Legislation to undo historic convictions for consensual gay sex between men is to be introduced next month, Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan has said.
He made the commitment on Thursday as the Dáil debated legislation introduced last year by Sinn Féin TD Aengus Ó Snodaigh which aims to remove historic convictions which remain on the statute books despite the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1993.
It is estimated that at least 1,690 men were prosecuted and 941 convicted between 1950 and 1993 according to Oireachtas Library research.
The Bill was developed with a number of campaign groups and cosigned by Opposition parties and Independents including President Catherine Connolly when she was a TD.
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Ó Snodaigh said amending legislation “will allow us to put an end once and for all to the wrong committed for many years. Every day wasted is a day where we are failing to account for the nation’s dark history when it comes to the persecution of gay men.”
That could be traced back to 1634 legislation which remained law “until 1993 along with the other draconian laws from the Victorian era which criminalised men who engaged in consensual sexual activity with other men”.
Ó Snodaigh said that when homosexuality was decriminalised in 1993 there was “little acknowledgment then or since of the lives that were utterly destroyed by the horrific penal system that existed for generations or of the lived reality of being gay in this State and the climate of fear in which gay men lived or left Ireland to escape.
Decriminalisation came 10 years “after the brutal murder” of Declan Flynn in Fairview Park, which sparked the first Pride march in Dublin in 1983, he said.
His party colleague Paul Donnelly recalled that Fairview Park killing. He was “beaten to death by people who I knew, who I went to school with. And we didn’t understand because we had been programmed”, given information “all our lives that this was a horrible thing that these men were doing”.
He said he found it “really difficult when you hear some of the horrific language being used now by people on protests”, against immigration against LGBTQ, against educating children.
“We’re really going down a very dark road” and this was “something that we need every one of us to stand up against”.
The Minister acknowledged that he was prompted to action on the issue last year by Ó Snodaigh. He said a disregard scheme to undo historic convictions is being drafted by his department and is “more robust” than Sinn Féin’s Disregard of Historic Offences for Consensual Sexual Activity Between Men Bill.
He was “putting pressure on my officials” to have it ready for inclusion next month in the Miscellaneous Provisions Bill.
The Sinn Féin Bill includes an application-based process for the disregard of historic convictions and assigns responsibility for that to the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (Ihrec). O’Callaghan said his own scheme would appoint someone who would be “solely focused” on the scheme.
He acknowledged that while homosexuality was decriminalised more than 30 years the “malign effects continue for all those who were unjustly rendered criminals in the eyes of the State”.
The scheme will also apply “in a posthumous way and people will be able to apply for disregards in respect of deceased relatives”, the Minister added.
Social Democrats TD Pádraig Rice said these “archaic laws also had a major impact on the provision of public services, including HIV and AIDS prevention.
“The State must right the wrongs of the past and we are running out of time for some of these men. The Government must act urgently to disregard these historic convictions and deliver true equality for LGBT people in Ireland.”
Green Party leader Roderic O’Gorman said “what we are doing today is entirely consistent with a set of actions that Ireland has taken over the past 15 or 20 years to recognise and try to make some recompense to how our State treated other minorities and other vulnerable groups since we gained our independence”.
