Last Saturday there was a demonstration outside the Dáil that was hastily organised to try to capitalise on a controversy that you may or may not have noticed, depending on what corners of Twitter you inhabit, if any.

The genesis of this was an article on the website Gript, a clone of far-right American opinion websites run mostly by former Youth Defence activists, and edited by John McGurk, who’s been on this podcast. It was about the new Green Party minister Roderic O’Gorman, his brief is the newly-renamed Department of Children, Disability, Equality and Integration – he’s basically the Minister for Woke.

Gript have made a habit of mining the social media feeds of newly-elected left-wing TDs for anything that can be packaged into an embarrassing article. To be fair to them, they exposed pretty unsavoury anti-Semitic comments made by one Sinn Féin TD; they didn’t get anything said by Roderic O’Gorman that was worth writing about, but they did find a photo from a Gay Pride parade in 2018 where he and the British-based gay rights activist Peter Tatchell appeared together.

This article then triggered the actor and sometimes Travellers’ rights activist John Connors to record a rant and put it on Twitter.

That ends a bit abruptly there, but that’s what John Connors published. It’s worth looking into the background of this.

Peter Tatchell is pushing 70 at this stage, but he was a pushing for gay rights long before it was fashionable. He was a UK Labour parliamentary candidate in 1981 in a previously safe labour seat, where he was subjected to a barrage of homophobic abuse and as a result lost badly to, ironically, the Liberal candidate Simon Hughes, who at the time was a closeted homosexual.

Tatchell stepped down from his activism in 2009 because of the effects of brain damage he suffered including from being beaten by neo-nazis while taking part in a Pride parade in Moscow, and by thugs hired by Robert Mugabe when Tatchell tried to perform a citizen’s arrest in Brussels for human rights abuses in Zimbabwe, and was beaten unconscious.

He clearly is not afraid to stand up for his views, and in most of these views has been vindicated by history, but not all. In 1997 the Guardian journalist Ros Coward wrote a withering piece about a book edited by one Joseph Geraci calling for what he called a ‘more balanced’ debate on paedophilia. Ros Coward rightly excoriated the book.