Emily O'Reilly

And so I remember putting my arms around him and saying, look, it'll be fine, it'll be fine, based on absolutely no evidence whatsoever of what could you do.

You could just try and comfort.

And then...

Well, everybody else was, you know.

He didn't think he was that exceptional, you know.

And he told my parents and I remember, no, he told me he was going to tell our parents and I was worried about mum and dad how this was going to impact them because basically he was telling them that he had potentially a terminal illness and he would die.

He would die soon and he was only 28, I think, around the time.

And I remember I rang up a kind of a gay counselling service and I explained the situation to them because I was concerned about my parents.

And they said, look, Emily, it will be a shock to them, of course, but like anything in life, they will absorb it and it will become normal.

normal.

This would become the part of their lives that they now have to absorb into it and that's the way it happened.

Brian stayed in Dublin not for that long.

He was a big city boy and he went to London and

Whoever was protecting him or whatever was protecting him, he managed to live, obviously, long enough for the miracle drugs, the antiretroviral therapy, to come on stream in the mid-1990s.

And that was it for him in terms of the terrors being lifted from that time in 1990 when he was first diagnosed.

Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, I think when you have, you know, a chronic illness, which this obviously was, you don't want constantly to be reminded of it.

So whenever I would meet Brian, if he was fine, I would take my cue from that.

I wasn't going, how are things?

And, you know, how's the ART going?

And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.