Ireland

An Irish woman has opened up about the pain of discovering that her husband of 20 years was gay. Speaking on RTÉ Radio One’s Liveline, the woman – who only gave her first name, Mary – said she thought she was “happily married” until she discovered her husband’s sexuality. “He was a good, decent, kind man. But he was living a lie,” she revealed. “I found out by accident and in that second I knew that my marriage was over. She continued: “I loved him. Love doesn’t die easily, it...

The operator of Ireland’s national railway, Irish Rail, has formally apologised to a married lesbian couple who were asked to prove their marriage was real in order to buy a train ticket. Mary McNally and her wife Karen Underwood have been together more than two decades and in a civil partnership since 2012. They were married in 2015 as soon as the referendum passed. As a pensioner, McNally qualifies for free rail travel along with her wife. When buying tickets they “flabbergasted” when a member of staff asked them to...

HIV rates in Ireland have risen again this year with numbers now higher than they were at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s. There have been 476 new diagnoses of HIV in Ireland this year so far compared to 447 in the same period of last year, according to The Irish Times. The statistics mean that Ireland is now at double the European average for new diagnoses. According to HIV Ireland, almost 10,000 people have been diagnosed with the virus in Ireland since the early...

An Irish mum has shared her powerful story of raising a trans child, and said her son Steve knew he had been assigned the wrong gender when he was just two years old. Aisling Gannon told RTÉ Radio’s Ray D’Arcy Show that he was two and a half years old when he first asked when he would “get the right privates”. Since then, Steve – who is now 11-years-old – has been “consistent, insistent and persistent” that he is a boy, she said. “He says he was always a boy,...

LGBT+ people took part in a “kissing protest” yesterday in Dublin, outside Ireland’s parliament, to demand more robust hate crime legislation after a spate of homophobic attacks. The kiss-in protest took place just weeks after Dublin man Marc Power was violently assaulted by a group after he arranged to meet a man on Grindr. The incident was met with public outrage over inadequate hate crime legislation that fails to protect minority groups such as LGBT+ people and people of colour. Now, activists claim that there are parts of Dublin where...