I grew up in Dublin on the Northside, the middle child of seven children. The first in my family to go to university, I went to UCD in the late ’70s. I worked for about ten years as a teacher and then went on to work as an editor, then started to work as a consultant on a European funding project. I’ve been doing consultancy for the last 25 years.
When Katherine Zappone and Ann Louise Gilligan took their court case against the Irish government to have their Canadian marriage recognised, they invited a few of us over to their house to talk about how we might support them. That was really the formation of Marriage Equality. Myself, Ailbhe Smyth, Denise Charlton and a number of other women came together and decided we would develop a support group for Katherine and Ann Louise, which we called KAL. After about a year of working on that we realised needed something that would be wider that the court case. So, we formally launched Marriage Equality (ME) in 2006.