The North was ‘Last’. For a long time.
It was the last place in the UK to decriminalise homosexuality in 1983, requiring an individual, Jeffrey Dudgeon, to take a case to the European Court of Human Rights. Many LGBT+ people believed the North would never be ‘Next’, rather, it was ‘Never in My Lifetime.’ Then the North was ‘First’ in 2005. It wasn’t supposed to be. If the North had been ruling itself, rather than under the direct rule of Westminster because Stormont had collapsed, then civil partnership legislation would not have passed, despite years and years of activism. An administrative loophole meant paperwork processing times were shorter in the North, and voilá - Gráinne and I had the UK’s first public civil partnership in Belfast, followed by Chris and Henry Flanagan-Kane.