We seemed for a while there to be at war with ourselves. At war with our sisters and brothers, our friends, our children, our citizens. Apparently we thought it was ok to round them up and point at them as something other, a separation from us, an alien body within the mainframe, as opposed to a vital part of us, cleaved to us by the bounds of family and those things we allege make a nation, indivisible from us because they are us and us them.
We went to war with a group so used to being abused and scorned that they have endured this for so long it may even have felt normal. How much a toll it must have taken on our citizens who were gay to have their identities so horribly questioned by creeps with a fuzzy religious agenda. What mental health issues there must be from posters mushrooming on the lamp-posts haranguing them as lesser Irish people. The No campaign have been waging war on our citizens for decades but at least now they have confessed their bitterness and laid bare their bile. We know who they are.
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Make no mistake a vote to discriminate against gay people’s equality was homophobic. It is the definition of homophobia. For whatever reason a consensus grew that pointing this out was more damaging than helpful to the Yes campaign.
Maybe that was the case. Maybe it was better to love bomb the electorate than remind them that it was racist or sectarian to vote against equal rights in the US and Northern Ireland and it’s homophobic now to do the same in Ireland.
Maybe it was counter-productive to point out that the taxi driver who proclaims “I’m not racist but…” and the person who says “I’m not homophobic but gay people don’t deserve equal rights” are the same person. Maybe that’s your Ireland and you’re welcome to it, but you should have the courage to embrace your homophobia and call it what it is. It turns out most people’s Ireland is a different, better place.
Whatever the result of this referendum was going to be something fundamental had changed and it’s not going back. We won’t know the full amazing impact of this Yes vote for years to come. The No Campaign still control almost all our schools and hospitals though so don’t doubt that their war isn’t over. They’ll continue to wield their influence on education and health policy and focus their deep resources there. This is a turning point but not the end.
For the rest of us there is a possibility that this moment develops into a movement and Ireland changes from the Ireland of the last two decades into a country that cares about all its people equally – the maternity wards, the elderly homes, the kids in creches and the homeless, the jobless and the working poor, the emigrants and the immigrants. That maybe 100 years on we finally do cherish all our people equally. We’ve won this war. It’s time to win the peace.
