By Anne Mulhall
On the complex achievement of the same sex marriage referendum in Ireland
The importance of the political mobilization of working-class communities in Dublin in the process of building a self-organized and powerful anti-austerity movement cannot be overstated, and this was a decisive factor in the marriage referendum passing. Voters in Jobstown and young emigrants coming #hometovote were not voting in solidarity with the government and the State, but in defiance of the multiple impoverishments and oppressions that the State has enacted on the majority of those who live here. The political and relational texture and hopefulness of these and other mobilizations, disruptions, acts of citizenship against the State, produced in excess of the managed marriage campaign, are perhaps occluded when the Irish marriage referendum is viewed solely through the lens of the established radical queer critique.
Almost a month has passed since the verdict of ‘Yes For Love’ was returned in the same-sex marriage referendum in Ireland. For the people who drove the campaign; for those who canvassed during the hard emotional slog of its last month in particular; for all those who told their stories of hurt, of lives lived in closeted fear and repression in newspapers, on TV, across social media, to family and friends; for the LGBTQ young people who had not before witnessed the extent and depth of homophobia written in to longstanding norms as to what and who constitutes the ‘nation’; for those who had to face the harsh truth of homophobic discursive violence enacted under the guise of ‘democracy’ and ‘balanced debate’ and smile and thank the homophobes for their consideration; for the thousands of recent young Irish emigrants who came #hometovote on the eve of the referendum; and especially for all those personally invested by way of their own positioning as ‘queer’ in the resounding victory, the outcome catalyzed a confusion of raw emotional responses. There was of course joy – the joy that was broadcast across a transnational stage, an unfettered jubilation. But the tears of joy were complicated. They communicated emotional and physical relief and exhaustion, a kind of system-wide collapse into elation. They articulated – for many, not for all – gratitude and vindication at the ‘majority’ acceptance that the vote represented. As time passes, the more difficult constituents of those tears becomes more clear, perhaps – anger that the rights of a minority were the gift of a majority to bestow; anger at the emotional and political costs exacted by the campaign itself; anger and sorrow for personal and collective histories mired in pain and exclusion that cannot be recuperated. The referendum result sent a message back to the past, a friend who unlike me has been in the queer trenches for many decades said to me recently, reflecting on the meaning of this long and at times ugly road – a message back to the past that all of the hurt, the neglect, the violence, the lives lost were not entirely in vain. That this vindication is in part for all of those who did not live to see it.
Messages to the past, and a promise, perhaps to the future. For many, the result has opened out potentials for a different way of being for young and future generations of LGBTQ people (and as always, the homogenizing this entails is deeply problematic). Given the majority vote, given that the grounds of the vote exceeded the ‘marriage equality’ remit, but also given the centrality of marriage and the family to the Nation’s symbolic image of itself, and how that symbolic image operates within the State’s machinery of inclusion and exclusion, it is difficult to see how some other forms of institutional homophobic exclusion can continue unchanged. The most immediate of these is the legislative sanction of discrimination on grounds of ‘ethos’ that persists in the Irish school system. A legacy of the organization of education under late colonial rule and of the theocratic nature of the Irish state for many decades after its inception, 96% of primary and 51% of post-primary schools in Ireland are under the patronage of religious orders. While discrimination on grounds of gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, age, disability, and marital status are prohibited by equality legislation, Section 37 of the Employment Equality Act includes exemptions on the grounds of ‘religious ethos’. This exempts schools from anti-discrimination legislation in both staff recruitment and student enrolment, and it also allows in the law for dismissal of staff if they are deemed to undermine the ‘ethos’ of the institution. This has in the past been used to sack women ‘living in sin’ so to speak, and it continues to provide a mechanism to exclude children from racialized, migrant and religious minorities from State-funded schools, though this racial ‘filtering’ is of course vehemently denied. The main lobby for striking Section 37 from the Act has been the LGBT lobby, and it is difficult to see how the Department of Education can continue to stall on this given the political and ‘moral’ force that the referendum vote represents.
Those most invested in retaining these religious exemptions within the State’s public education system are, of course, the same interest groups who were the bulwark of the ‘No’ campaign in the referendum. But while the interventions of Catholic clergy were muted and by no means unanimous, the No campaign was driven by a small but ubiquitous collection of right-wing lay Catholic fundamentalists, many of whom are associated with the Iona Institute, a ‘think-tank’ established in 2008 as self-appointed guardian of the ‘traditional family’ and Ireland’s system of compulsory reproduction. There is a direct genealogy between the No campaign and those US-funded and inspired groups that first formed in Ireland in the late 70s with the express purpose of fully embedding coerced reproduction in Ireland via the now notorious 8th amendment to the constitution that gave “equal regard” to the life of the woman and the fetus. The defeat of the No campaign struck a serious blow to Iona and its fellow-travelers. While commentators such as Katha Pollitt have highlighted the rapid gains made by the gay marriage lobby in the US at the same time as women’s reproductive freedoms are being severely undermined and curtailed (and one could make similar observations in the Irish case), a defeat in the same-sex marriage referendum in Ireland would have been a devastating set-back for the abortion rights campaign here, perhaps primarily because of the strong endorsement the ‘direct democracy’ of a referendum defeat would have given to the vanguard of what is a much wider anti-abortion lobby. The media presence of Iona and co is far in excess of their representativeness in contemporary Ireland, yet their complaints of ‘silencing’ and media bias are almost as frequent as their appearances in major national newspapers (Breda O’Brien has a regular column in newspaper of public record the Irish Times while John Waters and David Quinn, director of the Iona Institute, write for the Irish Independent), on radio and on television, with the State broadcaster RTÉ being particularly culpable of unfailingly providing them with a platform whenever The Family and its cognates hove into view.
[Courtesy of Oireachtas Retort https://twitter.com/Oireachtas_RX]
These protestations of ‘silencing’ are perverse if familiar given the strategies adopted in advance of the referendum. The lines were drawn in January of last year, following the appearance of Panti Bliss (Rory O’Neill), drag artist and long-standing community activist and public face of Dublin’s queer scene, on Saturday Night Live, a chat show on RTÉ hosted by Brendan O’Connor. On the show, in response to O’Connor’s questioning, O’Neill named O’Brien, Quinn, Waters and the Iona Institute as homophobes. Quite reasonably so, as it is difficult to know what else one should call people who suggest that queers should abstain from sex (because “intrinsically disordered”), oppose programmes to combat homophobic and transphobic bullying in schools, call for the continuing enforced closeting of teachers, declare LGBT people to be unfit to parent children, regard same-sex relationships as inherently inferior to the great gold standard of hetero coupling, and so forth. Iona and Waters promptly slapped a small avalanche of lawsuits for defamation on O’Neill and on the national broadcaster. In a particularly craven performance, RTÉ removed the video of O’Neill’s interview, issued a public apology the following week via O’Connor’s show, and agreed to a payout of 80,000 to the aggrieved parties. This, of course, was not silencing or censorship of the most egregious kind, but was, the national broadcaster agreed, in the interests of ‘democratic debate’. The deployment of ‘hate speech’ frameworks in the service of regimes of subjugation was abundantly clear. As Panti herself said from the stage of the Abbey Theatre in a performance that went viral, the people who wield hate speech as a form of power are now enabled to deploy the frame of ‘hate speech’ to silence the resistance of the subjugated. It is as Panti said “a spectacular and neat Orwellian trick, because now it turns out that gay people are not the victims of homophobia – homophobes are the victims of homophobia.”
RTÉ’s immediate capitulation in Pantigate encouraged a number of complaints of ‘bias’ in relation to programmes featuring The Gays. The Broadcasting Authority of Ireland upheld a complaint made just a couple of weeks after O’Neill’s interview, about a lifestyle feature on RTÉ Radio One’s The Mooney Show. The broadcaster Derek Mooney (himself a gay man) remarked to his guests, who were discussing their relationship in a personal rather than political capacity: “I hope you do get married. I hope it comes in.” This was ruled by the BAI as constituting bias, and a breach of “fairness, objectivity and impartiality.” Effectively, well before the announcement of the referendum date, any discussion about or involving LGBTQ people was ruled inherently ‘controversial’, ‘political’, and as many commentators observed the BAI ruling(s) made the inclusion of at least one bigot compulsory in any such discussion in the interests of ‘balance’. As a consequence the quest for ‘balance’ took on a near-pathological aspect during the referendum campaign proper as radio and television broadcasters timed contributions to the ‘debate’ down to the second in fear of litigation.
The fulcrum of the No campaign was the argument that including same-sex marriage in the constitution would catastrophically change the nature of the institution (which is, of course, about producing children) and fatally damage children’s ‘right’ to a mother and a father. Groups such as Mothers and Fathers Matter and First Families First emerged to flank the usual suspects. Lurid fantasies populated the mediascape and seeped out into the general populace, suddenly abuzz with the spectres of mothers marrying daughters, gay men stalking the streets in search of vulnerable women from whom to harvest eggs and/or rent wombs, small armies of fatherless children wandering the streets of Copenhagen in search of their ‘donor Daddy’. And so on.
By dint of ever more high pitched repetition, the No campaign and the media apparatus that accommodated it succeeded in making freedom to express homophobic bigotry appear as not just normal and right, but pretty much a duty in the service of democracy. So it was that rantings about, for instance, the prospect of predatory gay men buying children to satisfy their paedophilic desires could be framed as legitimate fears to be answered with a concerned tilt of the head and even-handed discussion – not just on the canvass, but in everyday interactions with total strangers.
The volume and intensity of such constant assaults were turned up when the campaign posters appeared a month before the vote, urging people to Vote No for the sake of the children. Reactions to these posters crystallized certain underlying conflicts within the LGBTQ ‘community’, ideological fissures and demands that were by and large contained for the sake of ‘unity’ in the service of the bigger picture – intense homophobic violence now with the considerable pay-off of less homophobic violence in the future. Pictures and videos circulated on social media of mostly young people, left activists among them, defacing and removing the offending posters. Demands from Yes Equality core organisers were issued on Twitter and elsewhere asking the poster guerrillas to desist from ‘undemocratic’ actions. Twitter exchanges went beyond demands for compliance, and veered into familiar ‘democracy talk’. Poster defacing was an “anti-democratic act”; the poster-removers didn’t “represent civilised YES voters” and were also needless to say “fascists”. Threats to report people to the police were made. “No to poster removal!” declared one passionate democracy-lover; not a battle-cry to kick-start a love revolution, but reflective of the ‘liberal’ attachment to a politics of respectability and hostility to political action outside the parameters of an NGO-led campaign.
The Marriage Equality movement in Ireland and elsewhere has been rooted in the kind of neoliberal marriage politics that has migrated from its origins in the assimilative, conservative drive toward respectability in a putatively ‘post-queer’, ‘post-AIDS’ American LGBT ‘rights’ discourse, whereby marriage has somehow become the apotheosis of LGBT struggle, and does the State some pinkwashing service.
The appropriation of this discourse by political and market interests in Ireland was in motion well before the event of the referendum. The campaign has done much to humanise Minister for Health Leo Varadker (who oversees a collapsing health system and who came out in January), great white hope of Fine Gael, the major party of government and right-wing cheerleaders for permanent austerity. Varadker posted not one but two rainbow twitpics from the campaign trail:
Tourism Ireland lost no time in capitalizing from the new markets in destination wedding tourism that ‘Yes for Love’ opened up, releasing this video with indecent haste the morning after the count:
Later that week, Fine Gael had its very own meme released on Twitter, circulated by the Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald (who is as I write at a meeting of the EU Commission that is deciding on how best to ‘manage’ the criminalisation and letting die of migrants at and inside the borders of Fortress Europe). Similar painfully transparent efforts were made by Labour TD and Tánaiste (deputy prime minister) Joan Burton – a much-reviled figure in the Irish political landscape, most recently notable for overseeing the slashing of lone parent payments and access to third-level education for some of the most deprived families in the country. In a radio interview the day after the referendum, Burton proclaimed that “We are now a rainbow nation, and that means a nation of inclusion and diversity”.
The attempt to leverage the referendum result for PR purposes has been somewhat inept then, and adapts for Irish vested interests the strategic weaponization of LGBT rights that has happened elsewhere (LINKS). The utility of ‘gay marriage’ for political interests keen on the appearance of ‘equality’ while busily decimating what little remains of the economic, social and democratic ground that is the starting point for redistributive justice has, however, been clear since former Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore’s salvo in 2012 that “the right of gay couples to marry is, quite simply, the civil rights issue of this generation”.
The architects of the Marriage Equality campaign in Ireland carefully fostered the allegiance of these and other politicians. Established in 2008 as a single-issue grassroots campaigning organization, resistance to the top-down approach weakened once preparation for the referendum began in earnest with the establishment of Yes Equality, a coalition campaign set up between Marriage Equality, GLEN (Gay and Lesbian Equality Network), and the ICCL (Irish Council for Civil Liberties) in 2013. LGBT Noise, an unfunded grassroots organization of mostly young LGBTQ people that focused on actions, including several large ‘marches for marriage’, was important in the longer campaign, though hardly mentioned in post-Referendum reflections. The Yes Equality campaign coordinated canvassing in constituencies across the country for the two months prior to the referendum. However, at the community level campaigning took on a more autonomous cast, as local people organized the canvassing of their communities and shaped their approach to local factors. Approaches designed to appeal to ‘the middle ground’ would not, after all, hold much water in the working class communities of Dublin. To this extent, organizing on the community level produced something in excess of Yes Equality HQ.
The political and discursive terrain of the Yes Equality ‘core’ borrows heavily from an established North American lexicon of same-sex marriage as an instrument of neoliberal governance. For instance (with thanks to Aidan Rowe for pointing out this leaflet; you can read their writing about the Referendum here. Also see these pieces by Jen O’Leary and Ariel Silvera.
“Research shows that marriage is good for people: married people are healthier, happier and earn more. Marriage is also a commitment device, it keeps couples together and families together. It is accepted by the majority of people as good for society e.g. the family unit looks after itself, takes on a caring role for the members of that family and therefore is less dependent on the State for support…. On top of this, introducing civil marriage equality is austerity proof. It won’t cost the State anything but will improve the lives of thousands of people and arguably improve Irish society in general.” (Five Reasons to Support Marriage Equality, 2014)
This is all to say that up to a certain point, the official campaign for ‘marriage equality’ in Ireland did not diverge in any substantial way from the familiar white middle-class neoliberal register. Once the heavily and cleverly strategized referendum campaign proper got under way a few months before the vote (involving many LGBT and other organizations and advisers beyond the core Yes Equality coalition), the pitch shifted. The focus was on the personal, on family ties and friendship circles, on the ‘positive story’, on self-revelation and emotional truth. And the address was, of course, to the straight population. The straight citizen-public had to be persuaded not primarily of the economic logic involved in welding queer couples together with ‘commitment devices’ and ‘forever love’ (to quote Zappone), but of the ‘sameness’ of lesbian and gay love and family-making. From a particular perspective, this normativizing drive is a corollary of the argument for marriage as neoliberal devolution of State and collective social responsibilities to the family, both being held in position by the marriage contract. If lesbian and gay people are ‘just like us’ (the ‘B’, the ‘T’ and needless to say the ‘Q’ were consigned to unspeakability for the duration), then they deserve what ‘we’ have – equality granted on the basis of sameness, on a shared humanity – but a humanity that does not diverge in any alarming way from what ‘we’ recognise as ‘just like us’, a fellow ‘citizen’ who does not disturb the established image the nation has of itself, but makes of it, as Burton had it, the ‘rainbow nation’. The ‘republic of love’.
To return to ‘Postergate’ – responses to this crystallised an important if difficult aspect of the Yes Equality campaign: the urge on the part of some of its managers to a disciplinary and totalizing control of the field of political action. However carceral and, to use Panti’s word, oppressive that insistence on uniformity and control was for some, the Yes Equality campaign did the job of winning the referendum that could not be lost. But the terms in which that disciplinary demand was made were too often suggestive of something in excess of pragmatism. The skirmish about the No posters exposed this excess of vigilance; one could feel the communicative ether vibrating at times with the pleasures extracted from the policing of dissent. In addition to its generally liberal complexion, among the campaign management were well-known right-wing conservatives such as Noel Whelan, former Fianna Fáil politician and adviser. Whelan had magnetised a considerable portion of snark when, during Pantigate, he published an article in the Irish Times mildly rebuking ‘liberals’ for calling homophobes homophobes, and advised that this was not the way to win over ‘middle Ireland’. Clearly people came around to his way of seeing things, though; Whelan was in fact invited in to the core coordinating group two months before the referendum, and he was clearly central to the management of the last crucial weeks of Yes Equality’s campaign. In his contribution to the GCN (Gay Community News, the main LGBTQ publication in Ireland) post-referendum special issue, Whelan noted that he was brought on board to advise on strategy to win over “the middle ground older audience”, the main focus of the campaign according to him. This entailed “maintaining discipline and keep[ing] everyone on message.”
There is no doubt that Whelan’s advice and Yes Equality’s strategy was a phenomenal success. At the same time, the strategy, while pragmatic, was for some at least coextensive with their ideological position on what constitutes legitimate political action and what actors are accepted as legitimate political subjects. In other words, in retrospect the campaign touched on fundamental conflicts about what constitutes politics as such, a question that includes but goes beyond the normativizing mystification of love and marriage that most partook of, with widely varying degrees of enthusiasm and ‘sincerity’, for the sake of winning the referendum that could not be lost. Despite Whelan’s and others’ focus on ‘middle Ireland’, the Yes vote was highest not in ‘the middle ground older audience’, in fact, but in the working class communities of Dublin. This took many by surprise, given that the urban working class have never been the ‘target audience’ for the marriage equality lobbyists. Working class communities (and of course the rural population en masse) have long been derided by a Dublin-centric middle class consensus as regressive and socially conservative forces, ‘failed’ citizens whose conservatism is assumed to manifest itself in part in an unreconstructed misogyny and homophobia. Junior Minister for Equality Aodhán Ó Riordáin attempted to play this supposed inherent conflict when he fretted publicaly about the possibility of anti-austerity activists – solidly based in Dublin’s working class communities – voting against the referendum in order to register their hostility toward the government.
The tensions involved in the pursuit of single-issue agendas to the neglect of all other struggles for social and economic justice was manifested in an online battle of the Facebook comments that followed a visit by the unpopular Taoiseach Enda Kenny to Panti’s bar in Dublin – Pantibar – last December. Panti posted a picture of Kenny with some other Fine Gael TDs to social media to a mostly outraged response. Kenny’s visit to Ireland’s best-known gay bar happened at a highly charged moment for the anti-water charges movement – the largest social movement that the country has seen since the inception of the State. A couple of weeks previously, the Tánaiste Joan Burton had attended a graduation ceremony for a community education project in Jobstown in Dublin, one of the most inter-generationally deprived communities in Ireland. Emerging from the ceremony, Burton (along with key marriage equality campaigner Senator Katherine Zappone) was met by over 1000 protestors who were vocal in articulating their rage at the Labour minister. A single brick was thrown but hit no-one; Burton caught a water balloon to the side of the head and went to her car, which the protesters surrounded for some hours before dispersing. Reactions to the protest were astonishing. The protesters, mostly people from the local community, were described in the media as a ‘baying mob’, a ‘frenzied mob’ engaged in ‘thuggery’, stirring up ‘fear and menace’ with their ‘ugly antics’. Burton herself wrote that ”The whole affair was sinister and it was disgusting. The shouting I could deal with, but the spitting, the virulent sexed-up language, the homophobia was disgusting. You could only wonder what kind of minds could think up such language.” This is of course the same ‘homophobia’ that Ó Riordáin imputed in a less explicit way to politicized working class communities that was supposedly endangering the marriage referendum’s safe passage. The incident was narrated in almost hallucinatory terms across the national media as foreboding the end of democracy, the rise of fascism, the spectre of mob rule and ‘demophobia’ orchestrated by the ‘sinister fringes’. Comparisons were made in all seriousness with ISIS and the worst atrocities of the Russian Revolution.
This was the prevailing political atmosphere into which Panti released the photo of Kenny at the gay bar. While Kenny’s photo op reflects the middle-ground strategy of the marriage equality campaign, responses to it suggest again that ideological fissure that opened very briefly during ‘postergate’. Broadly responses were divided between celebration of the perceived momentous occasion of the head of government – up until the previous year opposed to same-sex marriage – being photographed in the best-known gay bar in the country, and on the other hand an avalanche of rage at Kenny and his government, architects of the State regime of deepening and permanent ‘austerity’, its systematic disenfranchisement and dereliction of the most impoverished and vulnerable communities, and its relentless attacks on the under 30s through an implicit policy of forced emigration or dependency on, yes, Family, the result of extensive welfare cuts to those under 25, high unemployment, compulsory labour schemes, cuts to third level grants accompanied by hikes in tuition fees, and soaring rents. These are, of course, the very ‘targeted populations’ who made the referendum win such a resounding one, transforming the vote from a close-run gamble to a resounding victory. While the Union of Students in Ireland and BelongTo, an LGBT youth advocacy NGO, made a concerted and successful effort to mobilize the youth vote, neither the mobilization of recent emigrants in the #hometovote push nor the powerful Yes majority returned by working class communities were part of the Yes Equality strategy. Whelan, for instance, passes over the working class vote in silence, while more than one journalist insisted that it was ‘middle Ireland’ what did it.
“Coolock 88% Jobstown 85% Ballyfermot 90% Stoneybatter 86% Liberties 82% Darndale 80% Ringsend; 85%. 6% of people from Coolock progress to 3rd level. 88% voted yes, we meet attacks on our dignity with an understanding of exclusion. There was no fanfare or celebration of how we had ‘allowed’ the same rights, the implications of having that power over your fellow human beings have been made all too clear. Its time to break down the barriers,” says Dara Quigley, a young woman from Coolock in Dublin. The importance of the political mobilization of working-class communities in Dublin in the process of building a self-organized and powerful anti-austerity movement cannot be overstated, and this was a decisive factor in the marriage referendum passing. Voters in Jobstown and young emigrants coming #hometovote were not voting in solidarity with the government and the State, but in defiance of the multiple impoverishments and oppressions that the State has enacted on the majority of those who live here. The political and relational texture and hopefulness of these and other mobilizations, disruptions, acts of citizenship against the State, produced in excess of the managed marriage campaign, are perhaps occluded when the Irish marriage referendum is viewed solely through the lens of the established radical queer critique.
The functions that marriage and family perform within the machinery of the State are nowhere so apparent as in the migration apparatus. One of the repeated arguments for marriage equality was that it would for the first time grant ‘full and equal citizenship’ to lesbian and gay people in Ireland. In other words, ‘same-sex’ couples will no longer be excluded from the protections afforded by the State through the institution of marriage. ‘Citizenship’ here carries other connotations: acceptance, belonging, inclusion; dignity, propriety, respectability, maturity. Within the idealising and normative terms of the marriage equality campaign, marriage equality is also about love – about the ‘forever love’ that is supposedly deserving of full State recognition, and also the love extended from one citizen to another in the act of voting Yes to Love. A couple of weeks after the marriage referendum, the Immigrant Council of Ireland publicised a meeting in Dublin with its partners in HESTIA, a project that is investigating ‘Trafficking for Sham Marriage’ between Eastern Europe and Ireland. The timing is I’m sure coincidental, but the juxtaposition articulates the function of marriage as a filtering device for inclusion in and exclusion from the protections of the State. There’s the kind of marriage that grants ‘full and equal citizenship’ on the one hand, and then there’s another kind that is held under suspicion, subject to racial profiling, interviews with immigration officers, the kind of marriage that words like ‘sham’, ‘bogus’, ‘illegal’ and ‘deportation’ stick to. Marriages of convenience are not, in fact, illegal in Ireland. Unlike other EU countries, there is no legislative or constitutional differentiation in Irish law between ‘genuine’ marriages for love and marriages for more pragmatic purposes (although of course marriage is not grounds in itself for residency in the State). The same constitutional enshrinement of marriage and the family that made it necessary to hold a referendum on ‘same-sex’ marriage is one reason why it has proven difficult to introduce legislation on marriages of convenience in Ireland. But nonetheless all marriages involving certain categories of ‘non-citizens’ are suspect; all are potentially ‘abusing’ the State and its mechanisms. ‘Marriage for Love’ in a form recognisable to the State’s norms becomes the filtering device here, acknowledgement of its presence being one determinant of the right to remain. For people in the asylum system, access to civil marriage for same-sex couples could even add an additional barrier to family reunification, as the legislation stipulates that there must be proof of State recognition of relationship equivalent to that available for LGBT couples in the Irish State. This can be nothing other than a deliberate instrument of exclusion given the status of queer relationships in the states that most people have traveled from.
The complexities of race and migration in relation to marriage equality had no place, of course, in a campaign like Yes Equality, which appealed to the familiar, the homely, to reassuring sameness and the norm in all respects. The whiteness of the campaign was striking, though not surprising given that the target ‘audience’ was, as Noel Whelan says, ‘middle Ireland’. The campaign managers and strategists who featured in GCN’s special issue were likewise uniformly white. Similarly, on posters, leaflets and in campaign videos, whiteness predominated. Part of the persuasive strategy of the campaign was to create points of identification, showing the ‘audience’ people like themselves, families like their own. The failure to address migrant communities or to include LGBT migrants and people of colour in the Yes Equality campaign compounded the alienation, marginalisation and exclusion that are the experience of minority communities in a white nation. The invisibility of LGBT migrants, in particular, indicates the border politics at play.
This kind of erasure has serious effects on LGBT people in minority communities. It legitimates the belief that being queer is ‘a white thing, it has nothing to do with us’. It confirms the lived experience of structural racism, to see the nation’s ideal image of itself and find that you have no place in it. It helps breathe life into the dogwhistle politics that stir up racist, anti-migrant scapegoating.
The video below, made by Anti Racism Network Ireland (ARN), a radical grassroots activist organisation based in Dublin, attempted to make an intervention when these dynamics became clear in the last few weeks of the referendum campaign. It was addressed not so much to the ‘majority’ community, but to migrant communities: to provide a message of acceptance and belonging to LGBT people in those communities; to underline the need for solidarity across communities and identifications; to show that there is no homogenous ‘migrant’, ‘African’, ‘Muslim’, as some newspaper reports drumming up fears of an orchestrated No vote from the so-called ‘New Irish’ had speculated. The short video conforms to the Yes Equality aesthetic and is ‘on message’, but the quiet radicalism of many of those who spoke to camera and of people from various ‘migrant communities’ who shared ARN’s message in their networks again produced something in excess of the marriage referendum itself – a step toward transformative change rather than an end-point.
Ann Mulhall teaches in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. She is an activist with Anti Racism Network Ireland (ARN).
Source: https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2015/06/20/the-republic-of-love/
