In April 2006, the Taoiseach, speaking at the opening of new offices of the Gay and Lesbian Equality Network, made an eloquent and apparently sincere statement on full equality for gay men and lesbians: "Our sexual orientation is not an incidental attribute. It is an essential part of who and what we are. All citizens, regardless of sexual orientation, stand equal in the eyes of the law. Sexual orientation cannot, and must not, be the basis of a second-class citizenship."
That speech was important because it made clear that gay and lesbian citizens are entitled to respect, not in spite of their sexuality, but as human beings with the same needs and desires for love as everyone else.
It is disappointing therefore, that the Government voted down the Labour Party's Civil Unions Bill last week and replaced it with a worryingly vague promise to present the heads of a bill on the subject by March 2008. While the Labour Bill would have granted gay and lesbian couples a status separate from but equal to marriage, the Minister for Justice Brian Lenihan promised no more than "the establishment of a system to allow same sex couples to register their relationships and thereby to subscribe to a variety of mutual rights and obligations." The rather apologetic tone of the Green Party spokesman Ciarán Cuffe, who had strongly supported the Labour Bill when it was introduced in the last Dáil, suggests that the intention is to give same-sex unions a limited recognition that will not have a status equal to marriage.
The rationale for retaining this form of second-class citizenship is, we are told, the advice of the Attorney General that the Constitution would not permit the kind of arrangement that the Labour bill proposed. There is room for some scepticism in this regard. The All-Party Committee on the Constitution and the Working Group on Domestic Partnership chaired by Anne Colley, both of which had access to expert legal advice, stressed that this solution would not raise constitutional problems.
To confine the recognition of same-sex unions to what Senator David Norris dismissed as a "dog licence" would be to entrench inequality. As the Colley group put it the "option of limited civil partnership for same-sex couples does not address status and equality issues". If last week's promise of legislation was more than a way of postponing an awkward issue, the Government must produce a Bill that provides gay and lesbian couples with the greatest possible degree of recognition compatible with the Constitution. It should start from the premise that those who are excluded from marriage by virtue of their sexual orientation are not excluded from love, from faithfulness, from citizenship and from respect.