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BUCHANAN: Dublin Time Machine @RobLooseCannon

11 months ago · Bilbao

On the night of the 9th of September 1982, thirty-one-year-old Declan Flynn left a pub in Donnycarney and walked toward Fairview Park. He was a young man from Whitehall who worked for Aer Rianta. Flynn was sitting on a bench in Fairview Park when five local youths, aged between fourteen and nineteen, descended on him. They were out, as they later put it, to “clean up the area of queers.” They chased him, beat him unconscious, robbed him and left him for dead on the grass. Flynn was found and brought to Blanchardstown Hospital, but he died within an hour of admission. When the case came to court in March 1983, it revealed as much about Irish society as it did about the attackers. Justice Seán Gannon gave the five suspended sentences for manslaughter, insisting that “this could never be regarded as murder” and praising the young men for coming from “good homes.” None of them would spend a day in prison for murdering Flynn. Its worth noting tragically in 1992 one of the five who had walked free broke in to a flat in Ballymun and brutally raped a woman. She was seven months pregnant. The verdict sent a chill through Dublin’s gay community, but also sparked fury. Activist Tonie Walsh later recalled, “Pride grew directly out of the gay-bashing killing of Declan Flynn. There was such a sense of anger at the killing and disbelief that the thugs who killed him would get off scot-free that gay people started to mobilise in a concerted way.” That mobilisation began almost immediately. After the suspended sentences were handed down, seven hundred people marched from Liberty Hall to Fairview in an event organised by the Dublin Gay Collective. It was not only a protest against Flynn’s killers but a demand for an end to violence against both gays and women, groups equally subject to everyday abuse and indifference. The visibilty of so many LGBT people on the news, in broad daylight as it were was itself shocking to Irish society. Bonded by their outrage and desire for change, a community was formed. The event lit the fuse on the Irish Gay Rights movement and that summer the first Dublin Pride took place, more protest than parade. Two hundred brave vanguards of equality marching from St Stephen’s Green to the GPO. Irish Pride was born.

RobLooseCannon's tweet photo. On the night of the 9th of September 1982, thirty-one-year-old Declan Flynn left a pub in Donnycarney and walked toward Fairview Park. He was a young man from Whitehall who worked for Aer Rianta. Flynn was sitting on a bench in Fairview Park when five local youths, aged between fourteen and nineteen, descended on him. They were out, as they later put it, to “clean up the area of queers.”

They chased him, beat him unconscious, robbed him and left him for dead on the grass. Flynn was found and brought to Blanchardstown Hospital, but he died within an hour of admission.

When the case came to court in March 1983, it revealed as much about Irish society as it did about the attackers. Justice Seán Gannon gave the five suspended sentences for manslaughter, insisting that “this could never be regarded as murder” and praising the young men for coming from “good homes.” None of them would spend a day in prison for murdering Flynn. Its worth noting tragically in 1992 one of the five who had walked free broke in to a flat in Ballymun and brutally raped a woman. She was seven months pregnant.

The verdict sent a chill through Dublin’s gay community, but also sparked fury. Activist Tonie Walsh later recalled, “Pride grew directly out of the gay-bashing killing of Declan Flynn. There was such a sense of anger at the killing and disbelief that the thugs who killed him would get off scot-free that gay people started to mobilise in a concerted way.”

That mobilisation began almost immediately. After the suspended sentences were handed down, seven hundred people marched from Liberty Hall to Fairview in an event organised by the Dublin Gay Collective. It was not only a protest against Flynn’s killers but a demand for an end to violence against both gays and women, groups equally subject to everyday abuse and indifference.

The visibilty of so many LGBT people on the news, in broad daylight as it were was itself shocking to Irish society. Bonded by their outrage and desire for change, a community was formed.

The event lit the fuse on the Irish Gay Rights movement and that summer the first Dublin Pride took place, more protest than parade. Two hundred brave vanguards of equality marching from St Stephen’s Green to the GPO. Irish Pride was born.

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Ciara Whitty

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