Una Mullally > Quotes

“Women come in many colours - black, white, brown, yellow, red when hot, blue when cold, green when sick, multicoloured when unwell and orange when on a night out. In some countries they even come in invisible.”
― Una Mullally, Repeal the 8th

“Whatever your beliefs, women always have and will continue to have abortions. Abortions for medical reasons or for unwanted pregnancies, women need this choice. I swear, if men could have babies, there'd be an abortion app.”
― Una Mullally, Repeal the 8th

“SUZY BYRNE: I think it’s interesting to watch GLEN emerge from an organisation which was not interested in civil partnership to one that became interested in civil partnership ‘but let’s not talk about marriage’, to then going, ‘Woohoo! Marriage! And children!’ That was actually really interesting. GLEN didn’t want to talk about kids at the time when they were starting the civil partnership issues. And that’s where a lot of women were very critical. At the KAL lunch, GLEN put little notices out. They were trying to find lesbians to go on the board because there weren’t any lesbians on the board. We called it ‘Rent-a-Dyke’ at the time.”
― Una Mullally, In the Name of Love: The Movement for Marriage Equality in Ireland. An Oral History

“MARIE MULHOLLAND: I remember one night watching I think it might have been the old Questions and Answers, and there was a discussion, one of the questions was about gay families, same-sex marriage and adoption and children and stuff. And LGBT Noise was in the audience, and one guy who was known as an LGBT Noise activist said, you know, ‘Every child needs two parents.’ And I thought, ‘Fuck you.’ You know? ‘Fuck you.’ That is twenty-five years of my community activism and you just fucking totalled that, you know? We’ve been trying to stand up for lone parents for years, and you just decided that every child needs two parents in order to promote your agenda which is about gay parenting. It felt to me like lots of really important stuff was getting rolled back.”
― Una Mullally, In the Name of Love: The Movement for Marriage Equality in Ireland. An Oral History

“I was born into an Ireland where gay men having sex carried a maximum punishment of life in prison, where gay women were so invisible they weren’t even written into the law, and where upon killing a person in an act of hate, you could get away with murder. There are a lot of dark corners in Irish history, but there are always opportunities for brave people to emerge from the shadows. This book is about brave people.”
― Una Mullally, In the Name of Love: The Movement for Marriage Equality in Ireland. An Oral History

“So yes, women are very frightening, despite their almost universal willingness to please people, to smile and be nice.”
― Una Mullally, Repeal the 8th

“MICHAEL CRONIN: My three main concerns can, I suppose, be summed up as follows: (1) How can we find a space in the current public conversation for a perspective that is critical of the marriage campaign but from a queer, gay-affirmative and anti-homophobic perspective? As Pantigate demonstrates, once the referendum campaign gets going, that will become even more difficult, probably impossible. (2) How can we manage to engage in a political discussion while acknowledging that this is an issue in which people are so deeply invested emotionally and affectively? For instance, I find it very uncomfortable and challenging to express my opposition publicly as someone who, firstly, is a potential beneficiary of the change, and, secondly, am opposing something that is deeply important to individuals who I respect and love, and opposing subcultural organisations that were very important to my own formation. (3) How can we develop a perspective on this that acknowledges that this is simultaneously a victory and a defeat? It is a progressive development that will make our society more inclusive, tolerant and affirmative of loving relationships and different families. But it will also entrench inequality – between the married and the unmarried, the secure and the precarious – and is another indication of how the utopian hopes of 1970s gay liberation and lesbian feminism have been thoroughly defeated.”
― Una Mullally, In the Name of Love: The Movement for Marriage Equality in Ireland. An Oral History

“UNA MULLALLY: Any further points?

ANN LOUISE GILLIGAN: Je ne regrette rien.”
― Una Mullally, In the Name of Love: The Movement for Marriage Equality in Ireland. An Oral History

“COLM O’GORMAN: I feel very, very strongly from my own professional perspective that if any organisation is seeking to advance the human rights of any group of individuals or population, it’s incredibly important that their positions are fully informed by an engagement with that population and with those people. So rights holders’ participation, and active rights holders’ participation, is incredibly important. And ensuring that your campaign and your calls are representative, and reflect what that rights-holder group actually want, as opposed to your assessment of it, even if you’re a member of that group, is absolutely vital. I think it’s fair to say that there was a disconnect between the case that was presented for civil partnership and the lived reality for LGBT people. Now, I don’t know if that was GLEN’s fault or even their responsibility – GLEN are GLEN, you know, they were an organisation doing a piece of work, and their structure is their structure, and their constitution is the way that they’re constituted, but I do think that there needed to be more of a considered engagement with the LGBT community in all of its diversity, you know? And it’s not white, middle-class, male, single, with concerns about pensions and inheritance and income tax and property. Those are very real concerns for people, but they’re very limited. They deny the reality of huge numbers of people. Absolutely women, and men who aren’t concerned with that. Again, it’s been really interesting in the context of the whole debate that we’ve had on prejudice [in early 2014] that you know one of the things that I think was most valuable about what Rory was certainly saying, and it’s something I feel very strongly too – prejudice is nobody’s dominion. Look at this community. Look at how this community treated lesbians. Look at the view of lesbians in this community. Or transgender people particularly. There’s no point in imagining or pretending that the LGBT community would be very different from wider society, and that power and influence wouldn’t be almost automatically in the hands of educated, middle-class, middle-aged men. That’s the way the world has been. And it’s changing thankfully, but it’s the way the world has been.”
― Una Mullally, In the Name of Love: The Movement for Marriage Equality in Ireland. An Oral History

“WILL ST LEGER: Whatever time it was, it was fucking freezing. We were outside with one banner. There was about eight of us if I can remember … The Iona Institute were having a meeting in there. So it was directed at them and the participants. It was really nice because the cops came along just to kind of see what was going on. I don’t know who called them – knowing Noise they probably let them know beforehand because they’re very considerate like that. A very handsome Garda on a motorbike was there and he was saying to us, ‘What’s the story inside?’ We said, ‘Oh, it’s the Iona Institute; they think that marriage is just for heterosexuals to procreate and we’re not allowed access to marriage.’ And he was like, ‘That’s terrible!’ So I had this feeling either he was a really liberal person or a card-carrying homosexual guard – maybe hope for the latter, you know, he was quite cute.”
― Una Mullally, In the Name of Love: The Movement for Marriage Equality in Ireland. An Oral History

“IZZY KAMIKAZE: It must be five years ago, they introduced a debate, a one-off debate, into the Cork Women’s Weekend as a one-off thing. I thought that was very interesting. Katherine O’Donnell to the best of my recollection chaired it … One of the things that I would have said there – and I take responsibility for this – is younger people in the community are not really aware of the history. And I don’t think it’s on to blame them for that. How are they going to be aware of the history if we don’t fucking tell them? That’s our job. So I remember one younger woman standing up at that debate that day, maybe 23 or something, and saying, ‘I’ve been out since I was 14 and getting married is the first thing I’ve ever been told in my life that I can’t do because I’m gay.’ And I was thinking: there’s the fucking culture shock. Ok! Well, I can see how it could feel important to you in that relatively cosseted situation. Like, you obviously didn’t grow up somewhere where you were having stones thrown at you every time you stuck your head outside your front door. You obviously have a very supportive family, probably the kind of people I used to go marching with thirty years ago, and all of that. So you’ve got the illusion that that’s the battle to fight now, that that’s all that’s standing between you and equality. And it is an illusion.”
― Una Mullally, In the Name of Love: The Movement for Marriage Equality in Ireland. An Oral History

“WILL ST LEGER: I remember when I was up on the plinth – I remember getting the dirtiest look from Ciarán Cuffe as he wheeled his bike into Kildare Street looking up at me. I think he was really annoyed. I think he said something to media about that, ‘It’s all very well climbing up there, but this took years to come about’ – all this kind of stuff. I was saying to Buzz afterwards, the fucking cheek of them. This is the same party who chained themselves to fucking trees on O’Connell Street because of sparrows when they were not a coalition partner. They had done the exact same thing five years beforehand for trees that had to be replaced. I was like, by the time they even say the words ‘Green Party’, that many number of trees in South America would disappear. Get the fuck over yourselves. Know what I mean? Green Party, what do they know? I was never in any political party so I had no trust in them, even though I knew them all from my days with Friends of the Earth.

Did Ciarán Cuffe have any memory of that?

CIARÁN CUFFE: No.”
― Una Mullally, In the Name of Love: The Movement for Marriage Equality in Ireland. An Oral History

“Nobody owns history, and nobody owns the movement for marriage equality. A social movement is as much the property of a legislator as it is a kid who got on a bus to go to a march. Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world, and never doubt that everyone together can either – the named and unnamed, the prominent and the anonymous. To those who fought for equality who are no longer with us, thank you.”
― Una Mullally, In the Name of Love: The Movement for Marriage Equality in Ireland. An Oral History

“Girls are always too something.”
― Una Mullally, Repeal the 8th

“MAX KRZYZANOWSKI: I came out in 1993, the year that homosexuality was decriminalised, and that wasn’t an accident. It certainly, I think, helped. It was a tipping point thing for me. I was hating leading a double life and feeling very shamed about it. But it gave me a little bit of added courage to come out … I grew up during the AIDS epidemic as a teenager, so there were two things that I knew about being gay. One was that the world hated me, and the second was that I was probably going to die. So I was terrified of intimacy as well as terrified of what the world might say and do about me if they knew. So on the idea of equal rights like civil partnership or marriage and stuff like that, I'd sort of emotionally put that to bed. I thought that would never happen.”
― Una Mullally, In the Name of Love: The Movement for Marriage Equality in Ireland. An Oral History

“BERNARDINE QUINN: We’re calling marriage equality ‘equality’ as if the day that there’s a bill stamped saying lesbian and gay people can get married that we’ll have full equality. Yet in Meath, there isn’t one single support service for a young lesbian or gay person to attend; there isn’t one qualified full-time youth worker to work with young LGBT people; there is absolutely zero trans services, where the trans services in Dublin are mediocre at best. There’s something about ‘marriage equality’ – that we’ll all be equal when marriage comes in, when a kid in west Kerry doesn’t even have a telephone number of a helpline that he can ring for support. This was raised by our young people to Mairead McGuinness and to Mary Lou McDonald when they were here, just to say, thinking that your work around marriage equality – that that’s not all. The allocation of finances to LGBT work in this country is tiny compared to what is given to most other services. There’s something about calling it ‘equality’. It’s another step on the ladder and it’s a hugely important step … But it isn’t all. There’s another battle after that, and that is to get services to west Donegal, to Mayo, into the Midlands, to get real, solid support in these areas so that a young LGBT person has something in every county, trained qualified people to talk to. In some areas where those services aren’t available, where there isn’t training for schools, where there’s nobody that a kid can talk to, to say that they think they’re transgender – I don’t want to sound negative – I think marriage equality is going to be fantastic for a lot of lesbian and gay people. I think if you were 14 and coming out today, your story is going to be so much more different than when I was 14. The prospects of you considering yourself what every other young person considers themselves of 14 when you think about your future and what you’re going to do: you’re going to meet the person that you love, you’re going to get married, going to have kids, going to have the house and the picket fence. That will be an option for a kid. When I came out, those dreams were put very firmly away. I was never going to get married, I was never going to have children, I was never going to make my family proud, my dad was never going to walk me up the aisle. All of those kinds of things were not even an option when I came out. As a matter of fact, there was a better chance that I was going to have to go to London, I was going to bring huge shame on my family, I probably would end up not speaking to half my siblings and my parents, having to go away and fend for myself. That was my option. I think that option has dramatically changed. People can live in their home towns easier now … Anything that makes a young person’s life easier, and gives them more opportunities, is fantastic. I think that a young person, 14, 15, only starting to discover themselves, they’ve got a whole other suite of options. They can talk about, ‘I’ll eventually marry my partner.’ I think I’m only after saying that for the first time in my life, that there will be an option to marry my partner.”
― Una Mullally, In the Name of Love: The Movement for Marriage Equality in Ireland. An Oral History

“Our very capacity to fully own and inhabit our humanity is a class issue.”
― Una Mullally, Repeal the 8th

“But, you know, GLEN were always I think really on their own track, whereas Marriage Equality and Noise were sort of in terms of ideology … like, I had a conversation with Brian Sheehan and I don’t think he would be sad about me saying this, but his opinion always was we were being idealistic and having a great ideology, but that he felt in terms of legislation, pragmatism is the sort of route of the day. My rebuttal to him would always be pragmatism without ideology leaves you with shitty legislation. So it kind of comes down to, I suppose, how people think it’s best to achieve their goals. My only disappointment around that is that I think you should always aim higher than what you even think you’re going to achieve.”
― Una Mullally, In the Name of Love: The Movement for Marriage Equality in Ireland. An Oral History

“DAVID NORRIS: But my God, as I said years ago, they’ve blessed bombs, agricultural implements and goldfish. And how do they know the goldfish aren’t lesbians? With goldfish it’s impossible to tell! … I think it’s terribly mean. Why couldn’t they give some kind of blessing to two people who love each other? If they’re prepared to bless bombs that blow people apart, and goldfish – whose sexuality is questionable – and tractors? Jesus! It’s so stupid.”
― Una Mullally, In the Name of Love: The Movement for Marriage Equality in Ireland. An Oral History

“As a man, the worst thing is to be accused of doing something "like a Woman". Doing something "like a Woman" is a euphemism for doing something to an abysmal degree of absolute shiteness. Instead of saying that you did something like throwing, running or behaving "not very well" in your everyday language, you can handily use "like a Woman" or, if you are pressed for time, "gay" instead.”
― Una Mullally, Repeal the 8th

“MARIE MULHOLLAND: I’m not opposed to gay marriage. I think everybody should have a choice. I think they should be able to take the option that most suits them, benefits them, and makes them happiest. What I’m totally opposed to is the pursuit of gay marriage to the exclusion of everything else. And not just the exclusion of other options, but the exclusion of other voices and other critiques. And the silencing of that.”
― Una Mullally, In the Name of Love: The Movement for Marriage Equality in Ireland. An Oral History

“I spent one full hour convincing some friends that women said poems in Ireland before Eavan Boland. The women friends are suspicious. They have English degrees.”
― Una Mullally

“AILBHE SMYTH: While I admire the work of GLEN, for example, in relation to the civil partnership issue, and I do think they worked very, very hard on that, that would not have been my chosen route. Their argument as I understand it has always been that civil partnership is a route to marriage. Whereas I felt it was an unnecessary route to go. I think you’re always better to go for 100 per cent. Certainly my own background in left-wing politics and human rights issues, I’m not prepared to go for less. If I’m going to be out there fighting for something, I’m going to fight for 100 per cent. I’m always going to fight for rights, and indeed probably for revolution. My politics have never been reformist politics. Inevitably I would have been always drawn towards Marriage Equality’s politics rather than those of GLEN. That being said, I do admire GLEN for the work that they do on a very broad spectrum, and would certainly always stay with that and continue to respect and admire their work and to support their work. On the issue of marriage and civil partnership, I’m for marriage. I just don’t want to do it myself, by the way, but I am for everybody’s right to marry.”
― Una Mullally, In the Name of Love: The Movement for Marriage Equality in Ireland. An Oral History

“Kieran Rose, chair and co-founder of the Gay & Lesbian Equality Network, accuses the protesters of practising ‘more radical than thou’ politics. ‘I don’t see disability or refugee groups calling for a boycott,’ he says. ‘It’s an immature kind of politics, as if nobody else has opinions on immigration. You must engage with the democratically elected government. The only way not to be criticised is to do nothing. We think it’s entirely appropriate to invite the minister to a festival around the theme of “family values”. The festival has a right to invite him and there’s no connection between sexual orientation and politics. Your social class has more to do with it.’

On the face of it, there is no particular reason why gays should be on the left. In other countries, particularly in the US, many have seen their interests as being more closely aligned with the libertarian right and with neo-liberalism, agrees Sheehan. ‘Lesbians and gays don’t fit into any particular political group,’ he says. ‘Maybe activism has tended to be of the left, but there are also many people who identify socially but not politically with the community. But a lesbian and gay film festival will always be a political event when a gay couple can’t walk down a Dublin street hand in hand.”
― Una Mullally, In the Name of Love: The Movement for Marriage Equality in Ireland. An Oral History

“KATHERINE ZAPPONE: I think Ann Louise and I are both on record disagreeing really with the strategy – and it was a strategy – to move for civil partnership legislation. I would have argued we felt we were moving into the twenty-first century. A lot of other countries started with civil partnership and then moved to marriage, but look, we have their history to learn from, why do we have to do it that way ourselves? Furthermore, once they get marriage, they get rid of civil partnership. It is the establishment of a discriminatory institution. So I mean, I think we both felt that very strongly, believed that, still think that. Obviously we saw very clearly how it unfolded, why it unfolded, whose interests were being pursued, and identifying that. At the same time I suppose I thought anyhow it would be counterproductive to be out there slamming it, so to speak, in terms of the overall importance of building the possibility of where we were going. I’m on record in the Seanad on the one hand making those statements in relation to it is a discriminatory institution, and on the other hand we have witnessed and we have been present for people’s civil partnerships – we do understand at a human level what that means to them. We also know, at least many of the people we’re aware of, that they would have waited – they decided for different reasons that they weren’t going to wait; they were going to do it; it meant something to them. All the while they were doing it within a very limited context. That should not have to be the case. Why do we have to do that? Because some politicians aren’t ready yet? Are you kidding me?”
― Una Mullally, In the Name of Love: The Movement for Marriage Equality in Ireland. An Oral History

“RORY O’NEILL: Older gays – for want of a better description – they were used to going on marches. They still don’t think the Pride parade is a parade, they think of it as a march. They’re used to being politically engaged and fighting for things. They remember Declan Flynn getting murdered. They remember decriminalisation. It’s just part of their DNA. Obviously as you get older, most people, gay and straight, find it hard to keep up the energy for those kinds of things except for the ones who are very dedicated; the GLENs and the Marriage Equalitys and the Ailbhe Smyths and so on. The younger gays, that wasn’t part of their DNA. Going out on a march was something they never did. … They’ve never been out on the streets. To them, going out on the streets was a big party on Pride where they wore wigs and skipped along, which is great, and I love that and it’s fabulous. But it’s not a protest. They had no connection to that. And so I think [LGBT] Noise gave them not only an opportunity, but also an excuse to get involved in something like that. I think it made younger people feel they were useful. Suddenly they felt they had a power. You went to those marches, of course you did. The Marriage Equality marches, the Noise marches, there was a real energy about that, wasn’t there? A sense of all these young people out with their placards. I’m quite sure a lot of them had never walked down the street with a placard in their lives.”
― Una Mullally, In the Name of Love: The Movement for Marriage Equality in Ireland. An Oral History

“FIONA DE LONDRAS: We have lots of things that are very good about having a referendum on the constitution. The fact that the constitution should reflect our values, and so on, but what’s the flip side? What’s the cost? When we have a referendum like this, we literally have to stand in front of our friends, family, neighbours and say, ‘Recognise me.’ The risk is that they say no. And that causes problems; that’s hard; there’s a massive social cost to that. And me or you, we can do it, but we’re used to it, this is part of the give and take of our everyday life. We are not the typical person who needs this. We’re the atypical person. So I think about the 14-year-old in school who’s listening to this stuff on the radio. Or the 65-year-old closeted farmer in the middle of Cavan. And people are talking about us, and it’s our lives and it’s part of our lives we have no control over. That’s a massive cost. Most things are not about a core attribute of a person. That cost has arisen when we had an abortion referendum, when we had that egregious citizenships referendum, that must’ve been what it felt like for people then too. But where there was another option, I cannot fully comprehend why the government would have asked us to bear this social cost. Now, the social benefit that comes afterwards in enormous, because we’ve all these vulnerabilities we’ve exposed ourselves to, and our fellow citizens say, ‘You’re equal,’ and that is good. And it will give a level of democratic legitimacy that a Supreme Court wouldn’t give. But my God, it’s going to cost.”
― Una Mullally, In the Name of Love: The Movement for Marriage Equality in Ireland. An Oral History

“DAVID NORRIS: They should be on their knees, all the Churches, repenting and begging forgiveness from the gay community for the horrors that were perpetrated on them for centuries for which they were responsible. This all comes from religion. It starts with the Old Testament, which has been seriously misinterpreted anyway.”
― Una Mullally, In the Name of Love: The Movement for Marriage Equality in Ireland. An Oral History

“SUZY BYRNE: I remember being at Lesbian Lives in the early 2000s where people were criticising the way in which the debate was taking place, who was leading it, that it was very male, and that it didn’t look at the diversity of relationships within the community. There was a narrative of what I would have identified as ‘the Good Gay’ … gay and lesbian couples that are monogamous, buy houses and fit in with everybody else. It became very conservative. I’m firmly in favour of marriage equality, but I want to see other forms of relationships recognised. But there’s an awful lot of conservatism and tut-tutting – not just in Ireland, it’s happening internationally, where everybody now sees marriage equality as the thing to go for because it fits into a model of the family. And I very naively maybe thought we would have a range of relationship formations recognised. The Irish Council for Civil Liberties produced a document that Fiona de Londras, Marie Mulholland and people in the ICCL worked on, which had a range of relationship recognition options in it. We don’t talk about those things anymore.”
― Una Mullally, In the Name of Love: The Movement for Marriage Equality in Ireland. An Oral History

“It's so sentimental, isn't it? To love the land and think it loves us back. Pride is demanded and isn't hard to give. But one wrong move...one wrong move and we are banished.”
― Una Mullally, Repeal the 8th