The joy clearly manifest on Monday in and outside Belfast's City Hall as committed gay couples were at last allowed to tie some kind of legal knot was moving. Britain's new legal institution of civil partnership, like marriage, is firstly a mechanism by which the community rightly acknowledges as important and protects the dependencies that arise in long-term relationships, whether in terms of inheritance or other rights.
But such civil ceremonies are also at the same time deeply personal moments, the opportunity for intensely private, though public, expressions of the commitment of two people to each other, and moments until now only solemnised by society for heterosexuals.
It is right that the state should rectify that injustice. And in doing so, it is not destabilising marriage, as Belfast's detractors would have us believe, but affirming and supporting the sort of mutual commitment between couples that is the social glue upon which stable communities are built.
Different registration rules meant that yesterday in Scotland there were similar scenes as more availed as soon as they could of Britain's new laws, and today, across England and Wales, 687 gay couples, including Sir Elton John and partner, David Furnish, will do likewise.
In Dublin, now lagging behind many of our fellow Europeans in this regard, Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform Michael McDowell met representatives of the gay community and emerged to announce that he will be establishing a working group to consider models of legal recognition for cohabiting couples. This is ground well-travelled by an Oireachtas committee and the social partners in the National Economic and Social Forum where a broad consensus exists on the need, at a minimum, to extend legal recognition and partnership rights to people in long-term committed relationships. But Mr McDowell's promise that the committee will consider a full range of options and models and report by March is to be applauded, particularly as he appears personally strongly committed to bringing reforms to Cabinet.
The Minister has also made two welcome commitments. He has agreed to hasten transposition into law of an EU directive which will have the effect of extending to "enduring" partners of workers the right to free movement, and thus residence, throughout the Union, a measure which will help gay couples currently forced to live long-distance relationships. And he has said he will amend parental leave legislation currently in the Dáil to give such partners equality in respect of what is known as "force majeure" leave, or special compassionate leave.