As Pride came to a close for this year, we spoke with Oisín O’Reilly, CEO of Dublin’s Outhouse, a LGBT+ community resource centre and cafe, who sees cause for optimism as well as despair. Chastened by the Trump administration’s targeting of companies that pursue a DEI agenda, some of the corporate backing for Pride evaporated this year. While that could be interpreted as a worrying sign of the times, Oisín doesn’t see it like that.
“I think there’s a little bit too much on the 24% (of companies that cut their involvement) and not enough on the 76% who have stuck with us. There’s a good news story there,” he said.
“Friends of mine were challenging me last week and saying there were less rainbow flags or rainbows on social media, and they’re not wrong. But what I’ve seen is that the companies that we work with, in late January and early February, when they saw what was happening and what the impact would be for our community, they asked what they could do.
“I said, ‘Look, we’re actually going to need more help now’. What most of them said was that they wouldn’t spend money on telling people about the good things they’re doing this year, and the money we would normally spend on that we’ll give to you to run more programmes or add more services or what have you. I’ve actually seen huge allyship and solidarity happening and it’s a story I’m quite sad isn’t being told.”
Nonetheless, there is obviously fear and worry over what is happening abroad.
“The environment that we are working in, with all of the wider geopolitical shifts, has really changed the context for the work, particularly in supporting individuals and engaging in community development,” he said. “There is a huge amount of fear and anxiety and worry prevalent within the LGBT community here in Ireland, particularly for trans and gender non-conforming people. That part of our community has been really targeted by bad faith actors.”
“We look across to the US and things look scary. Then we look at what’s happening in Hungary, where they passed constitutional amendments to ban Pride and criminalise LGBT people. That sense of fear of it arising here has changed the environment that we’re in, the issues that we are working on and the types of support that people really need,” he said.
Homophobic attacks are on the rise, and sometimes getting Garda support can be a challenge.
“We’ve had some really difficult experiences when members of the community have gone to the gardai to report those. There are great guards, but they are also under pressure and sometimes when people go into stations those things aren’t taken entirely seriously. But when people come to organisations like ours and tell us, we know where the guards working hard for our community are,” he said.
- More information on Outhouse is available at its website outhouse.ie.
- A previous article on what Outhouse provides is available on page 15 of this edition: http://tommyo262.sg-host.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Issue-79-Winter-2022-2023-pubd-Jan-32p.pdf
- Also, our video tour of Outhouse with Oisín can be viewed here:
