Tonie Walsh
speaker
85 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 27 Jun
Tonie Walsh’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
You know, when we look back in that period and we look back at Ireland before decriminalisation, and by the way, it's lovely that this very week the government is progressing the disregard bill to actually expunge those criminal convictions.
But when you look back on that, it's not just about the crude numbers of men who, gay and bisexual men, who were sent to prison for nothing more than loving sex.
another man or having sex with another man.
It's the intangible corrosive impact of the law and how that played out.
And I think how it played out, what I'm referring to now is the culture of self-censorship that exists.
The fact that, and you would have been aware of it as a broadcaster and a journalist, how the media was reluctant to take up positive images and explore positive images.
I mean, the Evening Herald was still using the word gay in inverted commas up until 1989.
Well, they had a privilege of, I think they had the privilege of wealth and status and the theatre.
You know, so you didn't touch people who were working in the theatre.
It's no coincidence that lots of lesbians and gay men actually found refuge in entertainment and the arts because they were a little bit more liberal.
But, you know, there was, repression actually did impact on people.
We have no way of quantifying it, but anecdotally we know of thousands of lesbians and gay men who left Ireland right throughout the 20th century in search of more social,
Indeed, and a certain omerta of silence where people just didn't talk about it outside of those circles that so-and-so was gay.
You know, somebody like a broadcaster and one of your former colleagues, Vincent Hanley.
I mean, it would have been known, Vincent's sexuality would have been known in limited circles, but outside of that, nobody would have talked about it.
That's a really astute observation.
We wouldn't have known this at the time, but when you look back at that period, particularly the late 70s and 80s, you do see this parabola, a pushback against the increased visibility of the...
a newly enabled LGBT community.
I mean, there was a raft of just horrible murders right across the island of Ireland throughout the 1980s.
And a lot of that came in response to the emergence of pride festivals, people actually appearing more... And that was the idea of gays getting uppity.
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