Irish Aids Day 2026: Statements
Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-17
============================================================

Tom Clonan (IND), University of Dublin

I thank the Minister for coming to the House. I welcome our guests to the Visitors Gallery. When I saw this on the schedule, I decided to come along and speak to the issue of AIDS. Sadly, I will be 60 in August. I did my leaving certificate in 1984. That summer, and in 1985, all of my friends and I went to London, as young guys from Finglas. We went on the ferry and took the train down. I remember it stopped in Rugby at about 3 a.m. and some eejit got off the train and wandered off into the night. That summer, we all began to discover ourselves. Over that summer and the summer of 1986, two of my friends came out. They were able to do that in London in a way they could not in Ireland.
In 1986, I went to New York on a J1 visa. When I was working in New York, I met friends from school and from Finglas, some of whom were able to come out because it was a different environment and they could live an authentic, valid life. In 1987, Prince released the song "Sign o' the Times", which begins "In France, a skinny man died of a big disease". We began to hear of AIDS as a phenomenon. I remember the advertisements on Channel 4 and BBC that had pictures of cliffs crumbling and collapsing down into the sea. We did not really understand the threat, particularly in Ireland because of the intersectional stigma around being gay, which was to engage in what were described in the laws as "homosexual acts"; these were criminal offences. Therefore, we had this awful situation where people who were getting ill could not come out.
One of my friends was named Patrick. I grew up on Ballygall Avenue and he lived in Finglas Park around the corner. We used to play kerbs with footballs outside our houses. He was in London that summer of 1985 and he never came home. He passed away and none of us knew, again, because of that appalling stigma attached to it. The fact is that AIDS can be treated now. I pay tribute to all the people who work with antiretroviral drugs and deal with the community. I want to say this. I remember at the time when this was dominating all the major news platforms, there was a distinction drawn between people who were gay and then people who were infected through blood transfusions or who were haemophiliacs or whatever. There was kind of a hierarchy of suffering and more, if you like, recognition was given to people from outside the LGBTQI community.
A very close member of my family is a medical doctor. She was stabbed with an infected needle in the emergency department in St. James's Hospital in the early 1990s. We went through a period of waiting for the tests to come back to see whether she had she been infected. I understand the fear at that time before there were proper treatments. It was a uniquely cruel disease for those who contracted it because they could see in their own community what was happening and they had watched their friends with the appalling symptoms of sarcoma and struggling for breath. It was a very tough disease.
I want to conclude by saying that I came in this morning and passed by the front of Agriculture House. I saw the rainbow flags up there. I know there is a tiny minority of voices who question why we should put the rainbow colours around the Houses of the Oireachtas. I am delighted to see it because I remember the time when it was hidden. It was stigmatised. It was something that, thankfully, people like David Norris fought so hard to bring out of the framing of it being a criminal act. In celebrating where we are in relation to AIDS, we should not link the two things together too clumsily but we should celebrate our LGBTIQ community and all of our brothers and sisters.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-06-17/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:04+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-06-17