INTERVIEW Rory O’Neill on taking a stand

COLOURFUL CHARACTER?Ballinrobe’s Rory O’Neill is pictured among the many outfits he wears as ‘Panti’.?Pic: Ronan Long/Irish Independent

Taking a stand


Ballinrobe native Rory O’Neill, aka Panti Bliss, talks  about homophobia, support from Mayo and life in the spotlight

Interview
Ciara Galvin

IT’S February 7 and Rory O’Neill from Ballinrobe is walking through the halls of RTÉ’s buildings at Montrose, fresh from an interview with Miriam O’Callaghan. As he passes the famous RTÉ newsroom, O’Neill, known to many as Panti Bliss, his drag queen alter-ego, hears members of the DΡil on TV discussing ‘Pantigate’, the national and international conversation sparked by his appearance on The Saturday Night Show last month.
So he decides to wait, standing in the middle of the newsroom, surrounded by journalists watching the debate on TV screens as politicians talked about him in the Irish parliament. He describes it as a ‘surreal kind of moment’.
When Rory O’Neill came out after finishing boarding school in Meath in the 1980s, he never envisaged becoming a gay rights campaigner.
In his own words, the 45-year-old owner of Pantibar a bar on Dublin’s Capel Street said, “Gay people shouldn’t have to earn rights.”
However, now he finds himself at the centre of conversations and debates about homophobia, gay rights and marriage equality all across the world after his recent ‘Noble Call’ speech at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre went global via both social and mainstream media.
RTÉ’s decision to pay out €85,000 to members of the Iona Institute and columnist John Waters has meant that the conversation about the issues has broadened, and Rory O’Neill has been launched into the position of ‘accidental activist’.
He says the weeks following his chat show appearance were ‘stressful, aggravating and unpleasant’, but quickly adds that ‘the support from home, around the country and around the world has been great’.
“Obviously my family have been supportive from the first moment,” he told The Mayo News last week. “But, yes, I’ve had lots of messages from people in Mayo, and you know, I don’t just mean gay people. I’ve had plenty of those too, but just people who are saying nice things and saying they’re happy it’s a person from Mayo causing this fuss,” he laughed.
His parents, Rory Snr and Fin O’Neill, have also been getting plenty of support for their son’s stance in recent weeks, something that the man himself reflects on with trademark honesty and wit.
“I think when you have a middle-aged drag queen son you don’t often have people coming up saying nice things to you about him. So I think that’s been [great] too for my parents, especially because I think they found it stressful in the beginning as well. But it was nice for them.”

Coming out
IN one of a myriad of interviews since his initial appearance on RTE’s Saturday Night Show, Rory O’Neill explained to a Channel Four TV news anchor that just because homophobia in Ireland isn’t on a par with, for example, the murders of gay people in some African countries, it is still nowhere near acceptable.
O’Neill, the son of a Ballinrobe vet, describes himself as ‘painfully middle class’. For him,  ‘coming out’ in the ’80s in a west of Ireland town wasn’t particularly difficult, as he went to boarding school.
“Because I had gone to boarding school and all that [O’Neill spent his second-level education at Gormanstown College in Meath], and then I was away in college in Dublin, I didn’t find it particularly difficult in respect of Ballinrobe. I think there were probably people who knew me, who always thought I was a bit odd,” he laughed.
He added that the South Mayo town, like most in the country, has ‘changed so dramatically over the last 20 years or so’.
“I’ve never had any problems in Ballinrobe, [but] I’m sure there are some people who’ve said things behind my back,” he says laughing.
“There are great [support] organisations, especially for young people, and I think the internet too [has helped]. Even if you’re living in a small village or out in the countryside, there are much easier [ways] to make contact with other people,” he added.
“I think Irish people in general now tend to be very ‘live and let live’, and I think Irish society learned a few lessons in the last 30 years or so with things like Ann Lovett [the 15-year-old schoolgirl from Longford who died giving birth beside a grotto in 1984]. It’s about people finding happiness any way they can.”
Offering advice to young people in Mayo, and around the country, who might be thinking about coming out, O’Neill sends a reassuring message: “With the very, very, very rare exceptions, the fear of people’s reactions is much greater than people’s actual reactions.”

Oppression
ON February 1 this year, Rory O’Neill took to the stage of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin as Panti and spoke to the audience after a performance of James Plunkett’s ‘The Risen People’.
The passionate ten-minute speech was described as ‘the most eloquent Irish speech since Daniel O’Connell was in his prime’ by Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole. It has also been viewed over 500,000 times to date on YouTube.
O’Neill spoke passionately and eloquently that night about the oppression that gay people deal with on a daily basis, and how he has had insults – and objects – hurled at him. He spoke about how that oppression has on occasion forced him to try to suppress his ‘gayness’. He told the story of how once, on a crowded train, he found himself compensating for a friend who was behaving ‘overly’ gay.
Speaking to The Mayo News, Rory tells another train story: This time, his return to Ballinrobe for Christmas.
The Christmas Eve before last, on a crowded train travelling home to Mayo, he was once again forced to confront those all-too-familiar feelings of oppression.
“On the train there was people drinking, and this woman made a snide remark about me being ‘like Graham Norton’,” he explained. “She meant it like an insult, the guy she was with was sort of laughing. It was unpleasant and that happened twice, two groups of people made these kind of remarks.”
Unfortunately, he added, these types of situations are ones that gay people ‘just end up putting up with’.
Last Christmas eve, he chose not to take that train.

Support
ALTHOUGH Rory O’Neill’s views and beliefs about gay rights have been widely supported, with celebrities like Graham Norton, Stephen Fry and Madonna all offering words of praise, he said he was ‘bowled over’ by the level of support he received from all sections of society in Ireland and beyond.
“I have had great support from the gay community from the very, very beginning, but then I was totally amazed at how many other people, in the broader community, care about it and are supportive. I’ve got thousands of emails, and cards and flowers sent to the bar.”

‘Godophobic’
IN THE wake of the so-called ‘Pantigate’ controversy, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin said that anybody who doesn’t show love to gay and lesbian people is ‘insulting God’.
They ‘are not just homophobic but Godophobic – because God loves every one of those people’, he said.
When asked if he felt the comments from the archbishop carried weight in the gay rights debate, O’Neill said he did. He described Dr Martin as ‘a good man with a difficult job at a difficult time’.
“I think what he said is only common sense, and you would think all decent thinking Catholics would have thought that anyway. But it’s very nice to hear that articulated, and for the archbishop to sort of lay a line down for those small minority of Catholics who feel they can be hateful towards gay people – it was great to hear him say that and I appreciated that very much.”

What next?
The past few weeks have been a rollercoaster for O’Neill. What would he like to come out of the national and international discussion that he has triggered?
“What I would like is for people to remember that people’s rights, and the respect for people, aren’t things that people need to earn, or that people deserve, or that the majority ‘grants’ minority groups. Respect and rights are intrinsic, they belong to every citizen, and we shouldn’t have to earn them.
“So gay people shouldn’t be expected to behave in a particular way … or to be less gay in order to be treated the exact same as everyone else. It is intrinsically our right as citizens of this country. That’s what I want everyone to think.”

Rory O’Neill on…
Being asked to run in the upcoming local elections
I didn’t give it any thought. I’m not cut out for that.

Juggling his job as a bar owner
I’ve never been so busy in all my life, but I have a great team in Pantibar and a great manager and staff who have all been there a long time so I’m lucky I don’t have to worry too much about that.

‘Team Panti’ T-shirts
It started off as a silly joke, somebody on the internet, and one or two people made their own and took that slogan [‘I’m on Team Panti’] off the internet. We printed up 50 and they sold out in an hour – 1,200 sold in four days. All of the profits go to [LGBT organisation] BeLonGTo.

The weirdest place he has seen a ‘Team Panti’ tshirt
Well I think in the audience of Prime Time … I had no idea who they were, but then it turned out they were students from the art college I had been a student in.