Ireland Is Not Homophobic
Currents
In Ireland, the LGBT conversation is no longer one of victory, but one of vitriol, vilification and virtue signaling. The shift in tone began as Ireland awoke to news of the brutal assault of Evan Somers, an openly gay rugby player, who had been attacked the night before on Dame Street, Dublin, by an unknown assailant heard to be shouting homophobic abuse. Left with a broken ankle and fractured eye socket, Somers’s tweet from his hospital bed quickly went viral. Shocked at the brutality of the attack, the Irish media went into meltdown. Within the space of the next two days, police found the bodies of two gay men in the neighbouring county of Sligo. Both men, Michael Snee and Aidan Moffit, were found decapitated in their homes, having been targeted and tracked down via the dating app Grindr. Thousands attended vigils in Sligo and across the island. Disheartened by the inhumanity of crime, the Irish people went into mourning.
In the wake of these tragic events, many members of the Irish press have begun to wonder aloud whether, contrary to popular belief, Ireland has not evolved, but rather has remained a bastion of homophobia. Judging by the headlines, one could be forgiven for thinking that the Irish people have been hard at work repealing the rights of the LGBT community and reversing the course of recent history. “Homophobia Has Been Increasing for Years, Warns LGBT Community” reported Newstalk; “Homophobia in Ireland: Forgotten but Not Gone?” queried Magill; “What Is Behind the Resurgence in Homophobia?” asked the Irish Times; “Normalisation of Homophobia Must Never Be Accepted” declared the Irish Examiner.
To those intimately familiar with Ireland, however — with its nature, culture, and, most importantly, the data — these headlines are but dispiriting examples of the narrative fallacy. First popularized by writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Black Swan (2007), the narrative fallacy describes the human inclination to turn random events into simplified stories, superimposing agency and causal patterns that serve to hide the true senselessness of reality. It is the very type of broad brush that the LGBT community has fought to anachronize.
Indeed, even when one pares back the layers of these tragedies, outliers in their own right, the narrative of there being a unique and uniquely prevalent strain of Irish homophobia begins to unravel at both ends. In the case of Evan Somers, a subsequent Irish Times article has cited his assault as part of a growing trend of violence in Dublin city, whose list of victims includes lone women, homeless men, business owners, and members of the general public. Was homophobia the cause of the violence or a depressing correlation? On this question, the headlines were certain of the former. In the cases of Michael Snee and Aidan Moffit, police sources have since revealed that the killer, Yousef Palani, arrived in Ireland as an Iranian refugee in 2006. Is his homophobia the product of his time in Iran, a country wherein homosexuality carries the death penalty, or his time in Ireland? On this question, there were no headlines.
Homophobia exists in Ireland. It has always existed, here and everywhere else, since time immemorial. Yet, to say Ireland is homophobic, one has to wade through a deluge of evidence to the contrary. Ireland is the 9th most gay-friendly country in the world, the fourth country to elect an openly gay head of state, the first country to legalize same-sex marriage by popular vote, and the list goes on. And all this from a country that, as recently as 1993, considered homosexuality a criminal act.
To headline hyperbole such as “What Is Behind the Resurgence in Homophobia?” is not only to exhibit an ignorance of the relevant history and indifference to the relevant data, but also ingratitude. It is an ingratitude, not only for how far Ireland has come, but for those who got us here: those once described by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar as Ireland’s “Unknown heroes, the thousands of people whose names we do not know, who were criminalized by our forebears.” One can only imagine what those unsung heroes would have given to live in the Ireland of today. One can only imagine their reaction to its designation as “homophobic”. This is part of a larger trend in how modern society thinks about its past.
In the twenty-first century, love of country has become taboo. Within the limited vocabulary of our societal discourse, nationalism and patriotism have become synonymous: an intelligible conflation, but not an intelligent one. For though nationalistic love of country has a tendency to harden into forms of antisocial supremacy (objectively, my country is better than yours), patriotic love of country speaks to an altogether more social, soft-spoken form of prosocial preference (subjectively, my country is my favourite). In line with this reasoning, I have likened my love of Ireland to the love I have for my mother: there could very well be a better birthplace or birth mother out there, but none that could ever tempt me to trade. It is not that I am blind to their faults, but that their faults pale in comparison to their virtues — a good-to-bad ratio that, by any measure of history or humanity, could only be equated from a position of ignorance, desperation, or bad faith.
There is no libel for liberal nations. Unlike corporations, democracies do not have the legal rights and recourse of human beings — and thankfully so. In Ireland, a country that (not for want of trying) arrived late on the democratic scene, the national press has the freedom to sensationalize, scandalize, and slander it without fear of retribution or a midnight knock on the door. Yet, we abuse this freedom at our own peril. Unlike the island itself, trust is not evergreen. Surveying today’s political landscape, one can see faith in institutions collapsing across the board. In such turbulent times, neither Ireland nor any other liberal democracy can afford to become its own worst enemy. No matter how desperate the times or how gruesome the atrocity, nuance, perspective, and truth cannot be sacrificed on the altar of moral outrage. The repeated failure to see the big picture leads to an environment that disdains complexity, denies progress, scapegoats, and pits people against one another. It is, ironically, the surest way to make more nightmarish headlines a reality.
