What is a good measure to determine just how powerful a lobby group is, inside your country? There are several possible answers to that question, but I’m going to propose my own: If you have the power to get the Government to effectively reach back in time and change history, then you’re pretty darn powerful indeed. So, I’m going to just come right out and call it. The most powerful lobby group in Ireland, by some considerable margin, is what someone close to me calls “Big Gay”, in the same way that there is a “Big Tobacco” or a “Big Oil”:
“Jim O’Callaghan, the justice minister, is to introduce legislation to overturn convictions of gay men for consensual sex in a move hailed by campaigners as a long overdue recognition of past injustices.
O’Callaghan will bring a memo to cabinet on Tuesday seeking permission to make amendments to the Criminal Law and Civil Law (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026 that overturn discriminatory prosecutions of gay men before same-sex relations were decriminalised in 1993.
The “disregard scheme” follows the recommendations of a working group that conducted a comprehensive review of past convictions and proposed 95 recommendations covering which offences should qualify, the criteria for applications and the procedures for decision-making and review.”
Here’s Leo Varadkar, the initial author of this scheme, gushing about it to the Sunday Times:
“I am really delighted this measure is finally becoming law. I was a little concerned it had been lost in the department, given other priorities. Crucially, this is not a system of pardon nor will these be spent convictions.
“It’s a disregard, which means the conviction should never have occurred. That’s powerful. I do hope it will also be possible for the next of kin to apply where the person convicted has died.”
Now, I am not so naïve as to think for a moment that much of the public will join me in being outraged about this proposal: Modern morals, and all that, mean that nobody is going to take to the barricades to uphold somebody’s 1930’s era conviction for sodomy. Nor, for the avoidance of doubt, do I have any desire to re-introduce sodomy laws. This is not about the morality or otherwise of homosexuality. It is about how we as a society treat established facts.
First, note this nasty little line from Varadkar:
“I was born in 1979. In the years before that, dozens of men were convicted under an old British law for engaging in homosexual acts,” Varadkar said.
The idea that homosexual acts were banned in Ireland until 1993 because of some Imperialist and Colonialist hangover is ludicrously nonsensical, in keeping with much of Varadkar’s output in his post-Taoiseach era. In fact, the “old British law” criminalising homosexuality was abolished in the United Kingdom in 1967, more than a quarter century before Ireland got around to it. This fits with the general worldview of progressive Ireland: Everything bad that ever happened here was done to us, never by us, and always by either the British or the Bishops. Preferably both.
No, our anti-homosexuality laws existed because there was broad public support for them. This was the country in which, for example, during the 1980s, sitting Taoiseach Charles Haughey suggested that we should limit the availability of condoms, on prescription, to married heterosexual couples. It was a Fine Gael politician, the late Oliver Flanagan, in 1971 who worried that decriminalising homosexuality would lead to Ireland being “over-run with gays and Lebanese”. Neither man paid much of a price politically for their views.
The people who were arrested, charged, prosecuted and convicted of homosexual acts in Ireland were thus prosecuted under Irish laws, maintained by Irish politicians, with – for much of their history – the support of the Irish people.
Now, you might say “but John those laws were clearly wrong, and we should certainly issue pardons”. Except that is not what is happening here: People are not to be pardoned for their crimes. In essence, their prosecutions are to be deleted entirely as if they never took place. That is a subtle difference but an important one.
We’ll start with a basic question: Why does this not work in reverse? Ireland made rape within marriage illegal in 1990. Before 1990, it was an absolute defence against a rape charge to note that you were married to the victim. We do not know how many women were raped by their husbands in the first 70 years of this country’s independent history, but we can probably be relatively sure that the number is in the single digit thousands at minimum.
Can those women, should any of them still be alive (some surely are) now have their husbands charged and arrested for the heinous crimes committed against them? No, they can not – because it is an absolute defence that the rapes committed within marriage pre-1990 took place at a time when rape within marriage was not illegal. In other words, marital rapists are judged by the laws that applied to them at the time. We cannot do what Pope Stephen did to Pope Formosus at the “cadaver synod” of 867, and dig up the corpses of dead criminals and put their skeletons on trial.
The other point here is that there are many things made legal today that were not lawful in earlier times. For example, suicide attempts were illegal until 1993. The distribution of certain books was illegal for much of our history as a state. Selling alcohol in a pub on Good Friday was illegal until 2018. Selling or importing contraceptives was illegal until 1985.
Are all the people throughout the state’s history who were sanctioned by the state for offences under these laws also to have their history extinguished? No? And if not, why not? If the state were to decide, as some wish it to, to legalise cannabis tomorrow, should all of those who have historically been convicted for supplying cannabis be pardoned? Should anyone serving a sentence for the supply of cannabis be released?
The final point here is, I think, the most important: This proposal has no practical effect. There is nobody alive today suffering any practical harms because of a 1930s era conviction for sodomy. This is a proposal that is entirely symbolic. It is akin to what the Romans used to do to bad Emperors, like the unfairly maligned Domitian, when they would pass damnatio memoriae (literally “damn their memory”) laws attempting to expunge them from history. The point is that great legislative effort and time is being expended not on anything useful, but on a quasi-religious ritual damnation of this country’s own history.
No other group has this kind of sway and power, or gets this kind of deference. It is ludicrous, and it is about little more than the wielding of raw political power in service of a kind of group therapy session. It is about time, as a country, that we stopped prostrating ourselves before this agenda.
Love gay people, by all means. But I for one am tired of the constant bowing down to Big Gay.