‘We’ve seen very real rollbacks:’ Dr Michael Barron on the fight to maintain equality advances

From the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1993 to the 2015 Marriage Equality Referendum, Dr Michael Barron has been a central figure in the relatively rapid advance of LGBTQ+ rights in Ireland.

Originally from Glenmore, Kilkenny, Michael has detailed the experiences and knowledge learned through his decades of advocacy in a new book, How Ireland’s LGBTQ+ Youth Movement was Built.

The publication reflects on the behind the scenes work that was done to lay the foundations for the Marriage Equality vote but also warns of the fragility of the advances that have taken place amidst growing hostility towards marginalised groups in Ireland and worldwide.

“There’s definitely a right-wing pushback against minority communities in general and I wanted to produce something that would be useful to activists and advocates,” Michael says.

“It’s pretty much taking the learning that we developed through the 25 years or so of the book and then seeing how we can apply it to the present and future,” he adds.

A co-founder of BeLonG To, the national LGBTQ+ youth organisation, Michael and other members travelled the country in the 1990s, helping to establish local groups where young queer people could come together in their own communities.

“We spent a lot of time on the road doing that work, going to each of those areas, helping them set up the group and then leaving them to it. I think that proximity and localness of Ireland really helps when you have people from Kilkenny doing the Kilkenny work and people from Waterford doing the Waterford work,” he reflects.

“That’s pretty much how we approached this, that we’d come in quietly and not look for the limelight, then step away and maybe not even be noticed helping. I think that really worked.”

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Many would have expected the Marriage Equality Act to be the final victory ensuring LGBTQ+ rights but worrying reversals in public sentiment and policy around the world have threatened the progress that’s been made, something which Michael believes Ireland has to be ready to deal with.

“I have colleagues who are working all over the world including in the United States, Britain, Eastern Europe and Africa and we’ve seen very real rollbacks in societies where we would have thought LGBTQ+ rights were embedded.”

“That’s definitely a concern and I think we would be naive to think that level of pushback won’t come to Ireland. I don’t think Ireland is an exceptional case, so even if some of the pushback has been fairly disorganised so far, there’s a huge amount of money being put into the anti-LGBTQ+ movement throughout the world,” he outlines.

Although the far-right in Ireland hasn’t reached the level of coordination and impact of networks in the US and Great Britain, their influence is felt through the information fed to audiences on social media to sow division, something which Michael warns that people need to be aware of.

“You’ll have the underground agitators, but I think the bigger problem is the social media corporations who are quite invested and have created something which is really like an apartheid system online,” he explains.

“If you have one particular opinion, you’re pushed in one direction and if you have another opinion, you’re pushed a different way. There’s very little crossover, that’s not by accident.”

“The idea is to outrage people and to build up this continuous rage, spread disinformation through those systems which then results in people going out and doing what happened in the Dublin riots,” he adds.

The increased vitriol and hostility towards LGBTQ+ and other marginalised communities is a worrying and worsening issue, but nothing they haven’t already overcome as Michael hopes his book can offer some useful insights from his life and career to help others protect the areas of equality that have been fought so hard for.

“If you go back to the 90s there was incredible opposition to the work we were trying to do and it was very acceptable to homophobic in public so we’ve been here before,” he asserts.

“I think that’s part of what I’m trying to do with the book, is just to share learnings from what we did back then in order to shift the narrative, shift the country’s way of thinking about these things and see if they’re useful today.”

“Some of them will be and some of them won’t be because the world has changed, but to at least give some optimism that these things come in cycles, and it won’t always be like this as long as we organise ourselves properly again,” he concludes.

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