My gay brother doesn’t feel welcome here due to DUP, says Eastwood

SDLP leader Colum Eastwood has revealed that his gay younger brother Liam feels unwelcome in Northern Ireland — because of the DUP.

Speaking to BBC NI’s current affairs show The View last night, Mr Eastwood said: “I have a brother who’s gay, who lives in London, who thinks this place doesn’t welcome him, doesn’t treat him as a full citizen. “And I find that very difficult. “I think that many gay people don’t think Northern Ireland is a welcoming place for them,” the Foyle MLA told BBC reporter Enda McClafferty.

Mr Eastwood felt that his brother was denied the same rights as himself because of the DUP’s blocking of same-sex marriage here.

“There are many, many, people in the community who feel like that,” Mr Eastwood said.

“If people who love each other still aren’t entitled to get married, that’s a disgrace and has to stop and there is a simple way of fixing it.”

The SDLP leader was speakBut

Interview: Colum Eastwood

ing after DUP leader and former First Minister Arlene Foster prepares to attend an LGBT event at Stormont next week.

Mrs Foster is to join the leaders of Northern Ireland’s other four main parties at a Stormont event hosted by PinkNews on June 28.

DUP sources told the Belfast Telegraph she would not be speaking at the event.

Gavin Boyd of advocacy group The Rainbow Project has said he hopes Mrs Foster’s presence will be the start of bridge-building with the LGBT community.

“It is right that she attends. she should not see this as an end in itself but the start of a process of reconciliation,” Mr Boyd said.

But he added: “Arlene must apologise for the hurt and pain caused by her party.”

South Belfast DUP MLA Christopher Stalford told the BBC that his party had said things “in the past that have hurt people”, but that it is “reaching out to people to try and mend fences”.

And a gay man told The View that the DUP should be given credit. “I don’t take pride in being a homosexual in the same way other people don’t take pride in being heterosexual, it doesn’t define me, so therefore it doesn’t define my politics,” he said.

“I am fundamentally a unionist and that’s why I vote DUP.”

He added that “Mrs Foster has modernised the party in certain ways and has put her own stamp on as leader and that has to be welcomed”.

Veteran gay rights’ campaigner and Ulster Unionist councillor Jeff Dudgeon has welcomed Mrs Foster’s decision, but said it wasn’t enough — the DUP had now to facilitate same-sex marriage in Northern Ireland.