This column began fifteen years ago, when I wrote about the 1993 St Patrick’s Day parade in Dublin, and my experiences following the first ever gay community float as it trundled along in its gaudy finery. We were coming of age as a nation, able to tolerate sexual difference; the repeal of the draconian laws against male gay sex was on the way, but no one knew how far the government would go in decriminalization at that stage.

We had no idea then that the campaign would be so successful – but the fight had gone on for so long, we had no expectation that when it came it would be worth waiting for. Buoyed by the symbol of having Mary Robinson as president, the first (and, happily, not the last) to have been actively supportive of gay rights, and very well aware that the Catholic New York parade wouldn’t have touched us with a barge pole, it was an important event to mark a new Ireland. Still criminals, we were hopeful.
During the parade, however, it became obvious that there were others who were following the gay float too. They were members of an organisation called Youth Defence, and they were whistling and catcalling. Eggs were thrown. After a while they noticed me, and at one stage surrounded me, and although I knew they were hardly going to attack me in the middle of the huge crowds, it was a disturbing moment. A few weeks after I wrote about that event, I left Ireland.
Fifteen years later, and I’m back at the parade for the first time. As a symbol of how Ireland has changed, it could not be more dramatic. Before, it was hired trucks covered in crepe paper and bunting, with shivering girls in ringlets and green kilts and sashes doing a lovely little dance for us to the sound of an accordion player in front of a tinny microphone and amplifier, interspersed with serried ranks of groups of boy scouts or firemen waving sheepishly. In between the dreary floats for Building Societies and department stores, we yearned for the oomph of the American bands, (there were usually a couple), who with their swagger and showmanship and pazazz reminded us of what real entertainment could be like. This was before Riverdance; “sexy” and “Irish Dancing” were words never spoken in the same sentence. This is a time when the Eurovision gave us a sense of pride in ourselves: we were good at something, we weren’t all bad. The IRA was planning the Bishopsgate bomb in London in our name, to explode the following month, “peace process” was firmly the stuff of wild dreams. This was before the Celtic Tiger, when the Irish diaspora were the only ones doing well for themselves in Australia or Amerikay, and we longed for their Christmas visits to see for ourselves what happens when the youngsters earned decent money in a culture of self-belief. This was before the internet. Yes, there was a time.
This was before the church had lost its grip on power in the land, but had begun to feel the tremors. Bishop Eamon Casey had just fled the country, after revelations that he had fathered a child, the Supreme Court “X case” decision, a year previously, which had allowed a young woman to leave the State to get an abortion because she was suicidal, was followed by the painful abortion referendum which had split the country. This was a year before we learned that a priest had had a heart attack in a gay sauna and died - and that there were two other priests there ready to give him his last rites. We had yet to experience the shock of an Irish politician (or anyone in the public eye, for that matter) being caught with his pants down in a cruising area, and Emmet Stagg’s continued success as a politician serves to remind us of the singular power of the public backing of a wife and mother.
This was a time when Dublin was the whitest capital city in Western Europe; the only prominent foreign faces were gregarious loud groups of Spanish students, sent here by their parents to learn English in a good Catholic country, and the occasional glimpse of Chinese restaurant workers, who kept themselves to themselves in the main. Moosajee Bhamjee had become Ireland’s first Muslim TD the year before, an honourable “Indian among the cowboys.”
The 2008 Paddy’s Day parade was a blast, a celebration of diversity and good humour, a collective demonstration of bonhomie the like of which I have not seen since one New Year’s Eve in Edinburgh. Although I failed to see much of the parade itself, because I was not interested in queuing for hours in the cold to get a front row, the glimpses I saw were creative, theatrical, and hugely entertaining. Dublin’s “street party” atmosphere was enchanting. People were lying on the grass in their hundreds in St Stephen’s Green, enjoying the sunshine, the Céilí Mór in Earlsfort Terrace was ridiculously good fun. Everywhere I went I heard different languages, saw different races, all wearing silly costumes, all entering into the spirit of it. I can’t help but wonder how much we contributed to the Chinese economy, (and the suppression of Tibet), by buying such enormous amounts of silly costumes and merchandising in green, white and orange. And, the fact that there were drunken riots afterwards, and a poor English pianist lost his finger because he had the misfortune to come across a bunch of xenophobic hate-filled gangsters, reminds us that we are still a drunken savage lot.
Now, in 2008, it has become apparent how much the wounds of the Catholic church’s teachings on sex have damaged us - not only in their rigid, fearful implementation, but also, in the method of their unravelling in the last fifteen years, how they were revealed to be devastatingly hypocritical. Our collective conscience, our moral touchstone, was revealed to be deeply flawed, dangerously steeped in denial and corruption. Our rage against their double standards, the sanctimonious piety covering up institutionalised, terrifying abuse of children on an industrial scale, has left us bruised; deeply suspicious of, and hostile to, the sexual impulse. The stone-throwers are well-practised, and the living reality of the injunction “Let him without sin cast the first stone” seems quaintly archaic, part of the good old, bad old days.
We’ve still a lot of growing up to do.