Some people don’t think a gay man should be Minister for Children, says Green Party leader

Green Party leader Roderic O’Gorman has said he has been subject to more vitriolic abuse because he is a gay Minister.

In an interview on The Irish Times Inside Politics podcast, Mr O’Gorman spoke about the abuse he had received since 2020 on social media, and in person, for his work as Minister for Children and his efforts to provide accommodation for tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees and asylum seekers.

Mr O’Gorman said public protests started as soon as he took up his portfolio.

“On my first week as a Minister there was a demonstration outside the Dáil, where they had a noose for me,” he said. “That was a bizarre and troubling experience. I had to make adjustments to my own engagement with social media after that.”

He added: “There are people out there who feel a gay man should not be the Minister for Children.”

Mr O’Gorman said the experience had toughened him as a politician and he would not allow a tiny group of people “to impact on my head space and distract me from the work I’m doing”.

He said a priority for him in Government following his election as Green Party leader this week was to have hate crime legislation enacted to protect minority groups. However, that could put him on a collision course with his Coalition partners Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. The Bill was paused in the Seanad a year ago and is unlikely to return to the Oireachtas before the autumn, raising doubts as to whether it will be enacted during the Coalition’s term with election speculation mounting.

Mr O’Gorman said his other priorities were delivering a socially progressive budget, a Bill to protect marine areas and the ratification of the protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

He said the Green Party would not be entering into a transfer pact with any party in advance of the general election.

The Minister also said he wanted to use focus groups to help understand the party’s performance in the June elections to assess where, why and how it lost votes and see “what part of our message wasn’t cutting through with the electorate”. He said he was confident he could bring support back to close to the 7 per cent it received in 2020.