Enda Kenny's Equal Ireland

These days the keyword is emotional. Everywhere you look there are tears, so much so that I have taken to having a lemon at the ready when watching television. It is everywhere from the bland soaps, to the real life documentaries about lost children reuniting with their parents. We live in an age of mass hysteria where most of the news stories carried are dreadful, and things happen that are beyond our comprehension or at least they are presented to us as so. Our world is served to us on moralistic silver tray with the good morals on one side and the bad on the other and nothing in between.

We have smiling politicians wearing casual clothes and embracing the LGBT community like its liberation time, and you know who you have to thank for it. Well yes me Enda Kenny the flying liberal, or me Joan Burton the last bastion of social democratic principles, or me Micheal Martin the I would be more liberal than I am allowed to be, and of course me Gerry Adams the leader of a party that proposes to discriminate against sex workers and their clients for the sake of pragmatism, and brown nosing the DUP.

Amongst all of these are some genuine left wing activists who regard the freedoms awarded to the LGBT community as just a tiny step on the road to equality in our society. As in reality the plight of sex workers and their clients is just another LGBT scenario, just wind back the clock, and if you do you can see our society had a very similar attitude to homosexuality back in the days when David Norris ploughed a lonely furrow.

The thing about our esteemed politicians is that despite the smiles and the rhetoric they are lying, well it’s a bitter pill isn’t it to speak earnestly of equality whilst ruling over a society that is inherently unequal on so many levels not least economically, and for the leader of the country to tell the world that Ireland loves equality this should be regarded as a crime, and he should resign. Where are the media to challenge him when he makes such a bland and inaccurate statement, the figures are indisputable Ireland is an unfair and unequal society, and no amount of ranting by Enda Kenny re-our process will change that sad fact.

These after all are the people that go ducking for cover when the word abortion is mentioned. Such is their fear of the Catholic constituency, they must have been elated to find that the popular emotional vote was going to stick it to the zealots this time, but you try and muster that kind of support for women seeking an abortion within their own state? I am afraid you could be weeping your way to tidying up your office in Leinster house. No these politicians don’t want to take on the church on this issue. The other great issue is the criminalisation of the buyers of sex. Sex workers have long advocated this legislation will only push the industry underground and further into the hands of criminals, but the zealots say that we can stop men buying sex by sanctioning them by law. Well it doesn’t take a genius to work all of this out does it?


Of all of the issues we face regarding sexuality and our bodies’ sex work seems to attract the biggest loathing. It is a deeply held resentment and prejudice so much so that much discussion around it is irrational. Recently Ruhama the pro Catholic agency urged men not to buy sex which is grand an all until you realise that the trading of sexual favours is rampant in our society in and out of marriage, and to plead otherwise is insane.

So now the great Irish middle classes have lent their support to legalise the LGBT community and allow equal rights within the law. A great move considering our ultra-Catholic history. However it reminds me a little of Mel Brooks you know the one, ‘ok the Chinese can stay but no Irish,’or something like that.

If people want an equal society then they must be prepared to pay for it. We must repair the huge gap between the well off and the poor within this state. We must also examine the rights of individuals to have abortions within this country, and also the rights of consenting adults to provide sexual services for money, and the rights of others to pay for these services if they so wish.

Now that’s equality Enda.