So says Senator David Norris of the day that homosexual acts were decriminalised in Ireland, 25 years ago this month. To mark a quarter of a century of freedom under Irish law, Aoife Moriarty asks him and other notable lesbians and gay men who experienced Ireland pre and post-decriminalisation to refl ect on the changes it brought about.

Senator David Norris

“There’s been a revolution in terms of LGBT rights in Ireland. But I will also say that, at the core, Irish people were always compassionate, decent and tolerant.”

“We started preparing a case against criminalisation in 1974. I was running the legal section of the Irish Gay Rights Movement.

I thought at first we’d persuade one of the people who was being charged under the criminal law to take a constitutional defence. But of course they wouldn’t because the last thing they wanted was any more publicity. They wanted it all to go away. So we built a case around myself.

It was a very lengthy process. First of all we went to the High Court. We had international witnesses from all over the world. Every day it was some star witness, so it was on the front page of every newspaper.

And then we got a judgement. The first part was like a charter of gay rights. The judge said there were a surprisingly large number of gay people in Ireland, that they weren’t child molesters, that they weren’t mentally sick, they weren’t less intelligent. All those kinds of things. And then at the very end he said: ‘Nevertheless, despite all this, because of the Christian and democratic nature of the State, I have to find against the plaintiff’.

Ailbhe Smyth

“It’s very difficult to describe to anybody who wasn’t around at that time just how profoundly invisible we were.”

At the Supreme Court, we got a divided judgement, 3-2. Mr Justice Henchy quite rightly said that since the government had singularly failed to produce any evidence whatsoever, I’d won a walkover. So it was a moral victory. The government went after me for costs, and they were awarded £75,000, which of course I didn’t have. It was more than I’d paid for my house.

So I said, ‘Oh well, forget that, we’ll go off to Europe’. We went to Europe, and we won, but by a margin of only one vote, with the Irish Church voting against us.

Four or five years passed. Taoiseach Albert Reynolds was questioned about it and said it ‘wasn’t a priority’, which was rather odd, because it was a major breach of human rights. Eventually Máire Geoghegan-Quinn came in as Minister for Justice. I had been campaigning behind the scenes, writing personal letters to all the political parties.