Cathal Crowe warns marriage equality did not end prejudice

Deputy Crowell. Thank you. Glad to have speaking time in this debate. Minister, I was born in 1982 so I spent much of my the 90s in primary school and secondary school finishing up in the year 2000 and during all of those years the schoolyards were I think there were tougher places than they are now. I was a teacher before I became a TD and I think the school I taught in was quite soft, inclusive and everything but certainly when I was in school you shot insults from the hip like a gunslinger and usually those insults were homophobic and they were thrown around the schoolyard here there and everywhere every single day of the year. To many they were just brushed off it was water off a duck's back but it was years later I met some of my schoolmates and they would have said how those comments hurt because in those teenage adolescent years they were struggling with sexuality. It wasn't a time where you could just, nowadays some people don't come out at all, they just, they grow up, they meet people, they form relationships, they don't have to tell mom or dad or their circle of friends that they're gay, coming out isn't the thing but back then coming out was a colossal thing and for these people to be struggling in those years and everyone around them in the schoolyard throwing these insults and that was quite typical of the 90s and I'm not faulting the school system or parents or anything, I think it was a cultural thing. It's a cultural thing that to some large degree I think we've overcome and I was delighted years later when I was holding elected office I hope I and many more people of my era were able to atone for those schoolyard days when we went out and campaigned for marriage equality and naively as an ally of the LGBTQ plus community I thought that was it. This is the moon landing moment, they have marriage equality, this is fantastic and anything that's gone heretofore, the illegality of homosexual relationships, the criminalizing of people who were in same-sex relationships, all of that was behind us. We now recognize as a state that marriage equality was a thing that was cherished, respected. Not so it turns out because what I increasingly hear when people come to my clinics or when I meet them, when I speak with the gay community in Clare that life isn't getting easier for them, if anything it's getting more difficult. They would attribute some of this to the rise of the far-right, an intolerance of people who might have different color skin, a different religion, who love differently and that kind of intolerance has no place at all in modern Irish life. We're in the year 2026 and it has no place whatsoever in modern Irish life. I'm alarmed like others, I'm a 90-year-old member, I'm a teacher, I'm alarmed that one-fifth of my profession who identify as being LGBTQ plus, one-fifth of them have only come out in the school environment with their employers, with their colleagues and with the school patron. I think that's something we'd want to seriously look at. Someone should feel comfortable in their workplace to be who they are. They should be able in that staff room over a cup of coffee to talk about what they're doing with boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, what their weekend plans are, what their relationship is. All of that is quite commonplace and it shouldn't be that someone feels that they have to hide something to their employer, to their colleagues and it's quite perverse in that regard. Could I also just say that I think it's great in this house that, I mean we've had a Taoiseach, a Taoiseach who was open again. We've many members of this house who are married and who are very open. I think they don't maybe day-to-day consider it but they carry huge leadership roles as well within the LGBTQ plus community. But it does concern me as someone who follows sports avidly, that in elite sport we have very few people who have felt comfortable enough to come out and to be able to share with fans, supporters. They share so much of their lives now. It's not just what happens on the field or in the court or on the running track. So much of their lives now is lived out in social media or on the back pages of newspapers that have the sporting columns and yet they've to also, within so many sports, and I'm not just going to single out one here, that's Kim Corley, within so many sports they too feel the need to hide. And I think some of that may be down to terrorist chat and the way, to some degree it happens in Ireland but certainly in the UK when you go to soccer matches the insults roared out from the sidelines just isn't acceptable. I think we need to support athletes in particular because in music and in the arts there doesn't seem to be those same barriers and people can be who they want to be and I think politically, thankfully, in the year 2026 I think any member here who is gay is able to be that without any judgment or there's probably idiots online who give them grief but certainly colleagues here from all political persuasions wouldn't. Could I just make the point along the lines of the sports people, in August 2021 we're coming up on the fifth anniversary of that awful attack on Olympian Jack Woolley just down the city centre. Now he's someone who's represented our nation at the top level. He stood there many times at the podium in taekwondo, in his preferred sport, an outstanding young man. He was in Dancing with the Stars as well, an outstanding role model for young people and yet he was attacked just a couple of hundred yards down the streets here in Dublin for being who he is and that's wrong. So I just want to I suppose close on a positive note just to wish all who celebrate Pride, those who are part of the LGBTQ plus community, they'll have to shorten that or make it easier for us to rattle it off but I want to wish them all a very happy Pride and those who will march at the weekend and I suppose as someone who grew up in the 90s with a bit of maturity and getting away from that schoolyard and when the bell rings and all that happens in the schoolyard I would be absolutely thrilled and delighted if any son or daughter of mine came out in years to come and said dad I'm gay or I love some of the same sex as me but I'd hope they wouldn't have to. I hope we get to a point. A lot of people are in inclusive families where they don't have to say that. Hopefully that's a pathway forward for most but we do as those of us who sit in government and in opposition have to make sure the public policy reflects the kind of inclusive values that we have and the one thing that has jumped out by a few contributors here today is that whole idea that teachers, my own profession, that four-fifths of them, four-fifths of them who are gay feel they cannot say that in the work environment. That's something I think that we need to reflect on and that's something that the committee that I lead out, I'm chair of the Oireachtas Education U committee, working in tandem with the Minister I think it's something we need to do a body of work on because it's it's not acceptable. Thank you László Góra.