Today's column will be about homosexuality so I must issue a warning that some readers will find some of its contents immoral, unnatural and downright disgusting. I know I do.

What, for example, could be more immoral, unnatural and downright disgusting than this statement? "Sexual relations outside marriage constituted a violation of bodily integrity, and homosexuality did so in a particularly grave manner as being against the order of nature and a perversion of the biological function of the sexual organs . . . it was important that the state should do all in its power to discourage the spread of homosexuality and in particular should not appear by the laws to condone sexual practices calculated to undermine the institutions of marriage and the family."

That choice piece of hate speech was issued from one Rory O'Hanlon SC in 1980. At the time Mr O'Hanlon was representing the State as it defended the legal ban on homosexuality being challenged in the High Court by David Norris. He was not giving his own personal opinion, he was giving that of the State. Or, in other words, us. This was being said in the name of the people of Ireland.

Justice Herbert McWilliam ruled against Norris, telling him "it is reasonably clear that current Christian morality in this country does not approve of buggery, or of any sexual activity between persons of the same sex."

This was the country that Donal óg Cusack was born into.

Justice McWilliam did say that "there was no foundation for any of the common beliefs that male homosexuals were mentally unbalanced, effeminate, vicious, unreliable, less intelligent or more likely to assault or seduce children, or young people, than were heterosexual males". Very good of him. Though presumably anyone who had laboured under the delusion that homosexuals were, for example, less intelligent, had lived in blissful ignorance of the work of Oscar Wilde, Francis Bacon, Benjamin Britten, Ian McKellen, WH Auden, Marcel Proust, Tennessee Williams, EM Forster, John Gielgud and Truman Capote, among very many others.

David Norris fought on. In 1988 the European Court of Human Rights found that the Irish ban on homosexuality infringed the rights of gay people. The Irish government had no option but to repeal the ban, though it took five years to do so.

On the day the bill legalising homosexuality was passed in the Dail, a Fine Gael TD from Louth named Brendan McGahon said: "I believe homosexuality to be an abnormality, some type of psycho-sexual problem that has defied explanation over the years. I do not believe that the Irish people desire this normalisation of what is clearly an abnormality . . . while they deserve our compassion homosexuals do not deserve our tolerance . . . such people have a persecution complex because they know they are different from the masses of normal society. They endure inner torment."

In a slightly less florid manner, some other politicians got in on the act back then. Three of them went on to hold ministerial rank.

"I do not often find myself in agreement with my constituency colleague Deputy McGahon but on this occasion I am," said our current Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern.

"The problem is that this Bill will be seen as sending a message that society regards buggery as a natural, healthy and acceptable act but I disagree totally with that. It would be irresponsible to send such a message to our young people at a time when AIDS is such a prevalent disease," said future Minister of State and Taoiseach's brother Noel Ahern.

"I ask the house to pause and think whether the decriminalisation of homosexuality is the duty of the house or whether it would in fact adversely affect future generations . . . if the argument is accepted that homosexuality is not morally wrong is there still a basis for a law to protect youth from corruption," said future national laughing stock John Limo O'Donoghue. These were our representatives. We voted for them.

This was the country in which Donal óg Cusack grew up.

And that is why nobody should underestimate the bravery it took for the Cork goalkeeper to publicly come out as a gay man in his autobiography or what a huge step forward this represents for Irish sport. We should also understand what a huge challenge it is to the bigotry and prejudice which remain against gay people in this society.

Perhaps there are people reading this column and thinking, 'Why is there such a big deal being made about it? Why do gays have to go on about their sexuality so much?' But it's not gay people who make an issue of homosexuality, it's straight people. Most straight men have, for example, been in a pub with a woman and, suddenly overcome by affection, leaned across and kissed her.

If a gay man did this with his partner, he'd be regarded as looking for trouble in most of the country's pubs. There's even a chance he'd suffer physical violence. Do gay couples walk arm-in-arm down our main streets with the same unselfconsciousness and freedom as straight couples do? They don't because straight people wouldn't stand for it. In most towns every pub is a Straight Bar.

This is the country Donal óg Cusack lives in.

The work of people like David Norris has made Ireland a better place for gay people. But it's far from ideal. Two years ago Brian Lenihan, then Minister for Justice, told a meeting of the Gay and Lesbian Equality Network that they could forget about gay marriage. "Gay marriage would require constitutional change and in my view a referendum on this issue would be divisive and unsuccessful and, furthermore, would jeopardise the progress we have made over the last 15 years."

You can read a lot into that simple sentence. Brian Lenihan thinks a referendum would be 'unsuccessful'. Why would it be? After all, it's no business of any straight person whether gay people want to get married. Well, is it? Yet apparently our leaders think they'd band together to deny them this right. The clue is in the word 'divisive.' Lenihan knows

the bigots would come out of the woodwork were such a referendum held. And instead of doing the brave thing and facing them down, the government haven't the stomach for that fight.

Ponder that bit about jeopardising the progress we have made over the last 15 years. Brian Lenihan was warning GLEN not to make the straights angry or they might take away what they so grudgingly granted in the first place. In other words he's behaving as though gay rights are a gift dependent on the good mood of the majority, rather than something which should be granted as a matter of course.

This is the country in which one of our leading hurlers decided to unapologetically declare himself a homosexual man. He asked for no one's permission and he expressed no regret. This, he said, is who I am and if you've got a problem, that says more about you than it does about me. We needed to hear this.

Donal óg's coming out coincided with the burial of Stephen Gately. There was a lot of hypocritical guff surrounding the presence of the former Boyzone singer's 'husband' at the funeral. We were told it showed how much we'd moved on, how much we'd 'matured as a nation' that Andrew Cowles was 'accepted' at the funeral.

But Stephen Gately's 'husband' wasn't his 'husband', he was his civil partner. They couldn't have got married in this country because the government feel this wouldn't be 'accepted'. I expect similar self-congratulatory nonsense to be written about Donal óg. But we don't deserve any plaudits because he came out. It doesn't show that we've 'matured as a nation'. It shows that he's a mature individual. It is a credit to him, not to us. Were we to put in place legislation that meant Donal óg Cusack might one day be able to legally marry, then we could start clapping ourselves on the back.

I'm sure there are people who feel the Cork keeper should have kept quiet about his sexuality. But that kind of silence has obtained for too many years. It's not too long since a well-known gay Irish public figure, who never left the closet, died and the papers were full of stuff about how he'd never met the right woman, he wasn't the marrying kind etc, etc. In fact they went a bit OTT with this kind of stuff, as if this was in some way the most suitable posthumous tribute to the man. But we're always better off with the truth. And, above anything else, Donal óg Cusack has made us face up to the truth.

It was not just a coming out, it was an honest coming out. There was no dissembling, no kowtowing to the straight prejudice which demands that gay men present themselves as sexless creatures. Instead he said that, like many a healthy young straight Irishman, he'd spent plenty of time trawling the pubs in the hope of a ride. And he didn't apologise for it.

What Donal óg Cusack did at the weekend is important, too, because it challenges some of the myths peddled by the homophobic pressure groups Brian Lenihan and his cabinet colleagues run scared of. They tell us that homosexuality is 'a lifestyle choice' and that people can be 'influenced' towards it. The implication is that people become gay for the same trend-setting reasons that they might develop a passion for performance art or avant-garde cinema or that they are suborned into the culture by listening to one too many George Michael albums, watching one too many episodes of Queer As Folk.

Well, Donal óg Cusack grew up as a GAA-loving teenager in a small East Cork village. It is doubtful that gay culture played a big part in his teenage years, doubtful too that a young man whose big ambition was to play hurling for Cork thought, "Do you know what? I'll become gay because that looks like a cool thing to do". As he says, he knew he was different. He didn't make a sham marriage, he didn't go on for the priesthood, he didn't emigrate or do any of the other things which gay men once felt they had to do to stop the rumours and the sly questions of, "no sign of you to get married then?"

Sometimes we kid ourselves that we're tolerant because we condescend to accept flamboyant gay men in the Julian Clary/Graham Norton mould. But we have more problems with accepting our gay neighbours, our gay relations, the gay mechanic, the gay bricklayer and the gay farmer. That's another reason why it's such a big deal that Donal óg came out. Because one look at how the man plays the game is sufficient to destroy that old myth that gay men are uniformly effeminate, sissyish and, above all, instantly recognisable.

It's been a good week for Irish sport. It's also been a good week for the gay man I know who religiously travels forward and back from England every year to watch the Galway hurling team in action and a good week for a friend of mine whose brother recently got married in England. It was a gay wedding and the family, died in the wool fans of GAA, soccer and Munster rugby, all went over. So did the children from the brother's previous marriage. When I see solid no bullshit country people reacting like this, I wonder if Brian Lenihan underestimates us a bit.

It's been a good week for our gay friends, our gay neighbours, our gay brothers, our gay uncles, our gay sons and daughters. And that means it's been a good week for all of us as we continue the struggle towards that day when we cast aside all the old bigotries and taboos, a day when our kids and grandkids will look on our hang-ups as relics of a darker, thankfully departed time.

And when that day comes one of the people we will have to thank is a very brave man from Cork. A very brave gay man.

thephotograph@hotmail.com

Sunday Independent