From less than a dozen marchers to tens of thousands: A history of Dublin Pride

The Journal

3 days ago

Lauren Boland
FIFTY-ONE YEARS AGO, on a mild, dry day in late June, a small group of less than a dozen people marched through Dublin to protest outside the British embassy.
It was 1974 – the year the Ladies' Gaelic Football Association was founded, the year of the UVF's Dublin and Monaghan bombings, the year that Transition Year was first introduced to secondary schools – and the ten activists who took to the streets on the 27th of June were fighting for LGBTQ+ rights.
At the time, same-sex relations were criminalised under the law, and they had been so since the 1800s under legislation that the British state imposed on Ireland which the fledgling Irish State had never repealed.
The group of activists – which included David Norris, who went on to be Ireland's longest-serving senator – gathered outside the embassy to demonstrate against the laws that Britain had introduced and which were still criminalising homosexuality in Ireland more than a century later.
'That was really the beginning of what was then called the gay rights movement in Ireland,' said historian Mary McAuliffe.
Today, in many countries around the world, June marks the festival of Pride – an event which is both political, in its calls for LGBTQ+ equality, and personal, in the opportunity that it gives members of the community to come together and celebrate their identities in the face of discrimination and oppression.
Pride events like parades are held in many towns across Ireland throughout the summer, with the largest each year taking place in Dublin at the end of June. It's attended by tens of thousands of people – a long way from the group of just ten activists calling for decriminalisation outside the British embassy in 1974.
The start of a movement
The celebration of Pride in Ireland today has its roots in the boots-on-the-ground activism of the 1970s and 1980s.
'1974 saw the foundation of the sexual liberation movement in Ireland. Second-wave feminism had begun, and then sexual liberation, and the idea of self-determined sexuality and decriminalisation of homosexuality,' McAuliffe, a
lecturer at University College Dublin
specialising in the history of Irish women and gender, told
The Journal
.
'There were a whole load of issues that people were beginning to galvanise around and organise around.'
One of those organisers was Tonie Walsh, an activist who has been at the helm of projects and organisations over the years like the National LGBT Federation, the Hirchfeld Centre – an LGBTQ+ community space in Temple Bar in the 1980s – and the Irish Queer Archive.
It was in 1979 that the first formal week-long event then known as Gay Pride was organised by the National LGBT Federation.
In Ireland, there was no political or commercial appetite in the 1970s to sponsor or support events linked to LGBTQ+ people. The community had to have its own back.
'The Hirschfeld Centre was an example of a community resource that provided the people and the ideas and, crucially, the money needed to to roll out a full week festival of talks and pop up theater and live discos and live panel discussions, and all the other things that would happen during during Pride.'
(The Centre
burned down
in 1987.)
Declan Flynn
In 1982, a 31-year-old gay man named Declan Flynn was brutally attacked in Fairview Park in Dublin and died from his injuries.
A group of teenagers and young men between the ages of 14 and 19 saw him receiving a kiss on the cheek from another man while he was walking home through the park. They attacked him, stole the £4 that was in his pocket, and left him to die.
The group were found guilty of manslaughter but were let away with suspended sentences and served no time in prison.
'That was a horrendous murder and the teenage boys who were charged with his murder were more or less just slapped on the wrist by the judge, and so it seemed like gay lives, queer lives, were seen as lesser, as not having the same value,' McAuliffe said.
It sparked a protest march to Fairview Park in March of 1983 and a Pride parade that June, which went from St Stephen's Green to the GPO on O'Connell Street.
'It's impossible to forget the '83 March. There was only about 150 of us. I was one of the speakers, along with Jodie Crone had come out on The Late Late Show three years beforehand,' Walsh recalled.
'We redesignated the GPO as the 'Gay Persons Organisation'. It was a great day, because it was the first time it felt like we were reclaiming the streets, particularly in the light of homophobic violence and anti-women violence that was happening at the time in Ireland,' he said.
But the 1980s were a difficult time to organise Pride marches.
Many members of the LGBTQ+ community were not safe enough or comfortable enough to come out publicly. There were few resources at organisers' disposal. And, most hauntingly, the community was battling on another frontline at the same time: AIDS.
'The organisation that was necessary to run something as enormous as a parade just wasn't there because people's focus shifted towards the AIDS pandemic,' Walsh said.
'When you look back at the early history of Pride, what you see is a small group of people trying to do everything themselves. This was in a culture where there was no state funding of any sort, and corporate funding was didn't really exist, not to the extent needed,' he said.
'A week of events and running a parade demanded huge amounts of labour and also huge amounts of money, and both of these things were in short supply, particularly during the AIDS pandemic.'
For much of the decade, there 'wasn't enough people to warrant doing a march or parade – so few people were publicly out'.
'The high points of Pride then was a picnic in Merrion Square, a balloon release on St Stephen's Green, a leaflet drop around all the major shopping precincts explaining the history of the Stonewall Riots and giving people a shorthand into the history of LGBT civil rights on the island of Ireland and of Ireland,' Walsh described.
The 1988 Pride march.
Leon Farrell / Photocall Ireland
Leon Farrell / Photocall Ireland / Photocall Ireland
The fight for decriminalisation
At the same time as Pride was developing, there was a campaign spearheaded by David Norris to push the government to decriminalise same-sex relations.
Norris brought the Irish government to the European Commission of Human Rights and then the European Court of Human Rights, argued that the criminalisation law violated the European Convention on Human Rights.
The government actively fought to preserve the law. State papers from the 70s and 80s that were released to the National Archives in 2023, examined by
The Journal
, show the extent of homophobic attitudes embedded in the civil service at the time, like
fearing decriminalisation would lead to 'public displays of homosexual relationships'
and
considering whether to leverage the AIDS crisis to defend keeping the law in place
.
Despite the State's extensive defence efforts, Norris won his case before the European Court of Human Rights and the government passed legislation that decriminalised homosexuality on 24 June 1993.
That year's Pride in Dublin took place two days later on the 26th. For Eddie McGuinness – who would later go on to be the Director of Dublin Pride from 2017 for six years – it was his first time attending the parade. He's never forgotten it.
'A thousand of us stood outside the Central Bank and celebrated who we were, because it was the first time the State actually recognised us as part of our nation,' said McGuinness, who is also the founder of the Outing Festival for LGBTQ+ music and arts.
'The feeling was scary but yet amazing. I still remember it,' he said.
For Tonie Walsh, it's also a Pride that stands out strongly in his memory.
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'A group of people from Act Up Dublin – not surprisingly, all AIDS activists – decided to reinstate the parade in 1992. By 1993 there was about 1,000 people on parade, between 800 and 1,000 people, with a rally on the steps of the Central Bank,' Walsh said.
'Thom McGinty, The Diceman, did a striptease dressed up as prison convict because the government had reformed the old British legislation two days before – perfect timing.'
Thom McGinty was an actor and street performer from Scotland known for performing as a 'stillness artist' and 'human statue' in Dublin city. He was a beloved figure in the LGBTQ+ community in the 1980s and 1990s but died from complications of AIDS in 1995 at the age of 42.
'A lot of people who stood on those steps of the Central Bank are no longer with us,' said McGuinness.
'The likes of Thom McGinty, the Diceman… Junior Larkin, who was one of the youngest activists who had set up the first-ever LGBT youth group in Ireland, is no longer with us, and is sometimes forgotten about in our history,' he said.
'A lot of activists who were there back then are no longer with us. But there's still some of us who are fighting the fight, and still keep smiling and trying to make the rainbow shine even brighter.'
Around 5,000 people took part in the 2010 march.
Sasko Lazarov / Photocall Ireland
Sasko Lazarov / Photocall Ireland / Photocall Ireland
Women in Ireland's LGBTQ+ community
Pride and the movement for LGBTQ+ equality gained momentum in many countries after the Stonewall Riots of 1969 in New York City, when people attending the Stonewall gay bar fought back against police who were targeting them.
As Pride parades developed, lesbians also started to organise 'Dyke Marches', which were for women in the LGBTQ+ community to create a space for them and to highlight the specific challenges they were facing in society. Ireland's first Dyke March was held on 26 June 1998 (and the first one in Dublin in decades was also organised for this year).
'Women, lesbians, have always been part of Pride, but there were also the separate Dyke Marches,' McAuliffe outlined.
'They were always inclusive of trans women. Irish LGBT activism has always been trans-inclusive, for the most part,' she said.
'In many ways, as a historian of LGBT histories, oftentimes, the majority of what you're talking or researching or reading about is about gay male homosexuality, mainly the campaign to decriminalise. That's very, very important. But you often see lesbians are kind of invisible in the narratives,' she said.
'It's important that lesbian visibility, trans-inclusive lesbian visibility, is there on the streets, in our histories, in our narratives of who and what we are in our activism.
'Women's lives often include motherhood, and there are issues around that still to be campaigned for, because lesbians are women, women who need, for example, full reproductive rights, women who need safety in society, women who've experienced sexual violence, domestic violence, all of those things.'
McAuliffe's first experience of attending a Pride parade was in the late 1990s.
'Like many people, going on the first one, anytime I saw a camera pointed at me, I was hiding, because you may be marching down the street, but you're not that out and proud. It takes a while,' she said.
'I do remember that sense of belonging and community while at the same time feeling a little bit worried about being seen – and wanting to be seen.
'I think for younger people, it gives a way of feeling empowered, of maybe taking those extra steps in the coming out journey, because you have been with your community for a day and having great fun, great craic, and being involved in the political aspect of marching.'
Into the 21st century
Celebrations of Pride in Dublin and across the country have grown larger and stronger over the years.
'From 1993 onwards, what you saw was a really progressive development of pride, not just in Dublin but in the other urban centres around Ireland,' Walsh said.
According to Walsh, that development was enabled by decriminalisation, by corporate sponsors starting to view the community as being 'of value to consumers' in a way that hadn't been a case before decriminalisation, and by a wider pool of people coming out in greater numbers and bringing skills with them that helped to organise Pride events.
'It is still a fabulous day out. Since my very first Pride event in Pride Week in 1980, I've missed very few,' Walsh said.
'There are a few that stand out over the years. Listening to Panti [Bliss] rabble-rousing on Wood Quay when the rally for the Pride Parade was in Wood Quay in the amphitheatre. That would have been 2014 or 2015. Myself, I remember being Grand Marshal in 2008 and getting everybody, four and a half thousand people in Wood Quay, to sing 'to be queer is to be special',' he recalled.
More than 20 years after decriminalisation in 1993, another major step forward came in 2015 when the referendum to allow same-sex marriage in Ireland passed by a wide majority.
'I remember the one the year marriage equality was passed. That was fantastic. Such a celebratory one,' McAuliffe said.
Two years later, Eddie McGuiness – a connoisseur of Prides in Ireland and abroad – became the Director of Dublin Pride.
'One of my biggest honours has always been to have gone on to manage and develop Dublin Pride – my first type of Pride – for nearly seven years, only stepping away the last couple of years because I was diagnosed with cancer,' McGuiness said.
He also fondly remembers hosting Pride in his home town of Dundalk when it had its first significant parade a couple of years ago. The Pride parades in Limerick and Cork 'always give [him] a warm feeling', while Carlow Pride is 'so quirky and fun; the volunteers there put so much time and effort into it'.
David Norris marches in the 2019 parade.
Leah Farrell
Leah Farrell
The politics of Pride
Within the LGBTQ+ community, there's a debate that's rolled on for many years about what the nature of Pride should be – whether it's right that it's taken on a celebratory, festival nature, or whether it should go back to its roots as a protest march.
'From the early 2000s, the marches became more like Mardi Gras. They were less political – but I think pride is political, and I think it is important that it is political and that it remains political,' said McAuliffe.
'Even though we have marriage equality in Ireland, there's still a lot of transphobia and there's rising homophobia and lesbophobia, and it's very important for people to still campaign around inclusion and acceptance of all in society,' she said.
'The far right are very homophobic, very transphobic, a lot of them… they don't want queer Irish people, they don't want trans Irish people, they don't want lesbians and gays. That has brought around a rise in virulent homophobia and transphobia, both online and in real life, and so I think we need to be more political around pride.'
McGuinness said that 'when you look at the Pride movement, starting in New York in 1969 with the Stonewall riots to where we are now, there is still resistance within mainstream politics and society'.
'This is not just an LGBT issue. This is an immigrant issue. This is a women's issue. No matter who you are, if you're a minority, if you're a Traveller, right across the board, so-called mainstream society tries to downtrodden you, and we need to stand up to that. That is what Pride is all about. It's giving a voice to those who don't have a voice,' he said.
For Walsh, Pride is about 'being visible and making a statement about unfinished political business, and it's a statement of celebration – but it is also an invitation by Irish LGBT people to mainstream Ireland to join us on our journey of liberation and acceptance and visibility'.
'It's important that mainstream Ireland embraces that invitation, understanding that the journey that Irish queers have taken to get to the place we find ourselves in today hasn't just been about us. That journey is about Irish society finding its collective empathy and understanding,' Walsh said.
'Every year, you hear some people asking, 'why do they need Pride?' But remember, people are still being beaten up and murdered in some parts of the world. We had homophobic murders in Sligo just a few years ago. Trans men and women are still being beaten up with impunity,' he said.
'There is much work to done. There are still people living in the shadows, even in Ireland, for all of our liberalism. Pride is a reminder that we need to turn our attention to all of that unfinished business.'
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