The Blindboy Podcast - LIVE PODCAST

Episode Date: July 7, 2018

A conversation with with longtime Irish LGBT activists Will St Leger and Tonie Walsh Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Merry Daytime, you perpetual Brendons. Welcome to episode 39 of the Blind Boy Podcast. This is going to be a live podcast. If you want to hear the proper podcast hug episode, number 38, I'll release that there on Wednesday, so give that one a listen. This podcast is a separate one it's going to be a live podcast the reason I'm doing this is live podcasts are a different mood to the regular Wednesday podcast you know they're not as relaxing they're just as fun but it's a different energy

so I figure I'll release the live podcast every so often so this one uh it took place in clanmel there during the week and the reason I'm putting it up is I bought a new recorder a zoom recorder and I'm very happy with the fidelity on this particular live podcast I got a individual feed from the microphones on stage and then also a stereo two signal mic in the crowd so you have the intimacy of and clarity of being on stage but then a sense of the room as well because it was kind of there was about 300 people there it was fairly busy but it was great crack um so anyway before we go into the live podcast listen to Wednesday's episode obviously subscribe to the podcast

leave a review share it amongst your friends if you'd like to contribute to the podcast Patreon please do patreon.com forward slash the blind buy podcast if you'd like to give me the price of a pint once a month please do if you don't want to it's grand listen for free no hassle

trying to think is there anything else i needed to fucking say before i go into the live podcast oh yeah i have to put an advert in the middle of this thing, because that's how the Acast software works. So what we might do now is, let's try and get the Ocarina pause out of the way early, so that when you listen to the live podcast, it's not interrupted by, we'll say fucking, actually, do you know what as well? The British Army will not stop advertising on this podcast.

I've made several requests from ACAST to stop the British Army advertising on this podcast. But they won't. And I don't know why. Probably my demographics in England. I have working class listeners in England. And the British Army are circling them like vultures. Saying, come on, have a bit of patriotism, come over to Afghanistan, do some bad shit. Expand the colonial empire under a new name, we'll call it democracy.

So, if the British Army do advertise on this podcast, fuck the British Army. podcast, Fuck the British Army. The British Army in 1920 in Croke Park in Dublin, the British Army, they invaded the pitch during an All-Ireland final, opened fire on the crowd and the unarmed crowd and the unarmed Gaelic football players on the pitch and they killed 32 people in cold blood in Ireland in 1920 in 1972 in Derry in the north of Ireland

there was a march for civil rights for Catholics because Catholic civilians did not have proper rights in the north of Ireland in the fucking 70s. Because of the British government. So the British army opened fire on a bunch of unarmed civilian protesters. And they killed 28 unarmed civilians.

That's the British army did that. One of their greatest hits. In the early 1970s in the north of Ireland, there was a covert squad of the British Army called the Military Reaction Force. And they basically just dressed like civilians and did drive-by shootings on civilians and murdered people. They were legally allowed commit murder on innocent unarmed people and the reason they did this was because the IRA was taking its fight to the British army and the British army figured how about we do a lot of drive-by shootings in Catholic areas and then the RA will think that that was the UVF and what we'll

actually do is start a sectarian war to distract the IRA's efforts against the British army so the British army did that too um now fair play to the British army on the Hitler stuff all right fair play to you on that but like just in Ireland the level of massacres and you know murder of civilians by an operator of a fucking state and I know what you're thinking

the IRA did a lot of bad shit too they did they absolutely did I'm not fucking pro IRA at all especially the provisionals but the IRA at least were going

well you know we're a paramilitary organisation and we actively engage in terror at least they're honest about it the British Army are like no no no we're a defence of the realm we're honourable British Army

let's advertise on Blind Boys podcast and offer it to you as a career so go ahead advertise on my podcast British Army what a fucking like hezbollah started advertising on the podcast it'd make international news do you know or the plo are they still around or etta they're gone but you know what i'm saying bit of hamas hamas coming onto the podcast to advertise

be on Sky News but the British Army oh not a bother let's come into your space there where you're trying to listen to funny stories and mental health and yeah yeah well you're listening to that Sherlock we'll pay you there to go

over to Afghanistan and do some shit yeah that's normal that's perfectly acceptable fuck off so anyway let's go into the live episode this took place in Clonmel and it had the it felt like a novena because it was in the middle of a car park in a marquee on a summer's evening and everyone was gathered round to listen to people speak, as you do with Novenas, which is a kind of a weird tradition in Ireland, except on this night, and what I love about this live podcast, I interviewed two very, very important people within LGBT and queer activism in Ireland, and both of them grew up in Clanmel and they grew up in

Clanmel when being gay was illegal and I just I feel very humbled to have done this event in their hometown to return to a public space in their hometown in 2018 where these two

lads can speak about being queer, being uh what they went through and what they're doing now in their life experiences in the same town where it was illegal when they were growing up so that was a massive privilege for me to have done so i'll stop talking now oh shit we got to do the ocarina pause okay here's the Ocarina Paws for a digital advert to be inserted. And if it is the British Army, well, jokes on ye, lads. The first O-Men, I believe, Witness the birth. Bad things will start to happen. Evil things of evil. It's all for you.

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God bless. And I'm going to bring on my guests. And my guests are two long-term activists for LGBT rights in this country. They've been at it for a long time. So I've got Tony Walsh, who is the founder of the Irish Queer Archive. And I've got Will St. Laser, who's an activist, an artist. And I'd like to invite them to the stage, wherever the fuck they are. How's it going? Isn't this fucking fabulous?

The tent. Hello. And Blind Boy in Clonmel. How savage is that? At the Junction Arts Festival. You're from Clonmel, Tony, you are. Are you living here? No, I moved here at the age of four in 1964.

You can do the math. No, I moved here at the age of four in 1964. You can do the math. And so we moved here, and we were called Black Foreigners. My dad was from Dungarvan, and my mum was from Rathmines. But we were called Black Foreigners when we moved here.

That was a sort of shtick in the 60s. And I actually left 30 years ago when Star Wars was on in the Regal Cinema. And when I came back 10 years ago, after a 30-year break, Star Wars was on in the IMC. It was quite amazing, actually. It was like, everything's changed, but it's still the same.

I arrived at the same time as you left. You have a client-mail connection as well, haven't you? Yeah, I lived here from 1980 to 1991. So what's the draw with Clanmail? My dad was in the civil service. My dad was in the forestry, so we moved around quite a bit. So I

lived in Ballyporeen and Donegal and we came to Clanmail. So your dad came to Clanmail to guard orchards. Yeah, he did, yeah. Yeah, so I came here with a Camp Doddy Goll accent at the age of about nine, which has kind of beaten out of me. That has been beating out of you, yeah.

Beaten out of me in the first week of school. And I disarmed the assailants with logic by saying, if I was really a Protestant why am I at a Christian brother's school why are we at St. Peter and Paul's school then and they're like oh right okay Grant

you're right then fine the logic did work it makes sense they should have held up a piece of bread to you and asked you is this the body of a 2000 year old carpenter or is it merely a symbol that's how you find out if you're dealing with a Protestant and asked you, is this the body of a 2,000-year-old carpenter, or is it merely a symbol? That's how you find out if you're dealing with a Protestant.

Actually, if I'd been offered a yoke in 1978 when I was doing my Leaving Cert, I might have stayed. So, before we continue, because how I kind of do these is I tell the internet that I'm going to interview you, and then the internet gives me questions, because I find that the internet is a wonderful resource of various questions, rather than just me at home figuring out questions, you know? But tell me a bit about, Tony, what crack are you up to?

Tell us about the Irish Queer Archive. And as well, you're a bit of a legend of a DJ as well. You've been going back a while DJing, so tell us about that. Sure. So I came out in 79. 79 I just finished a relationship with a French woman who actually discovered she was gay as well it was like the blind leading the blind and and the Gay Liberation Movement was about five years old at that stage so like any night you know what was Gay Liberation Movement like as in around the world or just Ireland? No, in Ireland.

So like any conceited 19-year-old, I just wanted to go out and change the world. And like late 70s, early 80s, Ireland was just dirt poor, loads of emigration, creatively very interesting, but socially shocking. It was a horrible time. Like, I mean, I've had friends who were murdered, who died of AIDS, people were murdered, whatever. So I I mean, I've had friends who were murdered, who died of AIDS, people who were murdered,

whatever. So I've seen, I've been either involved or been a witness to all of those developments over the last 40 years. And this was as a result of their sexuality? Yeah. Well, also, you know, here's the thing. I think anyone who feels other, any Irish person, man or woman, gay or hetero, who feels other,

going back to the foundation of the state, you know, blame Dev and his Fianna Fáil henchmen. But here's the thing. We built a state in 1922 and we created this liberation myth, a founding myth. And it had no place for people, for people who challenged the norms at the time. The norms at the time were informed by a very rigid Roman Catholic morality. And it doesn't matter whether you're gay or hetero, if you didn't fit that norm, it wasn't a nice society. So people left. I mean, gay and lesbian people left because of the laws,

because we were criminal. Well, lesbians weren't criminal, but people left because it just was a hostile environment. And people continued leaving all during the 20th century. And I also think, you know, if anyone who feels other would have found it very difficult to live here up until, say, 15 or 20 years ago.

Even what you said there about the foundation of the state, you know, you look like one of the greatest Irish patriots, Roger Casement, and they turned his back on him foundation of the state. You look like one of the greatest Irish patriots, Roger Casement, and they turned his back on him because of the Black Diaries. Yeah, well, you couldn't be... The thinking was you couldn't be a Republican and gay or lesbian, even though eventually his diaries were...

And also, too, because his diaries challenged the notion of people being exuberant in their sexuality. He's talking in his diaries about copping off and all of his interpersonal relationships, both emotional and sexual, and that was just a bridge too far for lots of Republicans.

And I think he's only very recently being embraced. Very recently. Yeah, yeah. Very recently. And only because of people very loudly shouting and going, hold on a second,

Roger Casement was a bit of a legend. Oh, totally. Like, are you familiar with how much of a legend Roger Casement was? You know who Roger Casement is, bit of a legend. Are you familiar with how much of a legend Roger Casement was? You know who Roger Casement is, yeah? He was one of the leaders in 1916. And the thing with Casement is that he was...

Was Casement Protestant? I think he was Protestant. He was from Antrim, our country town. Protestant, but he would have subscribed to, we'd say, wolf-tone-type republicanism, it transcends sectarianism it doesn't matter whether you're a catholic or protestant you're fucking Irish and he was Sir Roger Casement

he was considered a legend amongst the Brits Roger Casement is the father of modern human rights he went to the Congo in the late around 1890 no about 1910 and exposed a bunch of human rights abuses that the Belgians were doing in the Congo. And it was the first time that someone had really done that

in the world, that someone from a Western country had stood up and said, hold on a second, have you seen what they're doing in Africa? Roger Casement started that, so he had huge standing amongst the Brits. And then he fell in with Padraig Pearce and them and used kind of his privilege as a knight to help 1916 to happen. But then when Roger, when the rest of the leaders in 1916 were put up for execution,

there was an outcry for Casement to not be executed because he would have been at the time an international celebrity of sorts, you know. Casement would have been a figure of note. So a lot of famous actors and writers come out and said you can't execute Casement. So the Brits brought out what were called the Black Casement Diaries.

They turned out to be real but all it was really was just Casement writing about his affairs with lads. That's all it was. Oh, being a total sleazebag actually. But it was meant for just private consumption. Yeah, it was. Oh, being a total sleazebag, actually. But it was meant for just private consumption. Yeah, it was just for him. It was his text messages, you know what I mean?

But when this came out, when the Black Diaries came out, the public support around the world for Casement's execution ended because they're like, oh, fuck, he's gay. Everyone backed off, you know? And he's been written out of Irish history as such, you know? His role in 1916, he's up there with peers, if not higher.

Can I also just add to that, Blind Boy? Like, nurse, Dr. Kathleen Lynn, who set up Ireland's first children's hospital in 1919, she was second in command in 1916 when Connolly was injured in City Hall in Dublin, as a result of both her gender and her sexuality. She was a woman and she was a lesbian, and she was just written out of what we call

the foundation myths of the Irish state in 1922. Not unlike Elizabeth Farrell, Nurse Elizabeth Farrell, who was in the original photograph with Porrick Pearce, who also happened to be a woman and a lesbian, and her sexuality and her gender was inconvenient for the mythology that was created in the 1920s and 30s. So they literally airbrushed her out of the official photographs at the time. They didn't, they're fucks.

They weren't doing the airbrushing the photograph stuff, were they? Well, thankfully, some original photographs survived. But here's the best thing. It took us 100 years for the state to finally issue, on post issued, a stamp in honour of Dr Kathleen Lynn and Elizabeth O'Farrell during the 2016 celebrations. And it seems that we're finally, not unlike all the conversations that have been happening around repeal,

we're finally having a grown-up conversation about the type of society we have inherited and the unfinished business of building a socialist republic and also accommodating and acknowledging some of our heroes and some of our founding brothers and sisters from 100 years ago. There's a lot of unfinished business, but I'm really happy to see that we're having these conversations finally. Can you tell me a bit about the Irish Queer Archives?

That's actually a very important part of that process. The Irish Queer Archives goes back to the 1970s in the main where people, both activists and organisations started collecting stuff. Excuse me. In the mid-1990s

I approached a civil rights organisation in Dublin that was looking after and I said, listen, all this stuff is in black plastic bags, we need to do something with it. So, long story short, got together a bunch of... Yeah, what's in there? What's in the Irish Queer Archives? A quarter of a million press clippings covering every mention of homosexuality and lesbianism

published in any Irish newspaper north or south of the border, in national newspapers, consumer magazines and provincial newspapers, photographs, badges, buttons, private papers, journals going back to the 1950s, 30 lesbian gay periodicals published on the island of Ireland that haven't even been digitised yet, about 700 international magazines, the earliest is a US magazine called One from the 1950s. And there's a load of social history, what I call ephemera, that's actually out in storage in Sandtree in Dublin because the

National Library just doesn't have the resources to actually catalogue it. Are you happy with the support you're getting from the States? This is fucking important. Should I answer that question? Yeah, it's on the podcast, man. It's not RT.

You can say what you want. No. What are you doing? No, of course I'm not. But here's the thing. When the National Museum of Ireland moved to Collins Barracks in Dublin, they hoovered up what available money was

there for our national cultural institutions. And the other thing is, I think, even though we sent all this stuff, so I've curated this material for the last, I don't work for the National Library, I've curated it for the last 10 years, 20 years independently, so I go around the country asking people to donate stuff or whatever,

see stuff that's interesting, peel stickers off lampposts, whatever, pick up theses, reports and everything else, social history. When we handed it over ten years ago, Colm Tobin, our celebrated writer, made a very important point. He said, regardless of your sexuality, regardless of your gender, you cannot write a history of modern 20th century Ireland without accessing the Irish queer archive. All our histories are reflected in it because it actually is about change and it's

about how we embrace, how mainstream Ireland embraced the concerns and fears and anxieties of its sexual minorities. But there are some moves afoot to basically get the National Library to pony up some cash and do something with it. And hopefully that will happen. Here's the other thing too, is post-marriage ref, post-decriminalisation. Decriminalisation happened 25 years ago. It's been all over the news.

Can you tell us about that now? Because me, even at my age, I cannot fathom the fact that being gay was illegal. Well, here's the thing. And you remember it. I don't know, do you remember it. Up to 25 years ago, up to 25 years ago, two men having intercourse would get 10 years in prison.

Two men holding hands or kissing in public or in private would get two years in prison, which is what sent Oscar Wilde to jail and broke him at the age of 47. Was it disenforced in the 50s, 60s? It was Leo Varadkar, when he was doing the formal apology in the door, which I was there for,

actually talked about the corrosive effect of the law, because up until he was born, he quoted the fact that he was born in 1979, and in the five years before he was nine, nearly... Sorry, in the ten years before he was nine, between 1969 and 1979, 470 odd men

were sent to prison. The Labour Party did a commission on Portleish Prison in the 1957 and they found that a third of the popular, a third of inmates in Portleish Prison in 1957 were in there for consensual

sexual offences under this dodgy British legislation. It was a British legislation? Yeah, yeah. The 1861 offence... We might have just kept the railroads and then given them that bit back. But here's the thing we rarely think about

is the corrosive effect of the law. It's not just about how many men went to prison every year. Like, when I came out in 1979, six men went to prison that year for consensual out in 1979, six men went to prison that year for consensual sexual offences, not only were their lives ruined, their family lives were ruined. In some cases, they lost their jobs. It had a corrosive effect on a whole load of people, and that's why the government apology was about acknowledging not just the hurt and distress that was caused to men who were imprisoned, but also the shame and stigma sy'n cael ei achosi i ddynion sy'n cael eu hysbysebu, ond hefyd y llyfrau a'r stigma

a oedd yn cael ei achosi i'w teuluoedd. Y llyfrau a'r stigma o'u homosegwiaeth, ond hefyd y ffaith eu bod yn cael eu hysbysebu. Ond ni ddim yn siarad, hyd at y diwedd, ni ddim yn siarad am yr effaith, yr effaith ddiddorol ar lesbion a hefyd unrhyw un, a bisegwyr. Ac yn y hwyth o'r ddynion 20, rydym yn gwybod bod llawr o bobl wedi gadael i'r wlad hwn and bisexuals, and right throughout the 20th century, we know that thousands of people left this country to go to more socially liberal places like Amsterdam or San Francisco or New York or Berlin or whatever, because there was no place for them here. And the effect of the law was to create this cloud of criminality

that basically oppressed Irish society up until 1993. And how that played out was it stopped Irish society from basically embracing our reality and just embracing our existence. And to give you an example of how this worked, my first journalist job for Out magazine, Ireland's first gay magazine, I'm in my mid-20s, my first job is interviewing Mary McAleese.

I didn't even get a fucking byline. I was really pissed off with that. Two pages and they didn't put my name on it. But anyway. But here's the thing. We put a radio ad and Elma Kafti was one of our journalists. This is 1987. We ran a radio ad in RTE and RTE said, we're not running the radio ad because the word gay is in it. We said, okay, we'll take the word gay out. They said, we're not running the ad. And I said, okay, what's the story here? And they said, and we have the letter that they wrote to us.

It's in the National Library, in the Irish Courier-Octave. They said, here's the thing. If we run this radio ad, which is a very simple radio ad that says, Out Magazine, Ireland's first gay newspaper magazine, available in all alternative bookshops, Nell McCafferty, blah, blah, blah, contributor, blah, blah, blah. They said, if we run this ad, it will be seen to encouraging criminal activity.

And that was the get-out. So people used the law as a get-out clause to basically not embrace us and also to legitimise people's violence, to legitimise people's bigotry, to legitimise people's hate. So it plays out like that. So I think sometimes when we think about these horrible, nasty Victorian legislation and the

impact that they have, it's not just about how many men went to prison. Too many men went to prison, had their lives ruined and their extended families. But it was just the existence of the law so comprehensively criminalized all forms of homosexuality and any engagement with homosexuality that just people didn't want to know and you see when decriminalisation happened in 1993 the first thing that you see happen

decriminalisation happened in 1993 yeah so up until 1993 if I was walking down the streets of Clonmel holding hands with Will we could have got two years in prison for just holding hands. Fucking hell. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I deserve to be more angry than I actually am.

But anyway, I've let it pass. That's one of the reasons I left this country. Because in 1993, right after college, I was like, I am out of here. Gone. Well, it's like this country is going to take away the best years of my life. Well, I had a great time in London too. You mentioned Nell McCafferty there. Did you know Nell?

Yeah, I was doing a talk for Republican Youth in Derry last February and I texted Nell to say that I was speaking in the gas house and she said yeah I have to go down and see my house in the bog site, it's a really authentic house in the bog site and she just gave me a fucking long list of everybody

including Seamus Eaney's house that I had to go and see and I thought you're creating a little fucking mini tour for me I'm supposed to be here just talking you know and getting a little selfie with Gerry Adams and she was actually quite emotional about it as well yeah I actually think here's the thing oh sorry for saying this now

because you know I love you but Nell is a fabulous woman she is one of the icons of feminism and she also happens to be lesbian and Irish society did not do good by her I did not do good by her, and did not do good by her generation. And we have a lot of catching up to do, and we really have to own our collective hurt and the damage we did to that generation and generations before them. Do you know that story about Nell

and women not being able to order pints and then she had this genius protest idea do you know about that? So Nell McCafferty and a bunch of other feminists in Ireland right it wasn't illegal to serve a woman a pint

it just wasn't done it was seen as completely unwomanly so if a woman went to a bar and was like can I have a pint, it just wasn't done. It was seen as completely unwomanly. So if a woman went to a bar and was like, can I have a pint? The barman would either go, no or you can have two halves. Seriously. So Nell

in like, I think it was the mid 80s or early 90s, went on like a bar tour with a bunch of feminists. And what they would do is they would all go to the bar and order a round of shots. Right? So they'd all get a bunch of feminists and what they would do is they would all go to the bar and order a round of shots so they'd all get a round of shots do the shots

then order pints and the barman would go, I can't give you pints but they figured out in Irish law if you get an incomplete order you don't have to pay for it so they were going around to these pubs going I'll take the fucking shots.

If you won't give me the pint, grand. I'm not paying for the fucking shots. At least she got the drinks. Because I remember being in a bar on Dame Street in Dublin in 1981. I was 20 with my first boyfriend from Kuluk. And we were in the middle of our first drink, and the manager came over and says, you guys, out.

I don't want your sort of people in here. And it's like how travellers feel when they're fucked out of a place. And there was simply no... Well, first of all, we were criminals. But there was zero anti-discrimination legislation in place. The Equal Status Act, you know, was still a glimmer. It didn't come in until 2000.

So bar people could legitimise their bigotry like that. You know, it was quite extraordinary. And it is of a piece. What I'm describing is of a piece of what you're describing with Nell. It's all interconnected, it really is. And a lot of it is around gender. That's the funny thing. And Ireland at that time as well, you're describing Ireland that was in the fucking EU.

So were we exceptional as an EU country to have this type of shit going on? We were the only country. We were the only country in the EU to have laws that were as regressive as the Soviet Union.

David Norris took 11 years with Mary Robinson as a senior counsel to actually go through all the court system and then to the European Court of Human Rights. And I said to him, actually, I remember just before the European Court of Human Rights in 1988 gave him his decision, I said, what are you going to do if you lose? He goes, I'm going to go up to fucking Strasbourg and I'm going to throw fucking Brett through the court house. And of course he won his case and actually I have a really funny story to share with you because the day

he won his case, David, Mary Robinson and I, who was in awe of, I was 28 at the time, we went for a celebratory lunch to the Doral restaurant and we had like a battered fish and chips and mushy peas with a glass of white wine and then wrote a little press release but here's the thing, the government

dragged their feet for another fucking five years before changing the laws Who were they afraid of upsetting? Catholic gardens the spirit of De Valera Yeah Well there were some Fianna Gael people who were against it too Fianna Gael, like yeah Catholic gardens. Yeah. The spirit of De Valera. Yeah. Well, there was some Fianna Gael people who were against it too.

Fianna Gael? Like, yeah, what parties were the ones that were bolstering this law? Well, it was the law of Fianna Fáil. But, like, you know, I was looking back at it because the apology was out, you know, last week. They were talking about that. But I was looking back at the speeches on the RT archives, the speeches that were made on the DOL the night that they passed the legislation. And yeah, there were lots of, there was Fianna Gael people in there as well saying, now I'm going to quote the person, I'm going to body quote them. He's like, what's next? Are we going to see now

the acceptability of seeing these people, homosexuals, holding hands in public, kissing? It's like, that's not going to be acceptable so it's fucking who? I'd have to find out the guy's name before I quote him I have to remember, but it was a Fianna Gael actually, I tweeted at Leo the quote because I wanted to

see what Leo would say there was that Fianna Gael counsellor, TG from Loud Brendan McGahan, who described gay homosexuals as sheep-shaggers in 1987. And here's the thing, because Will, of course, is all about sexual health advocacy. I mean, he's the icon of sexual health advocacy. Here's the thing, you know, you've got these people who are marginalising, criminalising people,

and then that makes it even more difficult to have grown up conversations around how we deal with sexual health, how we deal with the AIDS crisis or whatever, all that sort of stuff. And yeah, because Will, you're a street artist, but you're also an activist. You chained yourself to the doll or something for marriage equality, didn't you? It was for the civil partnership bill just before... Can you tell us about that? It was for the civil partnership bill just before the civil partnership bill was about to be passed. That was in 2009 or 2010. We've been doing a lot of campaigning on that.

I mean, I've been campaigning on marriage equality since about 2007. So, you know, 2015 had passed, but that's a long time to be there. But we absolutely flatly rejected the civil partnership bill because it was half measure. And there was lots of groups at the time, and they're pinkwashed out of history now. I noticed that in the sort of marriage equality movement. But there are groups out there like LGBT Noise who brought thousands of people together on the street. But we were kind of a splinter group, myself and Lisa Connell set up this direct action group because I have a background with Greenpeace. I was with Greenpeace for five years.

So I'm not afraid of, I don't know, frontline nonviolence activism. And I said, right, you know what we're going to do? The day that they go to pass it, we're just going to chain ourselves to the door. In fact, you know what? There's a good plan. I'll climb up in the gates of the door and you chain yourself to the gates and I I climb up on top

so I dressed up as a builder and walked over to the gates of the door that was for subterfuge yeah

and Lisa was chaining herself to the gates of the door and she could hear the guard saying what's that builder doing what's he doing

what's he there's no building work going on builders having a bit of a tough day and it took off yeah and i took off the tabard and the hard hat and um yeah and i held up a pride pride flag that said marriage rights are equal rights and stayed up there for about two and a half hours but the police were good about it to me i'll be honest you had a lovely story you told me a story before about a particularly sound guard that day yeah he was really nice because he was saying he was an older guard

and he obviously wanted to kind of bring the situation to an end and he was like he was looking and he goes, he learned my name obviously from the people down there and he's like William, William, William, would you not come down, come on and I was going, no no, it's a protest man it's a protest, I'm not coming down, I'm not doing it for the last I'm not

bored but you know it's weird about Ireland because you know I these things are like you know with direct action like this I mean you're making a point so maybe it's more direct comms but uh you know buzz O'Neill was our sort of a guy on the day he was negotiating with the guards and the buzz is a gas cunt yeah he is yeah and uh so he was on the phone to me he's like so he goes we got loads of tv you got loads of papers whatever and i said yeah okay well it's time to come down now and i said tell the cops if they bring the ladder over a half one i'll come down so i came down and we got arrested whatever went brought me to the police station

whatever i'm young i'm used to that kind of stuff, you know. Guilty people always sleep in cells, by the way, because they just don't care, you know. Innocent people will pace around, you know. The guilty will always go asleep, so I went asleep. And the guard who was arresting me, really nice guy, but later on that night I went to Panty Bar and got a kiss off off panty for that

but there was a girl came up to me in the bar and she's like she goes i saw you in tv today and i was like oh yeah it was cool that was great and she goes and that was my brother lorkin who arrested you she's a lesbian like it was like her brother was a cop who arrested me you know this city this country is too small which in a sense brings us to the whole point that we're we we are like we're more connected and we're people than we think you know when you talk about people um or otherness whatever you're actually probably talking about somebody who's actually in the room with you at the time so if you're talking about i don't know something like that i'm passionate about say like uh sexual health and whatever you know and you're talking about, I don't know, something that I'm passionate about, say, like sexual health and whatever, and you're mentioning something in work at Kitchen about STIs or people's sexuality or gender expression, you have to realize there's somebody around in earshot of you who that affects.

So we can't see each other as a separate islands. It's a community. It is, yeah. Can you tell us about ACT UP? So ACT UP is a AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power is a group that started in 1987

in response to the AIDS crisis in America. Our chapter, there's many chapters around the world, that kind of fell away towards the end of the 90s as the combination retrovirals came in and people who had access to retrovirals didn't die in the huge numbers they don't. So anybody today who is living with HIV,

who's on effective treatment, which means they're taking their antiretrovirals every day, not only are they going to live as long as anybody else and have a perfectly normal life, but the medicine has got so good that anybody who's living with HIV on effective treatment cannot pass on HIV sexually. It is impossible. And there's been a number of studies being done. One of the studies, the most important one, the partner study in 2014, 888 couples, 58,000 acts, condoms acts of sex between HIV positive partner and negative partner, one single transmission of HIV. Now, that piece of information there is going to

be the most important piece of information you're going to learn about HIV. Now, that piece of information there is going to be the most important piece of information you're going to learn about HIV because it... It helps to stigmatise them, I assume, or something like that. It does. It does. But the thing is, the problem we have with it is that it goes against the status quo, what we've learned in the past about it. And that's really important, so we need to think about that. But also... What's this... What is... What's HIV hiv in ireland today what's it like what like these retrovirals are talking about yeah for a hiv positive person in ireland

what is the access like for those drugs is it expensive does no it's very good it's it's it's it's it's treated like a chronic illness so it's really like yeah it's a manageable condition and good access and good care it's the care in ireland is very very good and so there's no reason why people shouldn't feel like they're being looked after. But society doesn't look after. The state looks after people medically but we don't look after people who are living with HIV

compassionately, understanding, destigmatising. Not at all. Will you just talk to Blind Boy and the crowd about the reality of PrEP? Because here's the thing. I'm HIV positive, and I take one pill every day, paid for by the state, which costs €43 per pill every day.

And it allows me to have a normal life, and I will probably die of a heart attack or something. It's not without its problems. I mean, okay, there's increased cholesterol and lots of other things. I'm in danger of getting what's called a camel hump, which I'll hopefully avoid. And I feel for every day in the shower. I'm going, is it growing? Is it growing? Do I need surgery at this point?

No, but seriously, I actually think we need to start having a conversation, which Will is leading with some of his peers in Dublin and Cork we need to have conversation about the access to prep which you'll explain because actually we shouldn't have to get to a point where people are on antiretroviral therapy we shouldn't have the huge numbers of people who are coming h3 positive in this day and age and the reason we don't is because the reason we do is because we have a shy sexual health education program in this country. Well, it just so happens... That was one of the questions from the internet.

They want to know what you think about the current state. I was... And I'm talking 1999. I was taught sexual education by a priest. And it was basically just, don't wank. That was it. That was it. And he really neglected talking about any of the important stuff.

And if you have a wet dream, it means you slept with the devil in your sleep. Mine was... My sexual health education in 1978 was a sheepish teacher in the high school going with a sort of diagram, not a photograph. This is a vagina and this is a penis. Stay away from them both. We weren't even told what happened in between all of that we were sort of allowed make it up for ourselves to just watch some dogs doing

it on the street or whatever so uh i actually brought some yolks with me tonight here so i have a yolk in my pocket but this is the this is prep this is the um it's called pre-exposure prophylaxis i take it every day and it is a I mean it's based around antiretrovirals based around the science of antiretrovirals that is a HIV prophylactic yeah that no that is a pre exposure prophylactic so that is what does that mean that is that is a drug you take before you have sex so it is it prevents you from getting HIV fuck this pill this pill cost me I get this online because you can buy it in the pharmacies with a

prescription you can only get it available since December that's the gay male pill that is the gay male pill hold on a second now it's not just about the gays it's about sex workers it's about anybody who feels they might be exposed themselves to HIV

so it's about IV drug users gay or hetero it's about sex workers gay or het So it's about IV drug users, gay or hetero, it's about sex workers, gay or hetero, it's about gay men, it's about anyone who might consider that they would be exposed to HIV. What about drug users and needers? What about that? Or is it just sexual intercourse? To be honest with you, all the studies that have been done on PrEP, because PrEP is fairly new in a sense. From 2012, it was approved by the FDA in America. It's been used in Europe for the last five years. Are they giving it to people in Africa?

No, because PrEP would be a pre-exposure prophylaxis. There they tend to focus more on testing, and condoms would still be one of the things they would do. But condoms have been there as a significant part of sexual health, but you have to understand, condom use, whether you like it or not, and people say, why don't people just use condoms condom use has been falling since the late 90s and like you know I can say we can all say here there have been times that we have used condoms incorrectly or inconsistently and we have

to be honest about ourselves we do that in my case if that if that happens then I know I've got this to back me up and that's the reason why so this costs um this cost me uh 30 euro for a month supply now that's from buying it um online and it is so what if you rock up to the pharmacist and climb mill how much that can it will cost me about 100 euro for a month supply now thing is, we are working at the moment to try and get PrEP as part of the drug payment scheme under the HSC. Could you get it on a medical

card? No, you can't. So sex workers, essentially, who would really really need this. Anybody who's at risk from HIV should have access to PrEP. Here's the thing. Why do we need it now? Well, Ireland is going through and has been for the last four years,

and it's time to wake up a HIV crisis. There is a new diagnosis, a new report diagnosis in Ireland every 18 hours. That's 10 a week. That's 500-plus people a year. And we have been trying to wake this country up about that crisis. The government don't want to talk about it.

It took Simon Harris 575 days because I counted in office before he actually talked about HIV once. We have a leader in this country who culturally, medically and politically knows the importance of this and has said, is mute about it, one speech since he's been Taoiseach and they're dragging their feet about getting this drug approved and going through the process and ending HIV crisis in Ireland so that's my rant

Fair play On that subject there Will like Leo Radeker's a gay man. Something like that there. How do the gay community in Ireland feel about him? Well, he's evolving, for a start. He's a gay man who's evolving. I don't want to be cruel and say he's not yet woke,

but he's a late-30s gay man man who is evolving and I am prepared to be a little bit generous to him, only for so long, both as a gay man and as a politico, and see him sort of embrace the new realities we find ourselves in Ireland. I mean it's shocking that Ireland only founded its first sexual health education strategy in 2015. So the first time ever we've had a national sexual health education strategy. Not education strategy, health strategy. Sorry, sexual health strategy. Yes, of course, and the education that follows from that.

So it's no surprise we're still grappling to deal with teenage pregnancies. It's no surprise we're still dealing with rising levels of STIs, infections across the board, chlamydia, syphilis, whatever, whatever, whatever. And a lot of it is grounded in the fact that we have been the inheritors of a culture, again, informed by a very rigid Roman Catholic morality and ideology around sex and sexual behavior and sexuality where we we we've got to a stage where we are sex is so covered with shame and transgression and in our cases criminality and everything so actually the idea of maybe going for an SCI checkup is like it should be as it should be as ordinary as going for a fucking and to the dentist and actually should go for an SCI checkup without a lot more a lot less fear than going to the dentist and still we don't do that I

mean I try to last it lasted if I was to like we say with the lads in limerick race they're terrified of someone sticking a cotton bud down their car okay so this is the company can I say this straight off? Do you know what I mean? There are myths that permeate through, and I heard them as well when I was in the schoolyards of the schools around Clonmel. And the same myths around today, that guys, if you go in and you have an STI,

that there's some kind of weird... Punishment, like that? No, but literally, there is some sort of like cocktail umbrella that they stick down that does not happen i've gone for plenty sti tests that does not happen this is how it works these days you go into your sexual health uh you know you can do it online like the thing is you can how do you do that you piss on your keyboard yeah water electricity my favorites um now you buy the kits online now so you know what

it's a sample of urine and maybe a swab you can send it away yeah you send it away so complete discretion absolutely because that's the other thing like the two

like talking to the lads in the pub the two fears like I said someone's going to do the cotton bud down the fucking that doesn't work

doesn't happen doesn't happen and then the other fear is, I simply don't want to be there because people will see me there. Yeah, I know. So those are the two things, discretion and pain. That's the cultural change. Well, listen, hold on a minute.

We still have to hope that the infrastructure is in place. Like, last Christmas, I was in Clonmel, but I live here, but I was hoping to spend Christmas in Dublin, and I got a sort of dodgy rash somewhere, and I phoned up the SCI clinic in South Tip General, Western Road, and this is like about three or four days before Christmas Eve,

and they said, yeah, okay, describe your symptoms, blah, blah, blah. We're having a convo over the phone and everything, and she said, well, here's the deal. We've only got two and a half nurses. I said, two and a half nurses? What did you do with two and a half nurses. I said, two and a half nurses? What did you do with the third one? What is that about?

Two and a half nurses and yeah. The first appointment I can give you is late January. Basically four fucking weeks away and I'm going, nah, I'm going to have a drippy cock by that stage or something even worse, okay? That's not going to help at all. So the STI clinic in South Tip General on the Western Road in Clonmel

is open for an afternoon, one afternoon a week on a Wednesday. Sorry, not fucking good enough. So what's the other option? You go to your GP and spend 60 quid? Yeah, if you have that. That's the thing, if you have it. This is the thing we need to talk about as well.

If barriers, if income is a barrier, if any of these barriers that are put in front of people in terms of their sexual health are going to have an impact on people's lives. So, you know, with PrEP, anybody who needs it should be on PrEP because if they're not, they're probably going to get a HIV and they're probably going to be on more expensive drugs

and also have this highly stigmatised disease for the rest of their lives. Camel hub. Yeah, the camel hub. But the other thing as well, here's the thing. The government have been underfunding and cutting back on funding sexual health around this country

for years. And to give you an example, from 2009, because you know what what there's one of these areas that people don't talk about because even your td comes to your door yeah most people are going to be uncomfortable about that because then they'll go i don't want my td wanting to know why i'm asking about we don't talk about sexual health so therefore we're not going to fight for it this time we did and to give you an example and to be visible about it is a brave move well it is a brave move.

Well, it is. I mean, you know, some, you know. No, it's not really. Look, here's the thing. If you're exuberant about your sexuality, gay or hetero, and you enjoy having sex, then you should be responsible enough towards yourself and your partner, whether it's your husband or your wife or your lover

or a string of one-time affairs or whatever, whoever you're boning, at the end of the day, you know, it's about having respect for yourself and respect to the other person you're having sex with. And if you're going to do that on a regular basis outside of a monogamous relationship, then you go and get checked.

It's very simple. It's very fucking simple. I tell you what, there is a thing to be said here. Back in 1993, when I left this country, and it was just after criminalisation, whatever, but it meant nothing to me because I stayed in the closet and I didn't want anybody to know I was gay, whatever. So I went to London as an immigrant, OK?

So I went to London as an Irish immigrant, not knowing a single gay person, what gay sex was like, nothing like that. Luckily, because I had one teacher in 1987, Mr Crowley up in the tech, who gave us a 45-minute talk about HIV, how you could get it and how you could not get it, that stood to me.

Was that off his own back? Yeah, it was. He heard somebody made a joke about AIDS in the class, and he said, right, we're not doing science today, we're going to do a different type of science, we're going to talk about HIV, we're going to talk about AIDS. And that was him doing his duty. There's a bunch of young people here, they're not hearing it from anyone else, I'm going to do a different type of science we're going to talk about HIV we're talking about AIDS you know and that was him doing his duty for yeah it was young people here they're not hearing that anyone else I'm gonna do something good here and you know what we were we were all

ears because he was talking about everything that we wanted to know about it including vaginas and and bums and everything you know we were like you know when you're 15 you're like oh right okay we're gonna have a conversation about that yeah and um do you know, when you're 15, you're like, oh, right, okay, we're going to have a conversation about that. Yeah. And, you know, those questions. This is not me asking, but somebody else said this one time. Of course, yeah, yeah. But that stood to me because, I mean, it stood to me in a sense that I had a good, maybe a good understanding of it. However, because I was still the immigrant in London, I didn't know about any of the other diseases. And I didn't know that it's important

to get checked or anything like that. So I went for 10 years without getting tested once. Holy fuck. I didn't get tested until I came back to Ireland 10 years ago. Sorry, 10 years later. And so it isn't a sort of a sob story for me, but what it tells me is that when we talk about people who are not from this country immigrants who are coming here people who are living here we've got to ask ourselves the same question how are they accessing services are we speaking to them the right languages are we engaging with them in culturally correctly as well so whenever i think about sexual health

and how we reach people we have to I have things of myself I want to think about the immigrant me that person. Yeah, who is the person? We're not 10% of our population 11% of our population. Yeah, yeah and Yeah, usually with this shit. It's those are the people who are most affected and poor people, you know I mean, it's it's like you said there I mean a four months or sorry a four week waiting list to get a check and like you said there, I mean, a four-month, or sorry, a four-week waiting list to get a check, and then you say there's 18, someone diagnosed every 18 hours with HIV. There has to be a causal relationship between those two things.

And also as well from the funding side, and I'll say this, we looked into, we got loads of parliamentary questions on TDs that enforced asking the HSE about funding, and TDs did them for us, asking the HSE about funding. And we found that the major gay men's health service that's in Dublin has been going for 25 years. Since 2009, their funding has been cut in half. In that same time, numbers of new diagnosis of HIV from gay and bisexual men doubled. And that is part of the correlation between there.

Now, if the government had recognised back in 2013 and 2014 when they saw a trend in HIV numbers going up, they could have brought in a PrEP trial and they could have nipped in the bud, but they dragged their feet, and that's why we're in the situation we are today, where 500-plus people every year are getting diagnosed and we don't hear a peep from them when's the last time and i'm going to ask you

seriously this question when's the last time you saw a woman on tv talk publicly about her hiv diagnosis an irish woman a woman who lives in ireland never yeah yeah right that's the question you gotta ask yourself and if you don't ask yourself that question, then you don't know the whole story. We don't know the whole story. Will, in a way, the culture you're describing is also not that removed from 30 years ago, where when the first cases of full-blown AIDS

were diagnosed in the early, mid-80s, the first cases were notified of seven cases of HIV. Five had already died of full-blown AIDS. The government took five years to have a conversation in the door of the Charlotte. As long as it took Ronald Reagan to have... And he, at that time, he actually barred known AIDS people and known homosexuals from actually entering the United States.

We had a protest outside the American embassy about it but in some ways it's sort of I'm telling you that story because it's emblematic of a sort of cultural and political mindset and I just think there's some of our political masters really need to get up to

speed with the reality of where we find ourselves because I think it's completely different from all of us here tonight I think our society has very changed values our society is actually a lot more engaged with the reality of where we find ourselves, we're finally having grown up

conversations as a result of marriage equality and repeal, we're having grown up conversations around notions of how we negotiate desire and intimacy, how that plays out in the Me Too movement, how that plays out in rape and and intimacy, how that plays out in the Me Too movement, how that plays out in rape and sexual assault, how that plays out in sexual health, all of that. I mean, I'm positive on one level.

You know, listening to Will, part of me just wants to hang my head in shame and go, has nothing fucking changed in 30 years? Yeah, but Tony, you have to understand that a month ago I was looking through the archive and I found a picture of you, Kieran Rose, Mick Quinlan, and a couple of other people who in 1985 set up the first response to the AIDS crisis in Ireland. It's called Gay Health Action. And in 1985, when it was illegal for anyone who didn't have a prescription. You have to have a prescription from the doctor to buy condoms in a chemist, right, in 1985, up to 1985. And in 1985, this group that Tony was part of

were importing condoms from the Netherlands and distributing them illegally to people who were treated like criminals. But they saved lives. We actually had a condom picket, Blind Boy, you'd love this, on 87 for gay prides. There weren't enough people to have a parade.

Everyone was burnt out. So we thought, well, the high point of Pride Week would be a kiss-in outside a door where loads of same-sex couples would just kiss. It's illegal. Hope to be there to be arrested and just to show how stupid and fucking

ridiculous the laws were. But then later on the week we had a condom picket outside the Vatican Embassy on the Navarone Road in Dublin and basically we got four of us got a load of condoms illegal and blew them up and made a necklace of them and draped them

around the entrance of the Vatican Embassy. Like a big rosary beads. Because at the time, the church was saying, condoms prevent life. It's better to allow people to die of AIDS than let people use condoms because it prevents life. And that's why we have 30 million children have been orphaned in sub-Saharan Africa. because it prevents life. And that's why we have 30 million children have been orphaned in sub-Saharan Africa, because the church's attitude

has informed societal attitudes around condom use. And while our brothers and sisters were dying of AIDS in Ireland in the mid and late 80s, the church was saying, no, we will not allow condoms. And that was informing the government's attitudes. Anyway, we blew them up, and then we had a couple of placards.

The one I'm most proud of is like, protect yourself from the church, wear a condom. How are you feeling about the Pope coming to Ireland? I mean, I don't give too much of a shit, but I mean, this is the stuff, will there be protests

from the LGBT community reminding the pope of what he fucking stands for and shit like that yeah there are there i mean this particular pope did he change his opinion on the africa condom thing or is that still going no that's that they they change a position on that but it's it's too late i mean it's too late about everything it's too late there's people dead like it's too late about everything i mean they're they're they're only doing catch up, only because they've been dragged, kicking and screaming into another century.

So they're irrelevant. Yeah. I mean, let's go on beyond. Mary McAleese for Pope. I want Mary McAleese for Pope, okay? We really need an alternative Pope, and it's just going to be one that has to be Mary McAleese. To be honest with you, we've got to go past all religions in our sense. Ireland should be a secular state where people, regardless of what you believe in...

I mean, I'm an atheist, and my whole approach to it is, like, I honestly would fight for a right for a person to believe in anything they want to. If they believe there are flying toads behind Mars... My cousin Nick believes that. But if they believe that and that's a belief they have and they want to say that and think that, absolutely, I will defend them

for it. But they can't go and start changing laws because of that belief. So I don't think religion doesn't have any place in a pluralist and modern society. By the way, can I say... By the way, can I say... Yeah. By the way, my thing really is just... I mean, like, because I take the piss

out of fucking Catholicism a lot because, like, I was raised in the Catholic system in school against my will because I would not have been able to go to school if I wasn't baptized, which is... They started that one out a couple of months ago actually they brought in something in the government that I'm from now on you can't discriminate on whether a child is baptized or not which is brilliant because it's one of those things it's a real Dublin divide when we were

complaining online about you know if you don't want to be baptized you don't have a choice down south Dublin people were going, would you not just send them to a multi-denominational school? It's like, not in Limerick. But there's what, like, when I was growing up, it was, I would have had to go to the fee-paying Protestant school. My dad was a communist, like, so he was not into fucking Catholicism or anything,

but I had to be baptized, and my brothers and sisters as well, because I wouldn't have gotten a school, you know? And I would have grown up near the end of it, but they still did fucking weird shit to me. Like, they... I remember once... Now, one of my... No, we were seven years...

Actually, this is... We were seven years of age, and we had a free class. And one of the lads in the class decided it would be a good idea to stick his willy into a girl's ear, right? And it was all a lot of fun. We were seven years of age, but the

nuns found out, dragged us up to the office, and what they did was they got jam jars full of clean water, and they got dirt out of a pot, and started shoving the dirt into these clean jam jars and pointing at the dirty jam jars, saying, that's your soul now, and you're not allowed

to have a confession until next year. And it fucked me up because I got nightmares over it. But now as an adult, here's the thing that I look back on. And I only realize this as an adult. The young fella who stuck his dick into the girl's ear, right?

Now that's all a bit of crack or whatever. He was seven and he came from a fucking fairly disadvantaged background. If a seven-year-old is doing anything with his dick to another person that's a red flag for him and abuse at home yeah and the nuns didn't spot it instead they went down the sin route you know in psychology they know that if a young kid is

doing something sexual someone showed it to him that's a red flag they didn't spot it instead they took out some jam jars and then told us the jam jars are dirty but however in a year's time you get to go into a vertical coffin and you get to say your secrets to a stranger and then magic will absolve them and you'll have a clean jam jar again. Do you know what? I don't want to diminish

anyone's belief, Christian beliefs or Muslim beliefs or anything but you know if I had a choice between a guy who's flayed to death on a piece of wood and Bowen, our Irish cow goddess, moon goddess who gave her name to Newgrange,

I'd rather actually, she's got a much sexier backstory. I'll go with her any day. Okay? But yeah, like Will said, you know, it comes down to choice, but we do need to, I think, I'm forever an optim, and I actually, I sense something. There's been a transformative, something transformative in Irish society in the last few years. And I just feel we're doing catch up with our brothers and sisters on mainland Europe.

You know, because they actually, after the trauma of the Second World War, the Netherlands and Germany and France and everything else in Denmark, they rebuilt themselves. They not just rebuilt themselves structurally and economically, they rebuilt themselves socially and culturally. But I actually feel we, as a result of our post-colonialism, as a result of our dirt, poor poverty and a whole lot of other things, all of that was delayed. And we're really only now, since the 1990s, since the beginning of the Septic Tiger, I mean, I fucking hate that period, but anyway, but since the beginning of the Septic Tiger,

more or less, the mid-90s, there's something happening in Irish society. And I just feel there's a conversation, and we're aware, even if we're not all individually a part of that conversation, we're aware of what's going on. We're aware of it, and we've signalled that we want to be part of that conversation, we're aware of what's going on. We're aware of it, and we've signalled that we want to be part of it. When you see something

like marriage equality, you know, somewhere during the campaign, it stopped about being a question about letting the gays get married. It started to be a question of, like, what fucking type of society do you want to grow older in? What type of social justice do we want? What type of culture

of fairness do we want? What type of society do you want for our grandchildren to grow older in? What type of social justice do we want? What type of cultural fairness do we want? What type of society do you want for our grandchildren to grow older in? And some of that played out in the repeal campaign as well. It was like, I just bawled my eyes out seeing some of the videos of people, mainly women, but not exclusively

women, coming home to vote, and I thought there is something utterly transformative about this process, and we need to, all of us who want to build is something utterly transformative about this process and we need to, all of us who want to build a new socialist republic in this country, we need to get on board and try and harness all of this energy and all of this mindfulness that's going on at the moment

and turn it into something that's of real purpose for us. And not let the political parties hijack it because that's a fear I have. No absolutely. Political parties, The political party system is just a shortcut to power. But there is a parallel part. The feminist movement understood this. The gay movement understood it. There are parallel

dynamics at play. Community organisations come them on. The Irish Country Women's Association. There's lots of community-based organisations that are just as valid expressions of political power. They're just different and they're in parallel. And we should just clue into that. And we need to sort of find our voice

individually and collectively, which is what we're doing in this bloody tent today in Clonmel. It's really important. That's one thing I wanted to fucking, one thing I'm after noticing while I'm here, like, imagine, like, what would it, while I'm here, like imagine, like what would it if 30 years ago someone said to ye as two young

gay lads in Clanmel who mightn't have even been out, that 30 years later ye'd be here in the Clanmel car park in a marquee openly talking about being gay and gay rights and whatever to loads of Clanmel people. Is that not kind of class? I wouldn't have believed it back yeah uh it wouldn't be it would be utterly shocking to me

because the only thing that that i grew up with like growing up in here in clonmel um like nothing happened to me because i kept it so secret like secret from myself and i didn't and i saw what happened to other kids who they could see it in they could see their sexual expressions what's that like as a young lad even not knowing it yourself knowing it but not knowing it oh I knew it but not admitting it

to yourself it causes duplicity and it causes you to become two people in a sense and it causes mental health issues and for me it caused amongst other things self-harming and cutting my wrists and things like that but huge amounts of depression and I was just lucky that I had a good group of people and also those people were involved in activism as well.

And I think activism is one of the things that saved me in a sense. Because back in the sort of late 80s... Did you get stuck into activism in Ireland? Oh, no. Here in Clonmel. Our first big campaign was to clean up the Shure. Does anybody remember what the Shure looked like in 1982, 83, 84? It was a cesspit. It had

no primary screening of raw sewage whatsoever. So all of the factories, and we were on Bridge Street, right beside our house was a dog food plant, and down around the corner was a pig arbitrary

abattoir where they used to put poor blood was to Australian's the river and then right beside it was a raw sewage outlet pipe and when them when the especially in the summer when they would water would go down you would just see every single thing that went out of edit toilet was caught up in all the shopping child it was one of the most disgusting. So we started this campaign called Our Future. That man had to leave the room. It was so horrible.

Maybe he's gone off to get that trolley. Yes, he is. It's no good to you. There's only poons in it now. A historical shit trolley. I need to get into the shore and get that before any e-cunts go down there. So my first activism was with Earthwatchwatch who were here in Clonmel. We went down to

the river with jam jars and marigolds and filled them up, filled up the jam jars with raw sewage, came out straight out of the raw sewage and did a march down to the city, down to the town hall to a council meeting. Did they want to know? When was this again?

They actually came out to us and they said, we're only going to allow two people into the meeting and you're not bringing the jars in. So I went in as a 16-year-old and Bobby was the older guy, but we went down and sat down with them. What year? This is 1988. And so I said to them, because we had all our info,

I said, the last time you sat down and talked about water treatment in this town was 1954. It's now 1988. We need to do something about it. They went off and got funding from the EU, and there is a plant built here. So again, it was the EU going, you can't be doing that. You're part of us now. Hey, but here's the thing. There's still raw sewage being pumped into the River Shura.

And it is the third largest river in the country. It is a sacred river. Who's doing it? It is amazing topography. But I was talking to some people, members of Tip County Council, and we were having some indirect chats about something else. And I said, you know what? Where they're doing

all of the new, the south level, the south branch opposite of Lady Blessington's Weir, where they're doing all the kayaking and everything else, they put in the infrastructure for kayaking. I said, oh, this is great. We need some jetties where people can not just canoe, but there should be water facilities and safe places for people, but especially children, to swim. And one of the Tip County councillors said not yet I said what do you mean not yet this is last year he said well distilled raw sewage being pumped into the river a bit upstream I said exactly where and he wouldn't tell

me I'm going I told you have a fucking treatment plants this is fucking shocking in this day and age okay a jam jar will go it up there they're on well on. Well you know what, the whole theme and tag of of Clonmel Junction Arts Festival this year is Sure Thing where it's about repositioning our attitude, not just our vision and our view, but our cultural attitude and our socialization towards, back towards the river which we just used as a sewer as as Will just illustrated, and about sort of imagining how a medieval heritage town like Clonmel, that's in the gravitational pull of water, which is a difficult enough issue,

how we can sort of re-imagine our heritage, how we can imagine this amazing topography in South Tip, where the river bends eastwards and it creates an extraordinary, extraordinary landscape. And we have not got on top of it. There might be some people of you in the audience, but our administrators, the county council, and people who run this town, the Chamber of Commerce, are simply not on it. They're not on it.

And I just feel it, I just take my hats off to the Junction Arts Festival for trying to, just for a moment, making us to reimagine the role that the river plays in our life here as a piece of recreation, as a piece of socialisation. Shore Island should be an amazing community, an artist community. It should have a water mill, it should have had a hotel, it should have sheltered housing for old people. It should have an art centre. It should have jetty ways. It should have cafes on the riverside and everything.

And it's a fucking surface car park. Sorry, not good enough. I love how passionate you are about a river. I wasn't expecting that, man. I wasn't expecting river passion. We haven't even started talking about otters and beavers, but anyway. Come here, Will.

You're going to do a bit of public arting during the festival period down here, aren't you? Yeah, unscripted, completely unscripted. I was at home today and was clearing out some stuff. I have this print that I did last year. 2016, but it goes back 10 years. It's kind of like a post-Celtic tiger print. It's Michael Collins with Chanel and Dior shopping bags.

It's called Judy Freestate. I did a canvas of it back in 2007. I did a canvas of it back in 2007 and I made a print and that print the screen print is sold out it was in a two colour but I found

these today and these are when you're doing up screen prints you do a lot of screens get the inks right and register the colours

and stuff like that so these are these kind of offset ones just onto newsprint so I brought about 30 of them with me and i'm not handing them out because that's not my style and it's not the fucking late late show yeah exactly

you have to work for them and so i do a lot of street art intervention i find street art intervention is a great way of i guess uh breaking people's patterns and habits you probably take the same route to work every morning you probably You probably drink the same coffee and say hello to the same people and whatever. And breaking people out of their habits, I find, as an artist, is one of the best ways of motivating and educating people to think a little bit differently. And that's why you tend to put

art in the street. But I'm going to put these in the streets tomorrow morning. So I've got some little glue dots I'm going to put on the back of them. But here's the thing. Are people free to take them? They're free to take them. They're free to take them.

There's about 30 of them. So it's like the Late Late Show, but with orienteering. What? So, but the only thing is I'm only putting them on buildings that are closed down or vacated because I've noticed from the time...

Because how do I turn onto the side of someone's fucking shop or house? Well, yeah. You know, it's unauthorized, but it's only glue dots. I mean, you know. There's too many closed down buildings. Yeah, I have noticed that from the time that I was a kid. You know, we just lived off of Collins Street. So Collins Street was alive in the 80s.

I mean, people didn't have a lot of money, but all the shops were open. Now you go down there, you see boarded-up shops, you see boarded-up buildings. And including my old house that I used to live in has been boarded up for the last 20 years. So it kind of makes me sad to see it. So I kind of want to put them on the vacated places so that you're only going to look for vacated places tomorrow

to find this print. And I'm not signing it either, so good luck with trying to get it authenticated when I'm dead. I'm going to I didn't even, you're such interesting cunts I didn't even get to ask you the internet questions. So I'm going to ask you one question from the internet and then I'm going to put a mic out into the audience um one question

i got was how do you feel about the corporate uptake of pride the way that recently this year in particular we're just after coming out of pride month corporations with their rainbow flags but being very performative not necessarily doing anything to head the community so i was one of the people who set up pride in uh well actually pride was set up in 1974 there were 10 brave people who walked from the british embassy because it was the site of the old british laws for three kilometers into the department of justice stevens green david norris was there and jeff dudgeon from Northern Ireland. They would both sue the Republic and Northern Ireland governments over the British legislation and win.

And they had some great placards, Lesbians in Love, and I love this one. This is 1974. Homosexuals are revolting? I mean, how cool is that? Anyway, and then Pride kicked in in 1979, and i was involved in the first pride week and there weren't enough people to i was 19 to give out to do a march so 16 of us wandered around dublin palming people with um bemused shoppers with leaflets explaining the history of the

stormwater riots in new york yada yada yada, explaining what was going on, and we were unveiling a pink triangle, the symbol of gay internees from the Nazi death camps. This was a symbol that was used before the rainbow flag. Is that what the pink triangle is? Yeah, it came from the start of David's basically, the Nazi death camps had

all this hierarchy of inmates. If you were an anarchist, you had a black triangle. If you were a communist, you had a black triangle. If you were a communist, you had a red triangle. If you were a Jew, you had a yellow triangle with another one on top, which made a Star of David. If you had a pink triangle, you were the bottom of the pile, you were a homo. About 100,000 documented gay men were imprisoned under the German penal code by Hitler. And here's a shocking thing. When the camps were liberated in 1945, the West German government, with the connivance of France, America, the US, and Britain,

put loads of those men back into prison again. And it was only as a result of an international campaign of shaming the West German government that the surviving inmates in 1991 were finally given, had their crimes expunged and were actually given compensation. The last group of death camp internees which tells you something about the lingering attitudes of shame and stigma around homosexuality. But here's the thing, Pride. So I have have a long history with pride that goes back to the 1980s and I've watched it being commercialized last week I got into loads of trouble because on social media. I said I am NOT having the fucking route

So the route we have this huge corporate buy-in to pride open City Council are tripping over themselves because they're just thinking pink euros We can brand Dublin and Ireland on post marriage or if we can brand as a gay LGBT friendly tourism all of that and I'm not against all of that but as far as I'm concerned if the if the parade is shunted off the main streets of Dublin which it has been for the last couple of years it is the second biggest parade in Ireland after st. Patrick's Day parade in Dublin it has to be on the main streets of the city caps the city, because it is about visibility. Pride has always been about visibility. It's about basically LGBT people, us sharing our unique queer

worldview with the rest of fucking Ireland. And it's also about having a party with the rest of Ireland. So if there's nobody, if we're shunted onto the back streets of Dublin, there's nobody spectating. So the rest of Dublin doesn't get to share in our party and our queer revolutionary joy. It makes a mockery of the whole thing. I'm not totally against the buy-in of the corporate sector, but it has to be modulated. It has to

be on our terms. And I'm reminded of something that Gilbert Baker, the guy who designed he died last year, 67, had a heart attack, from San Fran. He designed the rainbow flag. And I said to him, we were out having dinner in Dublin. I said, oh, you know, you remind me of Jim Fitzpatrick.

Jim Fitzpatrick never patented his screen print of Che Guevara. And so now it's the global image of Che Guevara. Do you know the Che Guevara image? You know an Irishman made that, yeah? Black with the red. And I said, why didn't you patent the rainbow flag back in 1977?

You were using it for the Gay Freedom Day Par in San Fran that was called and he said I wanted it open access I wanted open source I'm going yeah fair enough and then that led into a conversation about the embrace the corporate sector and he said here's the thing like you being reserved refused service in the bar in 1981 in Dublin I was refused service in the bar in San Francisco in the late 70s so when the corporate sector start to recognize me as a consumer I think well that's one step along the road to acceptance and equality and liberation but here's the thing all of that process has to be modulated and choreographed and engaged with. And the idea

some corporate thinking that they can just fucking drape a double-decker bus with a couple of rainbow flags is not, well it's not good design, but it's not a fucking corporate buy-in as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, it has to be something it has to be something. I think actually

if we, what Dublin Pride and all the other big pride parades around the country need and because the pride parades are the visible tip of pride when i hear people and it's usually angsty alt-right lonely angry uh middle uh early 30s uh heterosexual men going why don't we have straight pride and i'm going when you have straight pride every fucking day of the year, okay? And here's the thing, I'm not actually dissing your involvement. What I want is, I want Dublin Pride and all the other prides, but we'll talk about Dublin, because that's the one I've had the history with. I want Dublin Pride to be this big

midsummer party with a big queer heart that the entire city embraces that is good for tourism that's good for business it's good for everything and it also sends out a gorgeous image of the city and of Ireland to the rest of the world it's really important people socializing people having a party like the dad's bus from from Dublin bus had a dad's bus dad's for pride and it's basically dads who have sons or daughters who are lesbian or gay or transgender. Has anyone seen the video on YouTube? Oh my God, I bawled crying.

I bawled crying. And I'm going, this is a bus company giving real expression to what we call social inclusion in the workplace. So what we call diversity and all that sort of stuff. And they basically organise a bus, they dress it up and they basically pick up all of their kids who are lesbian or gay or transgender and they videotape it and it's Dublin Bus making an emphatic

statement about how they are not just family but they are part of Irish society and they are embracing everybody and they are also going to be part of this magic fabulousness that's our transformation of our society and I'm going this is how we go but the corporate sector I think it's going to become problematic I saw it's better than just a rainbow ice cream when I saw a group called radical queers resist and they're just going no sorry we don't want the corporate sector buy-in but my thing is they're a reality yeah so we can't prevent it but we absolutely have. And I think we have to stick

it up to Dublin City Council and Cork City Council and all the others and go, you want to do the parade and you want to fucking get the pink euros and everything else and market pride as a big sort of piece of cultural queer tourism and everything else. Great. But it has to be on our terms. Otherwise, fuck off. Yeah. Fair enough. We give out loads. We use Pride for our own advantage because we use it as a way of talking to the community about things that affect them. Now, of course, HIV is an exclusively LGBT disease or whatever, but we are disproportionately affected by it,

and so we distributed about 5,000 Prep prep now stickers and also it was the first time we marched this year and we had a debate about where we marched we thought if we're going to march we're going to make a lot of noise so you know the transition was you know it was like um rainbow bus rainbow bus rainbow lots of rainbow people and everyone wait you know clapping saying all of those cute people with the rainbows on and then it's us there's a black banner with act up with loads of people in black shouting you know um act up fight back prep now you know and they're like oh i thought it was supposed to be crack here here come the hiv angry people there's a one question i have right because you're talking there about pride and it being you know having a big load of crack and whatever right but one thing recently a conversation i've seen is about for straight

people to be also inclusive in queer spaces but also respectful of them by which i mean like how do you feel about hen parties going to a gay bar no or we'll say straight couples having affairs in gay bars and things like that i don't think I've noticed the affairs to be honest with you but the hen parties is a no-no. It was Panty, I was asking Panty and she said that's the two things she sees. It's either hen parties or the other straight people she sees are couples having affairs. What if the other people that they were cheating on were having homosexual affairs with the other people?

Yeah. The only time I get upset about something like that is when the other person scores. Because I remember years ago, my sister Louise, who's, oh, she's away at the moment, so I can say this. Anyway, so when she was doing her leaving search, she'd rock up from Clonmel, this is in the 80s, to Dublin, to the Hirshford Centre, this LGBT community centre that I was involved with, which was torched in 1987.

And in the midst of loads of our brothers being murdered or whatever and beaten up. And almost every weekend she'd come up with her woman friend, her girlfriend, Fiona, both con men, women, girls, 18, 17, 18. Almost every weekend she's rocking up to a gay centre and she'd fucking score. And we'd go home to our granny's house in Rathgar and I'm going, how do you... I'm single, I was on my own then, and I'm looking at her with some bloke she's picked up

and going, how do you manage that in a fucking gay club? So, actually I'm all about sort of embracing heterosexual people, but again... But the hen party thing. No, party thing. No. That's not great, no? By the way, we need to ban hen parties completely from Temple Bar. We need to up our game. Actually,

someone asked me on Twitter, ask Tony about how Temple Bar used to be. I don't know what that meant. Have you got some type of knowledge of Temple Bar before... Temple Bar in the 1980s was so derelict and so run down that the BBC used to come over

and shoot it as a stand-in for World War II bombed London. For real. My sister's getting married tomorrow, and she came up, she said, asked me would I be organising the hand party. I said, yeah, no problem, whatever.

So they came up to Dublin and I organised loads of stuff, whatever. And I said, look, we're not doing this whole tacky thing, you know, wearing like... Willy straws. Yeah, and all of that. We're not doing it, we're not doing it,

we're not doing it. And she's like, fine, fine, no problem. All her friends came over. Take them to the wax museum. All the cousins came from Clare to the Wednesday on tomorrow. So anyway, they came up to them, took them to a nice museum. All the cousins came from Clare. So the wedding's on tomorrow. So anyway, they came up to them, took them to a nice restaurant, whatever.

We had a drink, whatever. And I said, I'm just going to go off around the corner and whatever, but call them all around. And there was this big, loud limo with like disco lights inside it and whatever. And inside were all the straw willies and all the hats and the whole thing was inside. And so we used that vehicle for an hour to do the whole sort of like, you know, tacky bit.

Without going into a pub. And got the stripper in as well. And did that whole bit. And then took all the stuff off. Had a normal night. Had a normal night. Went into a bar and a club and just partied like anyone else. We didn't need to...

I wanted to have the experience, but I think that when you go into spaces and you take them over and you don't respect queer spaces and you don't acknowledge it, I think it's problematic. Yart. All right.

There's a floating mic around the gaff because has anyone got any questions? Well, how long are we here? We're here nearly an hour and a half now, so I'll try and wrap it up shortly. But has anyone got any questions? It can be about anything. Our phone numbers.

Any questions at all? All right, so do you want to go home? This gentleman at the back, he's got a fetching elbow How's it going? I just have a question for Tony or Will Over here I'm just wondering how do you feel

Education is going in secondary schools For the whole LGBT community Like I know when I was in secondary school We got little to no sexual education at all Like I left going to first year college Not not knowing any of the STIs, any of the symptoms. You know, we had a teacher, a female teacher, and we were an all-male CBS school. And she was too nervous and intimidated to talk about anything sexual-wise in our SPHE class. So how do you feel it's going and is there any progress?

You're going to sound like a plant now that I've planted you in the audience because that's exactly what I want to talk about tonight. So because of the ethos of the Catholic schools, they are not obliged to teach the curriculum, any curriculum that the government comes up with. Right now there is a sex education bill going through the Dáil. When I say going through, it's stalled. So it was introduced as a private member's bill.

And it's to update the Education Act to bring in factual, objective sex education in schools, including LGBT inclusiveness and also gender inclusiveness. Consent is in there as well, and sexual health. So we went through the second committee stage of the Dáil, but it's been held up right now by the government. There is a procedural matter in government after committee stage where you bring a bill in and they say, right, is there money to cover this? And it's called the money message. And the Department of Finance says, yeah, there is money to cover that.

I mean, an education bill, what does it mean? Some training, okay? Right now, the government are not going to give the people who brought in that bill the money message. So it's blocked. It's stopped where it is in its tracks in the Dáil. And the person that is responsible for that is Fianna Gael. And the people at the top of that is Llewod Wrager and this week, yesterday we were outside the Dáil

doing a demonstration about the blocking, the government blocking this education bill it is, I don't know a single person you know, I haven't talked to a single person who says oh you know I've got plenty of sex education at school you know and the situation is right now that we have, back in 2017, there was a report

done by, a survey done by HIV Ireland, and it asked people between the ages of 18 to 65 various questions about sexual health. And, you know, 24% of people thought that you'd get HIV from kissing, which is ridiculous. 14% think you can get it

from a toilet seat. In this day and age, honestly. But 93% of people in that survey said there should be comprehensive sex education at school, including teaching people about young people about HIV. Now, the reality of that,

if you're not teaching people, especially young people about sexual health, is that it's going to continue the way it is. And right now, 15 to 24-year-olds make up 50% of all chlamydia cases in Ireland. Fuck. 50%. That is the reality of it. So shame on you, Leo Varadkar, for blocking that bill.

Oh, and the hashtag sex ed bill. The one other thing I just wanted to say just really quick was what I found massively conflicting in school was, and the same with all our teachers including my own, was my SPHE teacher who was supposed to provide us with sexual information and that kind of education was also our religion teacher. Yeah, me too too and they go

hand in hand in college which i don't understand how that works like a lot of people who go in to do religion education religious education they do that teaching and they also do the sphe course and how do they align they don't align that's i think it's a very deliberate thing to make sure that it's almost like okay you can have your sex education but we've got to have Christ looking over earlier on before we came on tonight Blind Boy Will and I were chatting about just old government

legislation and I was actually filling them in on the fact that I was prosecuted in 1995 under the Dan Solz Act of 1935 and the Dan Sols Act of 1935. And the Dance Halls Act was brought in by De Valera under pressure from the Catholic Church because they were really worried about the proliferation

of jazz clubs in Ireland, which is basically the house music of its day in the 1930s. And the church was really distraught at the idea that if you allow people to congregate and have a good time and get jizzy not only might it actually end up with people having babies but god forbid I mean the bigger picture is that if you allow people into a place where they can dissuade themselves of their anxieties and everything else people get chatting and start having a convo about hey this

society is shit why don't we get a bit subversive and actually move it on a little bit? And this law, so it's quite extraordinary, was brought in in 1935 because the church was afraid of the proliferation of jazz clubs. It still exists,

and it's one of the reasons why we don't have a fully functioning dance club industry in this country. And I get prosecuted under it in 1995 and I have to spend an afternoon what was it you did like what did they say running a dance club until three o'clock in the morning which was fabulous in Dublin um and this copper comes in and starts giving me loads of jip and I'm going okay whatever anyway me and the venue owner Paddy Dunning who owns the button factory in Dublin were Anyway, me and the venue owner, Paddy Dunning, who owns the Button Factory in Dublin,

we're taken to court. Him, the venue owner, me, the promoter. He's sweating. He's going, I don't want to lose my license, whatever. And I'm going, look, let me into that witness box. I want to fucking give it socks about how we need to change our laws and how the reality is that the kids are going out

and having a good time and everything. And, you know, this needs to stop, whatever. And anyway, Paddy is put into court. Sorry for banging that. out and having a good time and everything and you know, this needs to stop, whatever and anyway Paddy is put into court, sorry for banging that It was your leg, it was Grant Paddy takes a witness box and anyway he argues a toss

and we're both up there, he gets fined the maximum fine in 1995 which was 5 punds so we have spent an entire afternoon of the maximum fine in 1995, which was five punds. So we have spent an entire afternoon of taxpayers' money in there under a 60-year-old piece of legislation. He gets fined five punds. And then my turn comes up, and I'm going,

yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sort of intellectualizing the fact that the kids are going out, and also I'm going out, and I want to make a career, and blah, blah, blah, blah. And we should be able to go out and drink and dance whenever we want, with responsibility, obviously. But this idea that Mami Ere infantilizes us and continues to infantilize us and says,

no, you can't be trusted to actually drink at 5 o'clock in the morning, unlike the Spanish or the Dutch or the Germans or whoever, whoever, whoever. Psychology would say that makes us irresponsible. And you can't be trusted to dance at 5 o'clock in the morning or 6 o'clock in the morning either. Irish people shouldn't be trusted to dance at 5 o'clock in the morning, or 6 o'clock in the morning either, and I'm going... Irish people shouldn't be trusted to dance anyway. Yeah, and you know what happens? Yeah, but you know what happens, Blind Boy? We become the stereotype.

Yeah. If the state, if Mamiera says, you can't be trusted, you're going to be a drunken fucking mess, we become the drunken mess, as is what happens, and then there's no harm reduction, there's no grown-up conversation, and we still have these ancient laws that continue to infantilize us. I'm going,

hold on a second. We really need a fucking revolution about stuff like this. Absolutely. Sorry, I'm on my blind boy soapbox here. You're grand. Any other questions? This chap here. Is the mic all the way over there? How can we do some type of... See, I've got a few listeners in Sierra Leone.

And I don't want to be... I do, I've got three listeners in Sierra Leone. So we need to make sure it goes into the microphone or else I'll be repeating your question. God bless, cuz. Crack. I might be completely wrong about this, but I remember reading a story about...

Irvine Welch has a short story about a black black lad who was a junkie and uh he got beaten up by the guards and at the time there was is it a true story or a fiction it's just a fiction short story but it seems from his upbringing that it might have been relevant say but um there was a black lad he was a junkie got beaten up by the guards and he got set up and it did way to go out there is an activist outside and they pick and choose they say no not him because he's a junkie and we don't want to try to flight fight for our black rights and same with Rosa Parks wasn't the original girl to not go to the back of the bus it was someone else yeah yeah so I was wondering what the decasement and the link would there be a similar thing and

do you feel as activists yourself who's who had seen the gay rights kind of movement move so much in Ireland is it a necessary evil or is it a complete betrayal when you selectively store them? Choose who your heroes are? Yeah, well, you selectively propagandize your movement. A little bit like with Repeal recently, where we're seeing people who weren't part of the grassroots movement taking a little bit more credit than they should be taking credit for. weren't part of the grassroots movement taking a little bit more credit than they should be taking credit for it's not even a state the choice you make where you are looking for inclusiveness but you exclude certain parts of your

movement because they're not the TV friendly kind of oh Panti talks about that but he talks about being on a train to Mayo and seeing somebody who was a bit too gay for her Okay, and in a way sort of reflects what you're just talking about You know that and there are there are degrees of acceptance and degrees of tolerance But am I getting this? Yeah, yeah, is it like all the necessary evil to em to? Am I getting this?

Yeah, yeah. You see, it's a necessary evil to, as baby steps into the, for any revolutionary movement, say, or any kind of thing like that. Like how third wave feminism will say that second wave feminism brought out women of colour. And actually, second wave feminism hugely emboldened the Irish lesbian gay civil rights movement. I mean, it's no coincidence we have a second wave of feminism in 1971, the same year that the Northern Ireland civil rights movement was founded, which had a big impact on the convo that was happening all over Ireland

around civil liberties in general. And I'm convinced... Would you see a correlation... I remember I spoke on my podcast about Stonewall, how Stonewall happened because of the general sense of civil rights that was anti-Vietnam.ietnam. Was that what Ireland too? I absolutely agree with you on that. I absolutely agree with you on that. I just think they feed off each other and

then it's about simply people being emboldened. Look, at the end of the day all revolutions are about people being brave enough to be real, to be a witness to our times. Doesn't matter whether we're talking about sexuality, gender, ethnicity, religious identity, whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever, craziness. It's all about being a witness to our times. It's about standing up and being real and finding our voice. And when we do that, we empower other people around us who have yet to find their voice. It's very important. Empathy is about being mindful of other people who are yet to find their voice when we have already found ours and they're struggling and to be that to be that

linchpin to be that little thing that would provoke people to get to that next stage I think in answer to that I think there is the people in the movement and and this and so I'll be turning back to myself. I ask myself constantly when I look around at people, a group of people who are fighting on an issue and I would look around and say, where is the person of colour here? Where are the trans people?

Where are the travellers? If I don't see any of them in the room, we're not doing our job. We're not including people. So in every conversation I have and that's why I asked about before have you seen a person speak out in the media

who is a woman with HIV and I asked myself that even culturally like last year I asked myself a question that kind of stunned me it was like name one single classical woman composer. Why don't we know one?

What's that? Yes. Very good. There's one woke person in the room. Well done. And I love her work. So I decided to spend a month just listening to classical women composers. And there's some brilliant ones out there.

Amy Beach is one of my favourites. So now when I'm having conversations with somebody, it's kind of skewed that way. So we've got to ask ourselves those questions all the time. And as activists, even inside these small movements, we don't see people who are different to us and have different voices. And we're not doing our job, we're not being inclusive. Because what happened is that cisgendered white people like

me, you know, showing you prep today, look isn't this great, I can take this drug and I'm going to get HIV. That sounds very privileged from my point of view sitting up the stage like this. But if that isn't available as well to people who can't access it because of money or because of restrictions or because of culture within their

social groups, then I have failed too. Yart. Pretty good. We're coming close to the end. Yeah, we're 10 o'clock. I'll take one last question if you had it, otherwise we can go in peace. This lady here. That's the mayor. The mayor is ringing saying... No, that's my mum. Will you close it up, please, blind boy? My mum always has about three dinners ready for me when I come home. It's a combination of

different things. So it'll be a pork chop with spaghetti bolognese as well. And some cabbage and potato. Because she'll just cook everything together. Because she hasn't seen me in a while, so it'll be a pork chop but spaghetti bolognese as well and some cabbage and potato and because she'll just cook everything together because she hasn't seen me in a while so she'll make three dinners at once and put them all on the same plate a buffet mother yeah where's tony gone he's after vaporizing is he he's spontaneously human combusted he's gone off to tell the cops we're all dancing inside a tent. Imagine that, he was a time traveller and we all looked away and that's poof, gone, into another dimension.

He's back. He's back. Alright. I wanted to ask, three of my relatives died of AIDS so I'm really sensitive when I hear about fundings getting cuts from the

services. Do you think that in Ireland, members of the LGBT communities are treated as members with a condition or a dysphoria, or it is just a cut that the HSE would have done as, I don't know. Are you saying people who are living with HIV or people do you think that members of the LGBT communities because of the cuts that have been done to the clinic they've been treated as citizens with a

condition yeah I mean that the cuts the clinic to the clinic are, the clinic is a testing clinic. So the clinic I'm talking about is a clinic where you go and get PEP, which is a post-exposure prophylaxis, basically a morning-after pill for a potential exposure, where you get your STI test done, where you would get HPV vaccinations, where you pick up condoms and lube. So that is actually a community clinic for gay and bisexual men and trans people. So it's specifically for that, because they are the most disproportionately affected by it. But the cuts, I mean, the cuts in 2009 have probably went across the board anyway. But the problem is, in every other aspect, there's been increased spending in those.

You can't expect to keep spending low amounts of money. And also, as well, the main problem is with it, as well, is that they're not talking about the new measures that we have. So here's an example, right? Something I annoy the HSE about all the time, and Simon Harris as well, and that is we've had PrEP in this country legally, we'll say, because, you know, I still get online illegally. Who cares? Come and arrest me. I don't care.

But we've had it for six months now, right? You won't see a single poster by the HSC in Panty Bar or in a gay magazine or anywhere that the community might read it that says, hey, you know, there's a revolutionary new drug out there that if taken as given or if you adhere to it, you won't get HIV. They're like, no. They won't even promote the groundbreaking drug that is actually going to be part of the solution of ending this crisis.

And what's even more extraordinary about that is if you just sort of quantify it on some crude economic basis, so I take one pill a day, my HIV retroviral, which stops me from getting AIDS, it stops me from living a life, it stops me from infecting someone. It's 43 euro per day compared with 80 to 100 euro per month for PrEP. Yeah. So it's a no-brainer when it comes to actually the rollout of PrEP for everyone, not just the most at-risk groups, for everyone. Everyone who needs it.

Yeah, and it's quite extraordinary. I mean, eventually this is going to happen, you know. But the thing that frustrates me a lot of the time, I'm sure it frustrates all of you, I know it frustrates these guys, is, you know, as a result of your own self-education or the conversations you have or stuff you read, you sort of come to a certain point, you make a conclusion about something that's happening in society and you're going, and then you look around and go, how fucking long is it going to take everybody to catch up to speed?

And that's where I'm at a lot of the time. I'm going, wake up, wake up to the reality of where we find ourselves on lots of stuff. Not just about PrEP, about loads of other things. We could sit here all night about things that we all know. We can share stories about things we need to, where we all know how we need to do things better. Or we just need to do things a certain way. And then we look around us and go,

when on earth will people get up to speed? Yeah, but but the thing is the government have the means and resources to end this crisis and it's not going to happen until we force them and if that includes nonviolent direct action then so be it we will bring it lovely um thanks very much everybody for coming that was lovely and I want to say to the two boys with the shared experience of the two we on the stage, it was a real pleasure because I feel this was pure historical importance. Do you know? It was, wasn't it? Do you know what I mean? Recording. I don't hear I don't there's a shit you're saying tonight I've never heard it

on mainstream media you know what I mean so a fucking absolute pleasure to have the two of you and even better to have the two of you in Clannmell do you know what I mean so Will St. Lazer is it St. Lazer or Salingerman? Salingerman if you're from Clare. Alright. Well, I'm from Limerick,

so it's St. Leger. How do you pronounce it? I say St. Leger. But there'll be cousins from Clare tomorrow who'll be calling me Salinger, and then there'll be people who'll call me St. Leger. Salinger sounds like you'd be a bit of a fascist. It does, do you know what I mean?

It's a pure... I'm dressed in black, aren't I? A nasty German name. So, when you say it later, Tony Walsh. Actually, Walsh down in Tip is pronounced Welsh. Ah, go away. Which the thing is, it's actually quite cute because the Irish for Walsh is Branagh,

which actually translates as Welsh person. So, so actually the local pronunciation of walsh is sort of very close to the original Irish. I did not know that. Very good. All right, iort everybody. Have a lovely evening. Wasn't that lovely? Have a charming evening. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none. Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night on Saturday, April 13th, when the Toronto Rock host the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre

in Hamilton at 7.30pm. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game, and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com.