On a sunny June day in 2019, half a dozen supporters of the Abolish Direct Provision campaign stepped onto the streets of Dublin to participate in the annual Pride parade. We donned face paint and tie-dye t-shirts to get into the spirit of things, but in truth, ADP’s presence at a festival of LGBT+ liberation was more natural than it may seem at first glance. Mere weeks beforehand, Sylva Tukula, a transgender woman who had died by suicide in an all-male Direct Provision centre, was buried by the state without the presence of her friends. Indeed, many of those in Direct Provision are there primarily because they face persecution for their gender or sexual identification in their home country. But the connection between queer liberation and the movement for the rights of asylum seekers goes beyond a narrow set of overlapping interests. Underlying both movements is a fundamental commitment to expanding our conception of what it means to be Irish. For most of the history of the Irish state, our dominant mode of discourse was self-denial. We would look at gay men, at single mothers, at victims of abuse, and say, “That’s not us.” Those we could not ignore we would exclude, pushing them either into institutions or out of the country. When gay marriage was legalized in 2015, we opened up the possibility of revising our national identity to include a broader swathe of humanity. Residents of Direct Provision centres are excluded today in much the same way that so-called sexual deviants used to be – confined to institutions, demonised by conservative media, often forced to leave the country. Just like the LGBT+ community before them, what asylum seekers need more than anything is to be included in Irish people’s collective self-image. They deserve nothing less, of course, and those of us whose Irishness will never be questioned have a responsibility to join in the struggle for hearts and minds. Given all this, the Dublin Pride parade represented a golden opportunity to get some vital conversations going. Pride has been criticised in recent years for abandoning its radical roots in pursuit of mainstream acceptance. But for a project like ours, there were benefits to being associated with such a family friendly affair. As the parade moved through the streets, some of us waded into the crowd to canvas. It’s hard to think of many contexts in which it’s socially acceptable to approach strangers in the street and strike up a conversation about one of the defining human rights failures of our generation, but Pride gave us the permission we needed. The responses we received were a neat illustration of Irish public opinion on Direct Provision. Some were depressingly predictable: “We don’t have enough housing.” “We need to preserve our culture.” “They could be going somewhere else.” In other words, “That’s not us.” The majority of those I spoke to, however, were enthusiastic about the need for change. Almost twenty years after the first Direct Provision centres had opened, most people had made their minds up about the system, one way or another, and the topic was gradually being pushed into the centre of public attention. This is how political battles are won in the long run – through a continual nudging of the issue back onto the agenda. And just as well. Less than a year later, a new government was formed, and now-Minister Roderic O’Gorman was given responsibility for both LGBT+ issues and Direct Provision. The opportunities this presents for further collaboration between the LGBT+ and asylum seeker communities are obvious. Pride 2019 offered a glimpse of what this collaboration could look like. With their lives on the line, asylum seekers bring a desperately needed sense of urgency to Pride, which remains a fundamentally political event. But in Pride, we also see the other side of that same coin: the potential for joyous liberation
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