Australia to share in luck of the Irish
The people of Ireland embraced same-sex marriage in a 2015 poll, but what has been impact since? Ellen Whinnett reports
MORE than 1200 samesex couples have married in Ireland since the strongly Catholic country voted to allow gay couples to wed.
But there has been little other change since the laws came into effect on November 16, 2015.
After Dublin erupted in a rainbow-coloured party the night the vote was counted, many of the concerns predicted by the No campaign failed to materialise. There has been no legal push to further extend marriage to polygamous relationships.
Same-sex marriage has not been included in the compulsory curriculum for Christian schools.
And no businesses have been prosecuted for refusing to provide a service to a same-sex marriage (although one was across the border in Northern Ireland).
“The sky most certainly didn’t fall in,’’ former Labour Party MP John Muir told News Corp. “It’s like Ireland just got back to doing what it’s doing.
“No one’s marriage is worth less. No one is looking for extra layers of something ridiculous. Life has carried on as normal.’’
Mr Muir, who is openly gay, campaigned with his mother for a Yes vote, and said the real benefits of the decision would come in one or two generations’ time, when same-sex people marrying was considered a normal part of life.
According to the Irish Central Statistics Office, there were 1289 same-sex marriages in Ireland between November 2015 and March 2017.
Christian advocacy group the Iona Institute led the No campaign and still has concerns at a lack of protections for religious freedoms.
The institute’s director and a columnist with the Sunday Times, David Quinn, said while churches could not be forced to perform a same-sex marriage, the legislation did not provide protection for other religious freedoms.
“At Catholic and Christian schools, will they be required to teach about samesex marriage?’’ he asked.
“That hasn’t happened yet, but what if it does?’’
And while he said there had been no legal move towards allowing polygamy, apart from one Muslim man who asked for a second wedding performed in Lebanon to be recognised in Ireland, there was “a small amount of pressure towards polyamorous relationships’’.
“At schools, the transsexual agenda is not compulsory but it is happening.’’
However, with Ireland facing a referendum to legalise abortion within 18 months, Mr Quinn said SSM had “gone off to the margins of public attention”.
The Irish experience most closely mirrors the vote in Australia, with the country holding a non-compulsory referendum in May 2015 which asked voters whether “marriage may be contract- ed in accordance with law by two persons without distinction as to their sex”.
There was a 60.5 per cent turnout, and the result was a resounding Yes, with 62 per cent in favour of allowing same-sex marriage.
It was an extraordinary turnaround in a country where homosexuality was decriminalised only in 1993, and where the Catholic Church – which asked its followers to vote No – once held enormous power.
Richard Dowling and Cormac Gollogly, both 37, were the first couple to be married under the new laws.
The pair, who had been together for 12 years, first had a civil partnership, when the passage of the legislation was unclear, but married under the new laws two months later.
Their civil partnership was celebrated in top hat and tails, with a big group of guests and fireworks on a grand old Irish estate.
But their marriage was performed in the Births, Deaths and Marriages office inside a country hospital in Clonmel, with two roped-in witnesses and journalists as their only guests.
Mr Gollogly, a commercial barrister, and Mr Dowling, a banker, said the legislation had sent a strong message of integration between the straight and gay communities.
“It’s become seamless, there’s no worry now,’’ Mr Dowling said. “We were in town yesterday and we were arm-in-arm all day and no one looked twice.’’
Mr Gollogly said there had been “no difficulties’’ reported in the media since the law changed, with no pressure put on churches or on religious schools to teach same-sex marriage.
“All those ‘what-nexts’ have not come to fruition.’’
In June, Ireland elected its first openly-gay prime minister, Leo Varadkar.