“It is a brilliant show of strength of a group of people who are the most vilified and marginalised in wider society.”ĭublin Pride Ltd has a voluntary board and one paid staff member who is financed through a Dublin City Council grant.
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“Even though it’s evolving, I think vital,” Finnegan says. He mentions London Pride, which in his opinion has become just “another music festival” with an entry fee. “It’s very hard to match rallying cries with corporate brands,” Finnegan says. Sponsors this year include 2FM and Nissan. Pride now walks a tightrope of commerce and community. The majority of people dancing last year weren’t dancing because they were politicised about being gay, they were dancing because it was a great party.” “It’s interesting to see how it will grow as we become assimilated. Brian Finnegan, editor of ‘Gay Community News’, says Pride is evolving.
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Rooted in protest, Pride has grown into a huge public celebration. There was a sort of brazen quality to those public demos.” “They were extraordinarily exciting,” Walsh says of the early events, “You can imagine what it was like. Also that year, they picketed the Vatican embassy, on Navan Road in Dublin, decorating the railings outside with condoms. In 1987, lacking the resources for a march, activists hosted a kiss-in outside Leinster House. People were beginning to die from Aids-related illnesses and were getting ill. “By 1985, I think, people had become exhausted. “By 1983, coming on foot of the Declan Flynn Fairview Park march, it consolidated our angle to allow us to focus our righteous anger and energy into organising the first proper Pride march,” Walsh says. There were Pride events in 1981 when 2,000 balloons were released on St Stephen’s Green, and gay people who gathered for a picnic in Merrion Square were moved on by park attendants. He was in a group of about 60 people who “ran around town on a Saturday afternoon”, handing out pink carnations and a four-page booklet about the Stonewall riots of 1969, sparked by a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, in New York. “The court case transfixed and informed Pride that year,” Walsh says.
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His earliest memory of Pride is at a demonstration in Dublin in 1980, a few days after Senator David Norris began his constitutional action to decriminalise homosexuality. Tonie Walsh, the LGBT activist and founder of the Irish Queer Archive, was grand marshal at the 2008 Dublin Pride parade.
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For activists it’s a show of strength, an opportunity to articulate the rights that still need to be fought for: full marriage equality the freedom for teachers in Catholic schools to be open about their sexuality and gender recognition of transgender people.įor attendees it can be a chance for a diverse community to bond and celebrate.įor the organisers it’s a tough gig that needs to be many things to many people. It was another 10 years before homosexuality was decriminalised in Ireland, and since then a slow creep of legislative, social, and cultural change has seen lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people emerge from the shadows, a demonised minority fighting for acceptance and equality. Their response, which many refer to as the capital’s first gay-pride march, spawned three decades of marches, protests, celebrations and rallies. The brutal killing of Declan Flynn, a young gay man, in Fairview Park in Dublin 30 years ago, outraged gay people in the city.