Can we all feel some pride?

LEO Varadkar has admitted that, as a politician, he is a victim of prejudice. Indeed he admits that not every one in the LGBT community supports him or celebrated his election as Taoiseach. “In fact,” he says, “some LGBT activists get quite annoyed when I don’t agree with them on every other issue.”

Leo suffers from a prejudice that many LGBT people in Ireland are confronted by. They are expected to be left wing. And because Leo isn’t a left liberal gay, he is basically made out to be Margaret Thatcher.

And it says something about how far we’ve come. Our first gay Taoiseach didn’t come from a predictable place, like the Labour party, or from the left. He came from right of centre, from Fine Gael for God’s sake. And you don’t have to like him just because he’s gay. And even some of the other gays don’t support him. It’s all so damn normal.

I spoke to a woman on the radio yesterday. She was there as a psychotherapist to talk about handling family holidays. In the course of this she happened to mention her own wife and her little boy. And at the end, I said to her casually if she was heading into Pride. And she said yeah, that she was going in to meet up with the family at Pride.

Such a simple, normal, natural thing to say, but it speaks volumes about how this country has changed.

Last week, on A Different Country, an RTE documentary about life in Ireland before the decriminalisation of homosexuality, Rory Cowan told a story about Bartley Dunne’s, an early gay-friendly bar in Dublin. Two guys were kissing in the bar and Mr Dunne said he’d have none of that nonsense in his pub. “But Mr Dunne,” everyone said, “it’s a gay bar!” But not as far as Mr Dunne was concerned, it wasn’t. That was Ireland then. Even the gay bars were in denial.

This weekend in Dublin, not only pubs but large corporations fell over themselves to be associated with the LGBT community. And, look, it’s their day and the rest of us won’t try to muscle in, but can we all allow ourselves a little bit of pride? There’s a long way to go in terms of our attitude to diversity in this country. And making people equal citizens, and not requiring them to live a lie, is not something we should congratulate ourselves on, it is merely attempting to right an age-old wrong.

But still, we’ve all come a long way, together, in the last few years. But our gay friends and family and brothers and sisters and sons and daughters brought us along with them, patiently and with love and tolerance. And it took a lot of patience and tolerance by them! These changes have enriched all of us and made Ireland a little bit less toxic. So, without muscling in, maybe we can all afford to feel a little pride today.