*Breandán Baguio at his home in Feakle. Photograph: John Mangan
FAR-RIGHT PROTESTERS were met with counter-demonstrations when they visited Killaloe and Scariff.
Protests over the stocking of LGBT+ reading material have forced the closure of Cork City Library in recent weeks.
On Saturday last, far-right protesters erected an anti-transgender banner across Killaloe library as part of their ongoing campaign. The library which was closed for the weekend had no staff or users present when the banner which read “There are only two genders: male and female” was placed outside the building.
Members of the group camped on Inis Cealtra that night, an act that has been described as illegal by Cathaoirleach of the Killaloe Municipal District, Cllr Tony O’Brien (FF). They also raised their banner on Holy Island which Cllr O’Brien said “desecrated” the protected structure and national monument.
A two hour counter-protest was held in Scariff on Sunday when the group arrived at the Harbour and in the Market Square.
Feakle’s Breandán Baguio was among those involved in the counter-protest. “My view is they have the freedom to assemble, to gather, to demonstrate, they have free speech to say what they are saying, that is not in question, I vehemently disagree with their message and believe what they’re saying is wrong and trying to demonise non-conforming and queer people, the language they are using is taken from American right-wing people where they have been demonising and othering queer people. My opinion is there is no place for that in Ireland and we don’t stand for that as a nation and a people”.
He told The Clare Echo, “We have a duty to stand up, the reason I stood up is because these people are claiming to protect children but they are not interested in the impact of their message on LGBT children who are listening to what they are doing, it is something I can’t stand by and let others do, we had to stand peacefully in opposition to do so that young impressionable LGBT people could see that we were willing to take a stand”.
“I’m thirty eight now, I grew up in the 1990s with a narrative of homosexuality being evil and bad, I went to the Christian Brothers and my sex education was given by a nun, when she was asked about gay people she said they would do irreparable harm to themselves by having sex with men. To me what I felt as a young person to see that was scared, ashamed”.
According to Breandán, the message pushed outside libraries in recent weeks by this group of protestors can be very damaging. “What they’re preaching is designed to push young people back into the closet, I never had an adult step up for me as a young gay person, even into my late teens and college days we had to stick up for ourselves, I would hope if fourteen year old me saw what we did at the weekend that he would have been given extra hope”.
A long-time volunteer with Limerick Pride, the member of East Clare Musical Society said the protestors are trying to bring undo the progress made when the country passed the Marriage Equality Act in 2015. “It was difficult coming out at the time, to be honest for me it’s more of a weariness of here we go again, the nation very much resolutely in 2015 said we cherish all our children equally but these people are trying to take us back, we’ve some uptake in hate crimes and queer bashing since these people have got prominence in the media, that is something that I have a concern about. I’m big enough and bold enough to look after myself, I’m happily married but my big concern is for children, they go about speaking about children but no one thinks of the gay or lesbian children who may be listening to them and their existence being debated”.
He claimed that the protestors “are anti-refugee, anti-immigrant, anti-everything and they have been given a resounding tick to go home by people of Limerick, Clare and Galway, they’ve been run out of every town and city they have gone into. What happened in Scariff, there was no political people or elected representative there involved in the counter-demonstration, no politician spoke to us or offered support, this was the community that stood up”.
