Comment: Time for a gay taoiseach?

Last Saturday morning, I was queuing in the post office in Dunshaughlin. A particularly gabby woman was being attended to, full of aul’ chat as the post mistress carried out her various transactions for her. Like most village post offices, it’s not the largest of premises, so conversations can be overheard.
Then came the mouthful.
“And I hope we’re not going to have a gay taoiseach,” she declared.
“Did you see them talking about it last night on the tele…?”
Then realising there were three more customers waiting behind her (all men), she turns around.
“Oh, I hope none of you are gay!” she says.
Silence.
“Sure you don’t know,” I say to her.
“Well it’s all over the papers this week about him, so there must be more than me giving out about it,” she says, before going into some incoherent ramble about what your marital status needs to be to get a council house.
Extraordinary. But it goes to show that while a majority of the population approved the same-sex marriage referendum a couple of years back, when Leo Varadkar, now a Fine Gael leadership front runner came out as gay, there is still a certain homophobic attitude under the surface.
John Boyne, author of ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’ was on radio recently to talk to Ryan Tubridy about his new book, ‘The Heart’s Invisible Furies’, which centres on a gay character, and he touched on that very topic.
He said he thought it would be a nightmare of a subject, as all the ‘naysayers’ would appear in the media, naturally as it was a referendum. And it did turn into that nightmare. Why should 90% of the population tell 10% what they should be doing in terms of marriage rights, he queried.
“You think everything is ok in society because the marriage referendum was passed. But it’s not fine. Because 60% passed it. Everything’s not ok – because 40% of people didn’t approve of it.”
Boyne, who is himself gay, said that this means there will be still young people – and not so young – who will suffer homophobia and bullying, and be frightened to come out or to be honest with themselves about what life is going to mean for them.”
Sebastian Barry was another writer being interviewed on RTE, after his book ‘Days Without End’ won the Costa Book of the Year 2016. The work, about the relationship between two soldiers in the US Army in the 1850s, is dedicated to his son, Toby.
He told Morning Ireland how he was worried about his preoccupied son who didn’t seem to be well, and how the worry turned to relief when his son revealed to him at 16 that he was gay.
Barry described how it had reversed the father-son relationship as he was now learning things from his son, and he described his son’s sexuality as ‘a magnificent state of being’.
That worry and anxiety among young people that Boyne and Barry describe hasn’t being wiped out by the referendum result. There are still young people losing their lives as a result of such stress, as they find they are not able to come to terms with their sexuality.
It would be ideal if the term gay was what the late Cardinal Desmond Connell thought it meant back in the 1980s, when he was working in the Philosophy Faculty at UCD, and some of the members objected to a gay lecturer coming in from Sweden. What was wrong with being gay, he wanted to know. Sure every philosophy lecturer should be gay, he added, much to the guffaws of his colleagues.
Afterwards, he asked Professor Richard Kearney what they were laughing at. Prof Kearney asked him did he understand the meaning of the word 'gay'.
“I do,” Desmond Connell replied. “It means to be happy and jubilant, and joyous and cheerful.”
When Professor Kearney told him it also meant to be homosexual, he almost swallowed his pipe in convulsions.
Much has been made of one national newspaper's coverage of the private lives of the two main Fine Gael leadership candidates over the past week, with happy families photos of the Coveneys juxtapositioned against photos of Leo Varadkar and his partner, taken from social media. Many were asking does it matter?  In some ways, it does - to those gay youngsters and not so young who are still living under the shadow of attitudes like the lady in Dunshaughlin post office. For them, what would be better than having an openly gay leader of the country? Then they might be able to live a life of Cardinal Desmond Connell's quaint interpretation of the word 'gay', or Sebastian Barry's 'magnificent state of being'.