Seanad report:While the Minister for Justice might not want to go as far as marriage when it came to giving legal recognition to gay relationships, at some point that nettle would have to be grasped, Eoghan Harris (Ind) said.
"I am lucky enough to live beside a gay couple in the complex I live in. They have been together for 20 years. They are a model on how people should conduct their lives, and to say that's not marriage is ridiculous. I understand that the Minister may very well be measuring public opinion in not wanting to go as far as marriage, but sooner or later that nettle will have to be grasped, because it's marriage by any name," Mr Harris added.
Earlier, David Norris (Ind) reacted angrily to the Minister's rejection of the Labour Party Bill on civil unions, saying that he greatly resented Brian Lenihan telling the Dáil that the constitutional aspect involved a possible attack on the family. "May I say very clearly to all my colleagues in this House that granting me a minimum amount of decency, that very nearly every other country in Europe has granted, cannot be constituted as an attack on the family. How dare any of you say that to a decent, upright citizen like me and the many thousands of gay people who have lived in servitude that a republican party should be ashamed of for the last 60 years."
"Get off your backsides," he told fellow senators. "Do something about it, for pity's sake."
John Hanafin (Fianna Fáil) recalled the principled stand taken by the chancellor of England, Sir Thomas More, when he was asked to recognise a marriage of King Henry the Eighth. "What people do in their own homes - that is one thing. I may not agree with it, but it is their own business. However, when they ask me to call it a marriage that is something I am not prepared to do."
Mr Norris retorted that he was tired of being insulted in the House and of having a tissue of religion used hypocritically to put him in a second-class place. "I will not be a second-class citizen. That is rubbish from Senator Hanafin. On the few occasions he speaks, it is to blackguard people like me."
He said that his Civil Partnership Bill, which had been on the Order Paper for four years, could have been enacted and tested if there had been a willingness to progress it.