have been very rare when I started to get involved in this.”

The recycling and repackaging of homophobic tropes as contemporary transphobia is blatant to O’Neill. He points to how it dovetails with broader discriminatory discourse in Irish society. “These things don’t exist in a vacuum either, they’re all intertwined, and very obviously intertwined ... It has changed the atmosphere in the community. The community feels embattled at the moment.”

There is now definitely a kind of normalisation of hatred that wasn’t there five years ago, and that has been amplified online

—  Adam Long

Increasingly, anti-LGBTQ+ tactics used elsewhere are playing out in Ireland. There have been protests (most recently at Cork City Library last Friday) about the availability of educational LGBT-themed literature in libraries. Last July, in an echo of protests against drag queens by far-right groups in the US, the Tertulia bookshop in Westport, Co Mayo, was the target of a protest in response to an event they hosted as part of Mayo Pride, Drag Queen Story Hour. Provocateurs frequently take text from books for teenagers and claim they are aimed at younger children to create online outrage.

Siobhán O’Donoghue, founding director of Uplift and chairwoman of the Hope and Courage Collective (formerly called the Far Right Observatory), says that the far right in Ireland became more organised over the course of the pandemic. “There are three core groupings. There’s the anti-science brigade – the anti-vaxxers and climate deniers ... the other group is the Christian fundamentalists, where you get deep misogyny, homophobia, transphobia ... and then the white supremacists are the third group. During Covid they all came together, basically ... What they’re doing is weaponising issues that are confusing for people, creating this kind of internalised angst.”

“There’s definitely a real attempt to import a cultural war into Ireland,” says Adam Long, a board director of National LGBT Federation (NXF). “We have to call that out for what it is. I think it’s manufactured. I think it’s based on false narratives. We have made a lot of gains and we should take strength from that. But there is now definitely a kind of normalisation of hatred that wasn’t there five years ago, and that has been amplified online.”

While progress has been made to combat anti-LGBTQ+ bullying in schools, aspects of the curriculum are also targeted, as has happened in other jurisdictions, specifically the relationships and sexuality education (RSE) curriculum.

Ruadhán Ó Críodáin is the executive director of ShoutOut, an organisation that runs educational programmes in schools across Ireland to combat anti-LGBTQ+ bullying and violence. “A young person does not necessarily have that positive perspective around the marriage referendum in 2015,” Ó Críodáin says. “They don’t remember those moments and they don’t know what the landscape was like before that ... For them, they’re living in the context they’re living in and that context is still quite difficult, quite negative, so their mental health outcomes, statistically speaking, haven’t really improved in a massive way even as things have changed.”

What is also changing is the media young people are consuming, and the online discourse they’re exposed to. “That change is from traditional homophobia and traditional transphobia to something that is a different narrative. It’s tied to a broader anti-feminist narrative. Young people are at risk of consuming that narrative as much as they’re at risk of being targeted by it.”

“It’s coming through very targeted online channels, very ‘clever’ algorithms,” Ó Críodáin says. “The big one, obviously, is Andrew Tate [the misogynist influencer currently in police custody in Romania]. He’s on everyone’s radar now, and he says awful things about women. But he also says awful things about LGBTQ+ people ... I think a lot of people, including teachers, school staff, policymakers, don’t know how to deal with the impact of far-right rhetoric on young people in general.”

Ó Críodáin points to the School Climate Survey by the Irish LGBTQ+ youth organisation Belong To, which found young LGBTQ+ people feel less safe in schools than they did three years ago. In 2019, 73 per cent of LGBTQ+ second-level student respondents said they felt unsafe at school. In 2022, that rose to 76 per cent. Sixty-nine per cent of LGBTQ+ students reported hearing homophobic remarks from other students, and 58 per cent reported hearing homophobic remarks from school staff. One-in-three LGBTQ+ students say they have skipped school to avoid negative treatment due to their identity.

Of the lengthy review of the curriculum of relationships and sex education in schools, Ó Críodáin says the new framework is positive, has undergone extensive research, submission and consultation processes, and was formulated in part at the request of students. Their voices, Ó Críodáin says, are being drowned out. The resistance to an updated curriculum, ShoutOut observes, often orientates around media and online talking points such as the use of pronouns.

“There’s a tactic by the far right to use the idea of pronouns especially, as a stand-in for transness, and a stand-in for queerness, and this quote, unquote ‘wokeness’ ... What that does is it singles out trans and non-binary people, it dehumanises us ... It has become a little harder to take that [discriminatory] approach when talking about lesbian and gay and bisexual identities ... Trans people don’t have much social capital, political capital, positive visibility, and they are drowned out in the media.”

Ultimately LGBTQ+ campaigners believe that online “culture war” narratives are impacting their safety. They point to an increase in headlines about hate crimes targeting LGBTQ+ people. There is little official data, however. The gardaí began recording hate crime incidents based on their own criteria in 2020 and began publishing that data in 2021. That showed that the second most common discriminatory motive for an attack was sexual orientation.

It takes one crime to have a huge impact beyond the individual, on the entire community, and then on the entire society

—  Luna Lara Liboni

The forthcoming Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022 is seen as important. It will replace the existing Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act 1989. “The introduction of the legislation needs to be the first step on which all the other complementary measures will be built, and that includes better recording and reporting,” says Luna Lara Liboni, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties’s policy officer on equality and hate crime. “We’re lacking official data ... It takes one crime to have a huge impact beyond the individual, on the entire community, and then on the entire society. That’s why we’ve really been putting the stress on the ripple effect that hate crime has. Many LGBTQ+ people increasingly feel they have to be cautious holding their partner’s hand in public. That’s how rooted inequality is in daily life.”

Beyond the legislation, Liboni believes there needs to be a society-wide discussion about these issues and that the Government needs to take a strong lead. “Legislation is an important first step, but it isn’t enough when it comes to tackling the roots of hate ... An Garda Síochána recognises that there is a huge component of underreporting ... We need to see more investment in building trust between gardaí and communities.”

Social media, the element which is amplifying anti-LGBTQ+ hate speech, also needs to be grappled with. “The scale of disinformation and hate is very much driven by algorithms,” says Siobhán O’Donoghue.

She points to a report where the non-governmental organisation Global Witness succeeded in getting horrifically homophobic and transphobic ads approved on various platforms in order to test moderation processes (the ads did not go live). In a statement, Global Witness’s digital threats campaign leader Naomi Hirst said: “We know all too well that when hate is allowed to spread online, it doesn’t take long to spill over into the real world. Ireland prides itself on its open and inclusive attitudes, but it urgently needs to get a grip on the dark underbelly of hatred that flourishes online.”

She noted that some of the biggest platforms have European headquarters in Ireland. “Ireland has a unique responsibility to hold platforms that are failing to stem the spread of hate accountable. In appointing two new data commissioners, Ireland has an opportunity to put LGBTQ+ people, their safety, dignity and rights, above Silicon Valley profits – it must take it.”

Many of those speaking out about abuse and attacks emphasise that the upswing in anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and violence reflects an emboldened minority, not the majority of people in Ireland. “I think if we had a referendum again tomorrow on marriage equality it would probably be 80 per cent in favour,” says Adam Long. “I genuinely don’t believe that there’s been a backlash amongst the broader public.” But, he adds, “the thing about hate crime is that it’s not just an attack on that one individual. It sends a shiver down the spine of every LGBT person because they can imagine themselves in that situation. When somebody is attacked, it signals fear to the entire community.”