Gilmore encourages gay community to stand in elections

LABOUR leader Eamon Gilmore has urged more lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) people to stand for elections.

Speaking at the launch of Dublin Pride, the annual festival that celebrates LGBT life in Ireland, Mr Gilmore said the root of pervasive, and often poisonous, discrimination against gay and lesbian people was a failure to recognise the equality of all of citizens.

“To deny equality is to look another in the eye and proclaim them to be a lesser person. It is to distinguish between the quality of one person’s humanity over another,” he said. “No citizen – whatever their sexuality, their gender, their beliefs or the colour of their skin – should have to live in such a society.”