LGBTQIA+ archival material in the collections of the Royal Irish Academy Library

Professor Sonja Tiernan, Co-ordinator of Irish Humanities Alliance, provides an insightful overview of items from the RIA Library collection relating to LGBTQIA+ history in Ireland.

In 2015 Ireland became the first country in the world to extend civil marriage to same-sex couples through a public vote. The collection of LGBTQIA+ archival material at the Royal Irish Academy provides an insightful account into the long battle that human rights activists fought to reach this level of legal recognition.

A collection of pamphlets held in the RIA dating from the seventeenth century provides an insight into the historic basis of legal discrimination against LGBTQIA+ people. The collection includes the cases of the first men executed for homosexual acts in Britain and Ireland. Such pamphlets were sold widely and often included illustrations of the court setting and the convicted person on the gallows. Details could also include witness accounts and intimate details on the convicted such as their letters from the condemned cell or a confession in their final moments of life.

The first of these trials took place on 25 April 1631, when Mervin, Lord Audley, 2nd Earl of Castlehaven, was tried for crimes including sodomy with two of his male servants; Laurence FitzPatrick and Thomas Brodway. Sodomy, also referred to as buggery, was punishable by death stemming from An Acte for the punysshement of the vice of Buggerie, 1533. Due to his rank, Castlehaven was found guilty by a jury of nobility and beheaded on 14 May 1631 at Tower Hill, an area near the Tower of London. Weeks later, on 27 June 1631, FitzPatrick and Brodway were both tried, sentenced and later hanged at Tyburn.

Castlehaven’s trial became the legal precedent for homosexual cases well into the nineteenth century. The interest in this case is evident from the publication date on the pamphlet which was reproduced in 1710.

This case also had wider repercussions as it highlighted that the Act of Buggery did not apply to Ireland which inspired the Irish Parliament to introduce an Act for the Punishment of the Vice of Buggery (Ireland) 1634. The sentence of death would only be removed in 1861 when the Offences Against the Person Act was introduced, which designated the ‘abominable crime of buggery’ as an ‘unnatural offense’ carrying a sentence of penal servitude for life. Ultimately, consensual sex between adult men would remain a criminal offense in Ireland from 1634 until decriminalisation in 1993.

A supposed proponent of introducing the Buggery Act to Ireland was the Anglican Bishop of Waterford and Lismore, John Atherton; in a cruel twist of fate Atherton would later become the first man in Ireland convicted of this capital offence.

On 27 November 1640, Atherton was found guilty of sodomy with his proctor, John Childe. Atherton was found guilty and hanged at Oxmantown Green in Dublin on 5 December 1640. Childe was tried at Cork and hanged in March 1641 at Bandon Bridge. A pamphlet was published in 1641 emblazoned with the images of two men hanging from the gallows.

This case caused controversy and attention long after Atherton and Childe were executed. A second pamphlet ‘The penitent death of a woefull sinner, or, the penitent death of John Atherton,’ was written by Nicolas Bernard, Deane of Ardagh, and published in several editions.

The RIA holds the first edition printed in Dublin by the Society of Stationers in 1641 and a second edition printed in London in 1642. The pamphlet includes letters Atherton wrote to his wife and children from his cell in Dublin Castle and a sermon delivered by Bernard who acted as Atherton’s religious advisor in his final days. Atherton’s letter to his wife contains the note ‘cast not away this Paper when you have read it, but keep it and peruse it often, as the Legacy of him who can now give no other.’ Footnote ¹

Bernard’s sermon, along with other details of the case and Atherton’s ‘true copy of his laft [sic] speech at the place of execution’ was published again in 1711 and is also held in the RIA collections.

Religious men in Ireland were keenly aware of the repercussions of being accused of sodomy. In the nineteenth century, Percy Jocelyn, then Church of Ireland Bishop of Ferns and Leighlin, took a case of libel against James Byrne, a coachman, who accused the Bishop of making homosexual advances to him. The trial took place at the Sessions’ House in Dublin on 28 October 1811. Patrick Geoghegan describes how ‘Jocelyn denied Byrne’s allegation and, as the word of a bishop was not likely to be doubted, the coachman was found guilty, stripped, tied to a cart, dragged throughout Dublin, flogged, and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment.’Footnote ²

Further pamphlets held in the RIA show that this was not the last time that the bishop would feature in a homosexual scandal. In 1820, Jocelyn was appointed Bishop of Clogher. Two years later, on 19 July 1822, the bishop was discovered in the back room of the White Lion public house in London in a compromising position with a soldier of the first regiment of Foot Guards, John Movelley. Witnesses reported that the bishop was seen with his breeches down and the two men were forcibly removed from the premises and were then set upon by a crowd in the street and beaten. The men were arrested and later taken to Marlborough Street Magistrates Court where the presiding magistrate determined that as the offense of sodomy had not actually occurred, the bishop was entitled to bail. Movelley, was not so lucky and he remained in custody; reports are unclear as to his fate.

Jocelyn fled the country; he was removed from his position as bishop in October 1822 and declared an outlaw in 1824. He died in Scotland in 1843 under an assumed name of Thomas Wilson.

Ireland achieved independence in 1922, and rather than implementing the ideals of equality as enshrined in the Irish Proclamation, repressive laws such the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, were retained. 2024 marks the 50th anniversary of the first gay rights demonstration in Dublin. On 27 June 1974, members of the Sexual Liberation Movement formed a year earlier, protested the criminalisation of male homosexual activity. The small group including Margaret McWilliams, Jeffrey Dudgeon and David Norris carried placards emblazoned with the provoking statements ‘Lesbian Love’ and ‘Homosexuals Are Revolting.’ The group picketed the British Embassy, then on Merrion Square, and marched to the Department of Justice on Stephen’s Green.

It would take a spate of homophobic murders in 1982 to inspire Dublin’s first official Pride march which took place on 25 June 1983. Personal reflections and academic studies held in the RIA enlighten readers as to the effect of these murders on the community.

In Diverse Communities: the evolution of lesbian and gay politics in Ireland, Kiernan Rose describes how the murder of a gay man, Charles Self, in January 1982 had a devastating effect on the gay community in Dublin. Self was viciously stabbed to death in his home, his murderer was never apprehended. Rose describes how the police ‘investigation was more concerned with compiling dossiers on gay men than it was with solving the murder.’Footnote ³ At the end of the investigation just under 1,500 gay men were ‘questioned, photographed and fingerprinted at Pearse Street Garda Station’.Footnote ⁴ Significantly Rose dedicates his book ‘For those who did not survive’.

In his book Occasions of Sin, Diarmaid Ferriter MRIA highlights the murder of Declan Flynn on 9 September 1982 as a pivotal moment for the gay rights movement in Dublin. Flynn was beaten to death by a group of teenage boys who regularly went ‘queer bashing’ in Fairview Park. The boys ‘were expecting to be sent to prison for about seven years. They received five-year suspended sentences,’ after which they ‘held a “victory march” in Fairview Park.’Footnote ⁵  The night before Flynn’s murder, John Roche a night porter at the Munster Hotel in Cork was viciously murdered by Michael O’Connor because he believed Roche had made sexual advances towards him. O’Connor received a five-year sentence for manslaughter.

Through the RIA collection of LGBTQIA+ material, a complete evolution can be traced mapping laws from the seventeenth century which criminalised same-sex love with the most extreme penalty. While a story from the collections also emerges showcasing how Ireland achieved independence in the twentieth century through the sacrifice of many LGBTQIA+ people.  Works by and about queer icons of the revolutionary period such as Margaret Skinnider, whose biographical story Doing my bit for Ireland: a first-hand account of the Easter Rising, adorns the shelves of the RIA. As do works by and about Roger Casement, Eva Gore-Booth, and Helena Molony.

Contemporary material points to a positive future following the momentous Marriage Equality campaign, after which the people of Ireland voted overwhelmingly to recognise same-sex love, simply as a love like any other.