Largely excluded from political debate because of the dominant influence of the Troubles, lesbian, gay and bisexual equality could well surface as a more mainstream issue in Northern Irish politics in the light of any lasting peace settlement.
Not that gay and lesbian campaigners have been inactive up to now, as witness Express Yourself!, a new report by Frank Toner, Adrian McCracken and Karen McIlrath. Importantly, this document has helped community workers to both assess the need for, and define the workings of, Northern Ireland's first gay counselling service. Due for publication in June, and researched under the auspices of the Rainbow Project - whose initial aim of promoting sexual health for gay men now encompasses a broad range of physical, emotional and mental health issues - Express Yourself! contains highly significant and often surprising findings about gay life in Northern Ireland.
Part of the Rainbow Project's work - which is funded by European Peace and Reconciliation money - involved Northern Ireland's first gay male community audit.
"What we found was that we had quite a lot of cross-community gay relationships," explains Adrian McCracken, project manager at Rainbow. "There was a lot of gay men coming to us and they were having difficulties. It was bad enough that they were gay, but then they were dealing with 'I'm a gay Catholic but I'm going out with a Protestant'. No one had ever done a proper audit of gay men's thoughts on what it's like to be coming from the religion and the culture that you come from and also being gay, and how you see that in terms of the wider community, in terms of relationships, and in terms of who you'd go to to sort out your problems.
"We felt that there was a very strong need to have a big cross-community element. That's one of the major things we'd like to tackle with the pilot project."
A questionnaire was disseminated, explains McCracken, "which looked at how difficult it is being a gay man living within Northern Ireland, and specifically in Belfast, taking on board the political situation, the terrorism and all of the other things that you would have in any other community.
"Some of the positive things we got were that 82 per cent of the respondents felt comfortable being gay, though 45 per cent regularly considered leaving Northern Ireland. Only 13 per cent felt that religion had a positive effect on their self-acceptance and coming out. We asked very specific questions around how important a prospective partner's religious and political beliefs were and the great majority of people felt that they were either unimportant or irrelevant. Which is really positive, because it does suggest that the gay community crosses the political and religious divide.
"You'd get a totally different response from the heterosexual community, and that's not based on assumptions - that's based on other findings from other pieces of research."
The survey also investigated how different religious backgrounds impacted on the acceptance or otherwise of one's sexuality.
"We tried to see if there was any difference between being Catholic and gay and being Protestant and gay," Aidan explains. "We found that Catholics were significantly more comfortable with being gay than Protestants - 87 per cent of Catholics were comfortable with being gay, whereas only 77 per cent of Protestants were. We also asked whether coming out or self-acceptance had been hindered by religious figures, and it showed up that 54 per cent of Protestants felt that it had been hindered, and only 30 per cent of Catholics.
"By that you can make the assumption that it's easier to be religiously Catholic and gay than it is to be religiously Protestant and gay. You could very easily make the assumption that there's only one Catholic church, but there's so many different Protestant faiths, and so many of them of them are so intolerant."
The audit also uncovered widespread evidence of abuse.
"The really interesting thing for us was that roughly a third of the respondents had been physically abused, that a quarter had been sexually abused, and one half had been emotionally abused," Adrian notes. "The biggest percentage of emotional abuse came from schoolmates, and we found a very high percentage of young gay men playing truant or being bullied at school. The emotional abuse from peers or schoolmates was 61 per cent."
These disturbing figures were matched by the large number of gay men who had been diagnosed with clinical depression or medically treated for depression - respectively 24 per cent and 42 per cent of those surveyed. Less than a quarter of respondents had told a family member that they were gay, pointing to a high level of emotional isolation from family. The men were also asked which elements of the wider community had hindered their coming out as gay; 38 per cent said they were hindered by religious figures, 31 per cent by politicians, and 29 per cent by society in general.
"Some people might say that there are too many counselling projects in Northern Ireland," concludes McCracken, "but believe me, there is nowhere near enough." He hopes that the funding being provided to Northern Ireland "will go in for grassroots community work, to enable people to get together to discuss their differences and try to overcome them." n