Woman in the Making: Panti's Memoir (23 page)

Then, a couple of days later, I got two solicitors’ letters via e-mail, and the next day two more. A few days after that I discovered I had received a fifth, which had been sent via regular mail and had sat unnoticed in Pantibar till I went to collect the hard copies of the letters. The letters were all written by the same solicitor, but on behalf of five different clients who were each claiming that I had defamed them. Two of the letters were on behalf of Breda O’Brien and John Waters, and the other three were on behalf of individual members of the Iona Institute whom I hadn’t mentioned at all, including its founder and director, the columnist and commentator David Quinn. One of those three people I’d never even heard of before and another I was only vaguely aware of. All five letters were almost identical and the assertion was that I had made ‘seriously defamatory comments’, which implied that their client ‘is known and disliked by the gay community as a person who promotes homophobia and hatred for homosexuals and the gay community generally’. They were demanding that I immediately provide them with an ‘open written apology’ and
retraction confirming that I ‘accept that there were no grounds whatsoever’ for my comments, and that I accept that ‘many people who saw [my] interview would think less of [their] client and in particular, the gay and lesbian community would think less of [their] client’.

Getting the letters was a shock. I had made the comments off the cuff and I had only named O’Brien, Waters and the Iona Institute in response to a direct question from Brendan O’Connor, the host of a chat show on the national broadcaster. And even then I had only accused them of being ‘horrible and mean about gays’, which is merely my honestly held opinion. I considered my comments to have been reasonable and nuanced.

At the time I knew very little about our arcane defamation laws so, sitting on my sofa with the dog, reading the first letters, I assumed they were silly and vexatious. Nonetheless, these were letters on behalf of prominent people, probably wealthier and much more legally and politically savvy than I, so I wasn’t going to ignore them. I called a barrister friend and explained the situation, and he recommended a good solicitor he knew called Andrew Sheridan, who knew his way around a defamation case. Thankfully, my new best friend Andrew agreed to help me.

Andrew is a neatly put together guy with a lawyerly demeanour. Controlled and serious but with flashes of humour or steely determination – and the occasional bit of Law Library gossip – he speaks deliberately, meaning what he says and saying what he means. It was clear from
the beginning that he thought this was an interesting case and I could tell he quite relished the idea of taking on my correspondents. However, like all lawyers, he can be infuriating because, knowing the vagaries of the law and the unpredictability of courtrooms and juries, he’ll never give you a straight yes-or-no answer. He’ll tell you what he thinks is the likely outcome, what he educatedly guesses to be the probable outcome, but always leaves room for doubt – always allows room for the possibility that it will all go tits up in court. As he started to explain the seriousness of the situation I was in, and the incomprehensible complexities of our defamation laws, I started to want a straight answer. I wanted to say, ‘Yeah, but it’ll all be fine in the end, right?’ and I wanted him to say, ‘Yes’, but he couldn’t.

What he could and did mention was bankruptcy –
my
bankruptcy – which was a distinct possibility, apparently. Still, after enquiring into the state of my finances, he told me that the only people who could afford to take on a defamation case were the very rich, and the very poor because they have nothing to lose, ‘and you have nothing to lose’.

What Andrew wanted to know was what I wanted to do. Was I prepared to go to court over this, a process that could take years of stress with no guarantee of the outcome? Was I prepared to possibly lose what little I had over it? If we lost in the High Court we could conceivably go all the way to the European courts, but
was I prepared even to contemplate that? Six or seven years of stress with this hanging over me?

The truth was, I didn’t know. I needed more time to think. I was being asked to apologise, but I didn’t have anything to apologise for. I’d meant what I said. I believed what I’d said. And people can say lots of things about me but what they can’t say is that I’m not principled because I am my parents’ child and I got that from them. I have risked things and lost things before on a point of principle, and I was prepared to do it again. I would avoid court if I could, but I wouldn’t apologise for something I hadn’t done. That was my line in the sand. ‘OK,’ Andrew said. ‘Then we’ll work from there.’

I was beginning to understand that I could really be in trouble but Andrew seemed to know what he was doing and I felt I was in good hands. Like the sick and injured animals that cleaved to my father and refused to leave after he’d treated them, I fell a little bit in love with Andrew too.

The next two weeks were difficult. Stressful, worrying, upsetting and tiring. I didn’t sleep well and would wake up suddenly to find my dog Penny sitting up on the bed looking at me oddly. And I was angry. Why were these people so upset? I mean, if you’re going to write, or publicly advocate for gay people to be treated differently from everyone else, then own it. Don’t advocate for gay people to be treated differently from everyone else and then get your knickers in a twist when somebody suggests that that might be construed as
homophobic. And since when did ‘homophobe’ become the worst thing you could call someone? So terrible that even people who publicly advocate for gay people to be treated differently from everyone else are appalled at the suggestion. And, anyway, the easy way to stop people thinking you might be a homophobe is to stop publicly advocating for gay people to be treated differently from everyone else!

I spent a lot of time discussing the case with Andrew and how we would respond to the letters. He made contact with RTÉ’s legal department and was told that RTÉ had received similar solicitors’ letters from the same five people, and a sixth from another member of the Iona Institute. At that point RTÉ’s legal team said they were considering their own response but assured Andrew they would keep him in the loop regarding how they intended to proceed. We were very eager that this would be the case, given that RTÉ’s decisions could have serious consequences for my own position. However, it soon became clear that we would not be kept in the loop. Emails went unanswered, meetings failed to materialise and we had little contact after that. What little we did have didn’t inspire confidence. RTÉ were in disarray, floundering around in a panic, desperately trying to make this all go away. It was difficult not to form the opinion that we were an annoyance they also wanted to go away.

I did have a few telephone conversations with a couple of the people who work on
The Saturday Night
Show
and they told me what they knew but they were clearly confused as to what was going on as things had been taken over their heads to RTÉ’s top brass.

During this time it was not a mainstream media story. Painfully aware of the shortcomings of our defamation laws, most newspapers and broadcasters were terrified to touch it. The removal of my interview from the internet was noted in the most bland terms, and a couple of small, timid pieces reported that the show was the subject of legal action, but little more than that made it into print. Not that it stopped reporters trying, and my phone was now ringing off the hook. One paper tried four times over those first two weeks to get a substantial article past their own lawyers but to no avail. And when a student newspaper, the
Trinity News
, broke ranks and published a lengthy opinion piece that supported me, they, too, received a solicitor’s letter from Waters.

Online, things were different and it immediately became a big story there, spread by blogs and social media. Debate raged on Facebook, Twitter and forums. To some this was a clear case of homophobia and censorship; RTÉ were craven for taking my interview down, and the Iona Institute were bullies, using threats of legal action to silence their critics. To others, I was a jumped-up drag queen defaming decent people with ludicrous accusations on national TV; not only should RTÉ have taken down the interview, they should be ashamed of ever having given me airtime. Of course, this being the internet, people also said many worse things about all of us.

As
the debate raged online, RTÉ quietly put the interview back on their website but with the ‘offending’ portion edited out, and in a statement to a reporter they said it had been removed due to ‘potential legal issues’.

Meanwhile Andrew advised that if I was not going to withdraw my remarks then the best course of action was to respond forcefully and at length to each of the complainants. We would tell them in no uncertain terms that I had nothing to apologise for, then set out our general arguments refuting their claims. To do this properly, we would need to research exactly what each of the complainants and the Iona Institute had ever written or said on the subject of LGBT people or same-sex marriage. This would be a big task (already made easier by internet sleuths who were delighting in digging up old interviews and opinion pieces), so Andrew suggested I speak to one of the marriage-equality groups and anyone else I knew who might have a head start in this area and see if they might help.

I had at this stage already been inundated with offers of help from various people – including a lot of lawyers! – so it was easy to get a group together. One evening about ten people – journalists, activists, academics and organisers – gathered in the basement of Pantibar to see what they already had that might help and what more they could do. While everyone there was committed to helping me fight my case and hopefully avoid court, it was also clear that the LGBT activists in the group
were also excited at the prospect of the fight against their erstwhile opponents (especially the Iona Institute, which has long campaigned against marriage equality and had only recently made an extremely controversial presentation against it to the Constitutional Convention). It was a fight they were sure they would win in the court of public opinion even if I lost in the court of law.

A fight like this, especially with Panti at its sharp end, would also energise the LGBT community in the campaign for same-sex marriage. So, for the LGBT activists there, this situation was a win. I, on the other hand, wasn’t so sure. I could envisage a time in the not very far future when I would be broke, trudging penniless and bankrupt through the courts, while the rest of the gays were celebrating their gay marriages and dropping the kids off at school.

Then, two weeks after the original broadcast, without any consultation with Andrew, Brendan O’Connor uncomfortably read out an apology on behalf of RTÉ.

Andrew was furious. In one of the only conversations he’d had with RTÉ’s legal team they had assured him that they were not considering an apology and that, in any case, they wouldn’t be making any decisions ‘for weeks and weeks’. He was also furious because the wording of the apology was a brazen attempt to shift any possible blame to me, when all I had done was answer a direct question from the show’s presenter. Not forgetting, too, that it hadn’t been ‘a guest’ who had introduced the word that had got everyone so hot under the collar, but their man! Of course, the whole thing had lawyerly fingerprints all over it, especially the last line, which attempted to have its cake and eat it by not identifying whose ‘views’ were ‘dissenting’ or ‘controversial’. Theirs or mine? Clearly the implication was that I was the one denying people ‘the right to hold dissenting views’ and impeding ‘democratic debate’.

I was fucking furious. What they were attempting to do was throw me under the bus. RTÉ were essentially standing up in the classroom and pointing at me shouting, ‘He did it, sir! He did it!’ Evidently, as far as RTÉ were concerned, it was every man for himself.

I was furious, too, at the lily-liveredness of it. It was craven. Supine. And it was a derogation of their duty as a public broadcaster. RTÉ is not Coca-Cola. They are
not a private company with only one responsibility: to do what’s best for the company. They are a national broadcaster, publicly funded, with a remit to provide a platform for free and open debate, to facilitate the ‘democratic debate’ their mealy mouthed apology pretended was so important to them. And yet all it took for Iona to bring them to heel was a few quid to a solicitor for a handful of letters. RTÉ should have had some balls and (in the equivalent legal terminology) told them to go fuck themselves, but instead they caved. And for good measure offered me up instead.

And just why were Iona and Waters so quick to run to their solicitor? O’Brien, Quinn and Waters are all opinion columnists, with regular columns in national newspapers (and all appear regularly on radio and TV) to espouse their opinions on any subject they please, including – as they all have – on gay people and our relationships. They are well used to the cut and thrust of vigorous debate, and all of them could simply have denounced me from their platforms in the country’s most-read national newspapers, so why did they go running to their lawyers? No gay person is in any doubt as to these people’s opinions on our relationships because they assaults us from the pages of our newspapers and ruin our lazy Sunday-morning breakfasts.

John Waters has since taken issue with the suggestion that he ‘campaigns’ against same-sex marriage and that may be true in the sense that, unlike the Iona
Institute, it’s not one of his main bugbears, but he has used his platform to espouse his views on gay people, their relationships and their motives. And he pulls no punches. For instance, in an interview in the UCD
College Tribune
in August 2012, he claimed that gay marriages are a ‘satire’ on marriage, that gay people don’t actually ‘want to get married; they want to destroy the institution of marriage because they’re envious of it’, and that our real motive is ‘a deliberate sabotage of the culture and the relishing of the destruction as a result’.