The Equal Status and Employment Equality laws that were brought in the late 1990’s early ’00s positioned Ireland at the time as a leader internationally in terms of LGB equality and equality in general; equality in relation to trans people still had/has a journey to go.
The new laws finally meant that lesbian, gay and bisexual people could feel that they had a right to be treated fairly, whether that be in booking a room in a hotel, having a pint, or coming out at work. That’s of course if you weren’t a teacher, doctor or nurse working in the predominantly Church dominated education and health services.
For these employees a clause in the Employment Equality legislation, known as Section 37.1, meant that a school, for example, could claim that hiring a gay teacher would undermine the schools religious ethos. The clause specifically permitted such discrimination, and given the fact that the vast majority of primary schools and a majority of second level schools are Church-owned and managed, placed gay, lesbian and bisexual teachers in an even more vulnerable position than before the new laws were brought in.
I did research for my masters around this time exploring what being a teacher in an Irish second level school was like for lesbian and gay teachers, motivated by my own experience as a young lesbian teacher at second level; I interviewed teachers from Catholic schools and from ETB schools, all boys, all girls and co-ed schools, rural and urban schools. The experience was the same for all these teachers; none of them, not even the teachers in the ETB sector, felt safe to come out, or be out about their LGB identity. Many of them talked about having to be ‘super teachers’, i.e., to make themselves so indispensable to their ‘straight’ counterparts that even if their sexual orientation became known, the prospect of them being sacked might be balanced with the loss that would be suffered by the school in terms of all the extra stuff they were doing. Section 37.1 became synonymous with the continued subordination of Ireland’s LGBT teachers and campaigns began for its removal along with its ‘chilling effect’ in Irish schools that served to silence thousands of teachers.