My mother had a friend for most of her life. He was a man called Roy. He lived in a flat in Rathmines in Dublin. Every so often she would take me to visit him. He was a warm and kind man with grey hair. I think he was probably about twenty years older than my mother. He had a piano in his flat which I loved to try and play.

But even at a young age I could pick up on something slightly sad about Roy. When I was age eight or nine, I could pick up a whiff of melancholy from this jolly man. I didn't know why or probably didn't even think about it at the time but as we know kids pick up on things.

It was only in my teens, the last time I saw Roy, that my mother told me he was gay.

I suppose it may seem too simple or even vaguely homophobic to see a connection between Roy's sadness and his homosexuality. But my mother confirmed that Roy has struggled all his life with acceptance by his contemporaries. Roy died in the early 1990s when he was in his seventies. He died without a husband or wife and lived in that little Rathmines bedsit right until the end.

Roy would never have 'come out' as modern parlance puts it - but he was never 'in' either. He had lots of 'friends' as people would have euphemistically referred to his boyfriends back then. But he never lived with anyone as far as my mother knew. To this day when I look back on the image in my mind of Roy it's still one of being jolly yet sad.
But I can’t help being sort of grateful for having known a little of Roy while I was young. I was a child of the 1970s and 80s and the idea of being gay wasn't widely talked about. But I realise now that through my knowing Roy I never had any of those strange homophobic leanings that many young lads around me seemed to have.

I never worried I was gay but I also never worried if anyone else was. In secondary school in the 1990s there was the casual gay joking that was deemed acceptable. Kids were called 'gay' for all sorts of reasons and the one or two kids that did seem like they were possibly gay were teased about it. But I never saw the joke really. I'm not suggesting I was some forward-thinking teenager who embraced diversity but somewhere along the line I picked up that 'gay' was no big deal. I guess I must have picked that up from Roy.

Oddly enough after school I encountered a lot more gay people than I might have had I not gone to a college where there were also a lot of young men in religious life who were training for the priesthood. It may sound like I'm making a sardonic joke here but I'm not. I'm simply stating the facts - in my years at college there were a lot of homosexual young men planning on joining the Church. How do I know, well many of them have subsequently come out. One of them even made a pass at me.

I'm recalling all of these things as we're now faced with the prospect of legislating on gay marriage the year after next. To me it’s a ‘no-brainer’. My life has educated me to a belief in gay marriage. From the jolly but sad Roy to my seemingly confused college colleagues, everything I've encountered tells me that being gay is something as random as eye colour or musical ability. What I've seen also tells me that treating gay people as being anything other than complete equals in society is to do a great disservice to human nature.

I have a wife and as of 20 months ago I also have a son. That boy is going to make history I tell you. He's going to be the first ever Everton-playing, E Street Band member who finds a cure for Cancer while on a sabbatical from his job at the UN. But I can't tell you yet if he'll be gay or straight. He likes Peppa Pig but he also likes to kick footballs and kicking things in general.

He gives his Mammy lots of hugs but also kisses me occasionally. Someday in the future I hope he meets someone he truly loves and wants to spend the rest of his life. If he wanted to get married that would be cool too. Hopefully he'd want his mammy and daddy there. And hopefully he's allowed to get married to whoever he wants - woman or man. Maybe he'll ask his Dad to say a few words at the party afterwards. And when I've thanked everybody for coming I'll ask them to raise a glass to Roy.