Lifelong gay rights campaigner mustn’t be denied the basic right of privacy

IT was all action on Saturday afternoon in Dublin.

All action that presented a microcosm of the complexity of current Irish issues, angers, and progress.

First of all, an impromptu march took place as a result of the Testosterone Tapes, with people gathering to protest the damage done to each and every one of us by the Anglo thugs, and to demand that someone, somewhere, short-circuit the snail-slow processes to bring somebody before a court or a robust inquiry.

Secondly, Youth Defence were up several poles, attaching inflammatory posters to them attacking the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill, or, more specifically, attacking Fine Gael for provisions within that bill.

Thirdly, gay, lesbian, and transgender folk were out in force for the Gay Pride Parade. Apart from some abuse reportedly delivered by members of Youth Defence to members of the Pride parade, the three groups more or less kept out of each other’s hair.

Which is just as well, given that our cities are currently playing host to large numbers of overseas visitors who don’t need to witness the kind of violence St Petersburg experienced. There, the Gay Pride march numbered only 40 men and women, who ended up bloodied (rocks thrown by nationalists who outnumbered the marchers five to one), sullied (eggs tossed by the same crowd), and arrested (because gay propaganda is illegal in Russia, courtesy of a recent law).

In Ireland, in sharp contrast, the Gay Pride parade is apparently second only to the St Patrick’s Day parade in terms of numbers and coverage, according to Ciarán Ó hUltacháin of the National Lesbian and Gay Federation, who was eager to present it as “a fun day for everybody — for the family”.

The fact that so many reports in the last 24 hours referred to it only as “the Pride Parade” underlines how mainstream it has become. It may still be difficult for teenagers to come out to their parents and friends, and gay kids continue to be bullied at school, but Ireland, on this issue, is now comparatively liberal and ready to move on.

Moving on depends on how vigorously Labour implement their party’s promise to bring in same sex marriage. Not everything has changed, but nothing is the same as it was less than a quarter of a century ago.

Back then, young gay activists had little in the way of expectations and were frankly dismayed by the appointment within the 1992 coalition government of a Fianna Fáil woman to the Department of Justice.

But it was that woman who altered Ireland’s law. It took courage and resolution on the part of Máire Geoghegan Quinn to change the mindset of her party and bring in the law to decriminalise homosexuality, but then MGQ was never short of either courage or resolution. She was also, it must be said, in the right place at the right time.

The EU had already looked askance at Ireland’s position in this regard, and, when she brought in the legislation, none of the other political parties fought her on it.

But the efforts of one man had changed the context for any discussion of gay life in this country. Senator David Norris, with courage, humour and personal sacrifice, built a new framework around the issue.

Ireland has just passed the 20-year anniversary of the legislative change, and that anniversary should have been a time of joy and pride for Norris.

In fact, he was in hospital as the Gay festival began, undergoing the first treatments for serious cancer. Partly because everybody expected him to be exuberantly present at the celebrations, curiosity developed about why he wasn’t around and questions began to be asked by media about his health. The questions eventually forced him to issue a statement announcing his condition. In that statement, having generously praised everybody taking care of him in St Vincent’s Hospital, he went on to say: “The cancer appears to be related to the initial incidence of viral hepatitis I contracted from tainted drinking water while I was on unpaid government business in Eastern Europe in 1994.”

The statement ended with a comment to the effect that he was being this open about his situation because he didn’t see cancer as meriting stigma. Most of us don’t. Most people under 50 wouldn’t even understand the reference to stigma, having grown up in a time when a) every second person they know or are related to has had cancer of some sort, and b) books, newspaper columns, and TV programmes constantly deal with how people, famous and obscure, cope with a cancer diagnosis and treatment.

SENATOR Norris, however, belongs to a generation which tended to perceive a narrow range of illnesses — most notably TB and cancer — as damaging to their reputation or that of their family. Which may, in turn, explain the sadly defensive tone of his whole statement. The defensiveness lay in two areas. The first was its eager offering of the probable provenance of the cancer. I cannot recall any other public figure providing historic detail to explain how they might have contracted the disease. The second defensive aspect of the statement was its insistence that he had been on government business and unpaid when he contracted hepatitis from tainted water. The reference to being unpaid was so gratuitous as to give the reader pause. It was as if he feared comment about his being on a junket.

The tainted water reference and the need to tie the cancer to the hepatitis sounded like something a clinician might have discussed with him, but it’s difficult to work out why he would think it was any of our business how he contracted it. Perhaps, after a lifetime experiencing prejudice, he feared that someone would decide he had in some way caused his own cancer.

The whole statement was ironically reminiscent of the second wave of language around Aids, when people infected with the virus through, for example, a blood transfusion were described as “innocent victims” of the disease, the implication being that if they had contracted it through sexual activity or through needle-sharing, they’d be guilty victims, but if they had developed it as a result of a third party medical intervention, they didn’t deserve it and should be recognised as a different and better class of Aids sufferer: Innocent.

It may speak to how bruised David Norris was, during the presidential election, that he would be so concerned about framing his bad news for public consumption. It may speak to the venom characterising much of current online comment. Or it may derive from a lifetime battling prejudice. Whatever the reason, Mr Norris, at a time when he could have told those receiving media queries that he’d answer them when he was good and ready, instead got involved in trying to inform public opinion around his diagnosis. In this instance, the public’s right to know is limited. Fame must not be allowed to strip privacy away from individuals at a time when they most need it — when they are ill.