Oisin Kelly's sculpture honouring the men and women of 1916 looms over a water-filled cross in Dublin's Garden of Remembrance. Tall and bronze, its theme was chosen when 1960s leaders wanted some way to honour the past.
What animated them particularly was the legend of the Children of Lir, about a girl and her brothers destined to live as swans lest they try to take political power. It was a lesson of hope to all considered potentially disruptive in their native land.
Walk in the Garden tonight at 6 p.m., or tomorrow at 2.15 p.m., and the legend is appropriated by a rather different community. Instead of 1916 heroes, the Irish gay and lesbian community will take this place as the starting point of its annual Pride Week marches. Proud and loud, they want to shout about it. It's almost 10 years since Ms Maire Geoghegan-Quinn decriminalised homosexual acts; lesbian acts were never criminal. Queerbashing, manifest intolerance and those sneaky little put-downs are less prevalent than they used to be.
Yet the visibility of gay and lesbian people in Ireland is close to zero. With the exception of Pride Week, it's difficult to name 10 gay or lesbian leaders in any field save for gay and lesbian activism itself.
Not that anyone, anywhere, wears their sexual identity as a halo, insisting that you see it and bow down before you can approach them. It's more a question of assumptions, and the assumption is that in the real world, the world of the mainstream and the status quo, everyone, or nearly everyone, is a red-blooded straight.
While estimates reckon some 10 per cent of populations world-wide are gay or lesbian, Irish society prefers to disguise itself as an exception to the rule. The reasons why are a measure of this society as much as a measure of Irish collective identity. Irish identity is still reluctant to include its gay and lesbian citizens. Much as we straights might prefer to think it's only the Friendly Sons of St Patrick who exclude gay and lesbian people from the annual St Patrick's Day parade, society back here hasn't fully digested that it is always good to be gay.
If global statistics are accurate, there are more gay Irish people than there are native Irish speakers. Yet while native speakers and those with a cupla focal have a radio and television service designed for their needs, the gay and lesbian community feature hardly at all on Irish TV.
No dedicated late-night shows, such as those on Channel 4, the BBCs and ITV, challenge RTE or TV3 viewers with the images, feelings and opinions of thousands of Irish people. When images of gay and lesbian Irishness are presented, the chances are they emerge as often negative stereotypes like the threat of AIDS, or within arts programming, rather than as part of features, news or current affairs.
No sense of a continuous gay history is allowed to enter mainstream thinking. We acknowledge some dead gay heroes - Kate O'Brien and Oscar Wilde. But in the disciplines with gravitas, like mainstream history and politics, the possibility that heroes such as Roger Casement might have been gay is so unsettling it sends otherwise reasonable people reaching for their guns.
Dail Eireann operates as if the rate of gay and lesbian people in its own chambers was more like 0.01 per cent rather than what the global rates suggest - close to one in every 10 elected representatives. Only one elected representative is known to be gay, and it is a significant clue to the conservative attitudes of all political parties that the member is a man and an Independent, namely David Norris, the senator for Trinity College, who entered politics on his own terms.
UNLESS Dail Eireann is an exception to every survey of gender and sexuality ever conducted, probability suggests that a significant additional number of deputies are gay or lesbian. Not coming out keeps their private lives private, but it also does not send a signal to young men and women that their orientations will not disable them from pursuing a political career.
That absence of leadership at national level fuels a system already disinclined to treat gay and lesbian citizens like everyone else.
Inheritance rights, transferable pension rights and transferable social welfare rights are not applied to gay and lesbian couples. One gay man who lived with his partner for almost 20 years was evicted from his home by his partner's family while grieving for the sudden loss of a man with whom he had expected to share the rest of his life. It's a common story.
Despite the pink pound's power in other western countries, Irish gay and lesbian people are notably more disadvantaged than their European peers. GLEN/Nexus's recent economic study of Irish gay and lesbian people showed a worrying gap between the average incomes of gay and lesbian people, as compared to national norms. Despite good work by new agencies like the reconstituted Equality Authority, gay and lesbian citizens are still treated as though they are something to be ashamed of and kept mute.
Nothing in the education system tells young people that there are differences in sexual orientation; no educational supports exist either for young gay and lesbian people, or for heterosexual men and women who need to understand their fellow citizens. Neither flesh nor fowl, like Finola and her beloved brothers in the Garden of Remembrance, gay and lesbian people are expected to fly on clipped wings, provided they don't clutter up our air space. Whose pride is it, anyway? To some of us, it sounds like shame.
mruane@irish-times.ie