NORTHERN IRELAND

In the fledgling stormont democracy, discovers Newton Emerson, some are more equal than others IrIsh stEw

THERE’s sO mucH TO DIscuss at the dawn of our shiny new power-sharing assembly, but what Northern Ireland has actually spent the past month discussing is homosexuality. This isn’t particularly surprising. With its domineering mothers, muscle Mary gangsters and toy-town soldier flute bands, Northern Ireland is plainly as gay as Christmas. The first bitch-slap of the new dispensation occurred just before the return of devolution, when former IRA gun-runner and Sinn Fein executive member Gerry McGeough stood for the assembly as an independent Catholic republican. “You would never get a leader of Sinn Fein condemning abortion, homosexual ‘marriage’ or anything of that nature,” he told the Observer. “But I, as an Irish nationalist and Roman Catholic, never want to see the day when there are abortion clinics in every market town.” While there is no doubt that Sinn Fein’s leftliberal posturing sits uneasily with the party’s innately conservative constituency, McGeough’s attempt to get Catholic Northern Ireland back on the straight and narrow fell flat on its virginal arse. He lost his deposit in the election despite weeks of high-profile media coverage and well-attended public debates. After the restoration of Stormont, in which various men pledged to respect each other to the strains of a Brian Kennedy torch song, the poofy province’s favourite subject predictably surfaced again. Marginalised anti-agreement figures in Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party and its associated Free Presbyterian church were seeking a wedge issue to snap traditional supporters out of their power-sharing euphoria and return them to the one true path. Observing that Northern Ireland’s new DUP culture minister Edwin Poots would have to approve funding for Belfast’s annual gay pride

12 new humanist July August 2007

parade, Free Presbyterian minister Ivan Foster challenged him to square the circle, then sat back to watch the fireworks. Instead, he got a damp squib. Poots is a religious fundamentalist who has previously spoken out against gay marriage. Yet he responded to Foster’s challenge by saying: “There are laws in this country and they have to be observed, whether we like them or not.” Begrudging as this comment was, it represented a paradigm shift in conservative unionist thinking. Poots had placed the laws of man above the laws of God on matters of sexual morality, rendering unto Caesar that which he had previously rendered only unto Leviticus. A bitterly disappointed Reverend Foster withdrew to fulminate on his website, still blissfully unaware of the dangers of posting anything about sex on a blog called “The Burning Bush”. It is deeply ironic that the explosion Foster failed to trigger was finally detonated two weeks later by a Dublin-based music magazine. Hot Press is the Irish Republic’s answer to the NME, with added current affairs. Its political interviews are legendary for luring people into revealing somewhat more than they intended – most famously in the case of Irish premier Charles Haughey, who found his every utterance of “fuck” quoted gleefully verbatim. It was the unlikely figure of Ian Paisley Junior who walked into the Hot Press trap when he granted an interview to the May edition, ostensibly on the subject of his interest in motorbikes. Somehow, the conversation turned to homosexuality and Paisley said: “I am pretty repulsed by gay and lesbianism. I think it is wrong. I think that those people harm themselves and – without

Happy together now. Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness enjoy a surprisingly civil partnership

caring about it – harm society. I mean, I hate what they do. I think they should just free themselves from being gay. These are people in a country which previously had a very strong family value and moral fibre – and that is slowly but surely being eradicated. I’m not saying that is all the fault of people who’ve a gay and lesbian outlook, but all of that adds to the problems society goes through.” When this hit the newsstands all hell broke loose. It may be a clichéé to say that it became the subject everyone was talking about but it is possible to roughly quantify that assertion. Because nothing is music to an Ulsterman’s ears quite like the sound of his own voice, Northern Ireland has a myriad of radio and television phone-ins which draw a huge audience – the 57 per cent viewing share for Stephen Nolan’s television show is a genuine phenomenon in a multi-channel environment. The volume of text and e-mail responses to these programmes confirmed that the fuss over