Sarah Harte: Legislation alone isn’t enough to bring an end to homophobia

According to a recent report from ILGA-Europe, the leading European LGBTI+ and equality organisation 2022 was the most violent year for LGBTI+ people in Europe in a decade with hate speech, violent attacks, and murders becoming more prevalent.

Uganda has just introduced the death penalty for “homosexual acts” with American evangelical Christians said to be behind the grotesque homophobia there.

You may think “ah well, we’re light years ahead of a country like that”. 

Certainly, over the last 30 years huge progress has been made here, but as Mr Varadkar’s comments indicate we need to look at our own backyard. “We’re not going to let anybody make us go back behind closed doors again,” he said.

It was very important, he stressed for young LGBTI+ people to see Pride as both a celebration but also as a protest against any attempt to make the LGBTI+ community feel ashamed.

And yet, it was reported in this newspaper last week that the board of Cork Pride has appealed for an increase in public funding as three of its main sponsors have withdrawn, with signals from other sponsors that they may not renew their annual support. 

Happily, this year’s Cork Pride event is going ahead as planned from July 30 to August 6. 

The board made the point that “Pride [is] as relevant and necessary as it ever was” against the backdrop of the increase of “hate crimes perpetrated against the LGBTI+ community”.

In May, a video of a teenager being assaulted in a housing estate in Navan, Co Meath was widely shared on Twitter, it was claimed that his sexuality triggered the attack. 

The teenager was hospitalised, and five teenagers were arrested. 

They were later released without charge and an investigation is ongoing. 

It is hard to imagine the pain of the boy and his parents but also the pain of parents of other LGBTI+ kids knowing that it could have been their child.

The fear that our children might be attacked when they go out the hall door simply because of their sexuality or how they identify is an utterly alien sensation to many of us. 

Equally to have to prepare a child for a future where they might not be accepted or even tolerated but subjected to sporadic incidents of hate. Unsurprisingly, the Irish LGBTI+ community was reportedly devastated by the Meath attack.

Eight years ago, the day after the historic marriage equality referendum many same-sex couples were to be seen proudly holding hands in public. It felt like we’d come a long way as a society but many LGBTI+ people in Ireland no longer feel safe expressing affection in public and why would they?

In March, Garda statistics revealed a 30% increase in hate crimes over the last year with LGBTI+ people for two years in a row the most targeted group of people in Irish society in hate crimes after racist attacks. 

Hate crimes against LGBTI+ people are believed to be chronically underreported.

Last year was grim. In April, Emerald Warriors’ rugby player Evan Somers was brutally assaulted when out walking on Dublin’s Dame Street. “I remember him calling me a faggot as he was about to punch me, and I had no time to react. 

"I don’t remember much after that as I got knocked out,” he said.

Five months later Mark Sheehan was returning on a bus from his birthday celebration in The George Pub in Dublin when a group of men hurled slurs such as “faggot” and “queer” at him. 

Mr Sheehan and his friends told this newspaper that they had tried as gay men to minimise their presence because his friend “had a birthday crown still on” so they “were sticking out a little bit”. 

Mr Sheehan was then viciously headbutted.

In May at Drag Fest Ireland, protesters outside the venue were said to have shouted toxic slurs like “paedophile” and “groomer” which is appalling.

The contentious Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill going through the Seanad will legislate against hate crimes for the first time in Irish law. 

People Before Profit TD Paul Murphy has claimed that the bill creates a thought crime with the possibility of civil liberties being eroded. 

On balance, this seems alarmist. 

Under the bill, a defendant must deliberately intend to incite hatred against a person with defences for a reasonable contribution to literary, artistic, political, scientific, or academic debate.

It will be interesting to see how the judiciary interprets the act when it passes, and how the case law develops, whether the notion of public debate will be incrementally altered or eroded as some have claimed.

In March, a man interrupted a live RTÉ News broadcast with anti-LGBTI+ slurs including one targetting Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth Roderic O’Gorman, who is gay.

On the face of it, a case like this might be the kind of case that could possibly come under the rubric of any new law on hate speech. 

Either way, it is yet another incident that seems to point to an uptick in homophobic rhetoric around LGBTI+ issues and people.

Last Saturday Elaine Loughlin warned in this newspaper that the discussion over hate speech is becoming more polarised with concern that voices in the centre have been “bullied out”. 

Sometimes, so-called ‘debate’ is a dog whistle for the ‘othering’ or dehumanising of other people, but constructive dialogue or healthy public debate is an essential requirement of any representative democracy, and we must talk more, not less. 

The thorny question is how respectful discourse can occur. Unfortunately, right-wing elements whip up a toxic debate playing people for their own ends, and engineering conflict so the more moderate among us see a distorted reality that involves worrying about threats that are not actual threats.

Legislation alone isn’t going to cut the mustard in fighting anti-LGTBI+ sentiment. Nor are vague expressions of solidarity with the LGTBI+ community. 

Proactively fighting the rise of hate speech means looking to home and particularly to schoolyards where anti-LGBTI+ slurs are casually traded often going unchallenged and unpunished causing stress and misery to schoolchildren.

This baseline societal tolerance of homophobia and transphobia implicitly greenlights more overt anti-LGBTI+ sentiment. 

Meanwhile each day of the week, LGTBI+ people walk down our streets forced to look over their shoulders.