T-shirt from Belfast's first gay pride on show at the Ulster Museum (Image: Maurice Fitzmaurice) Niall added: “There was some young person there who’s name I don’t recall and he came up with the idea, why spend money to take people away when we could have a gay Pride parade in Belfast to which everybody said ‘we can’t’.”īut Niall said the plucky young man’s attitude was ‘why not?’ and so a seed was planted. “There was a meeting organised to decide who would get their travel paid.” Read More Related Articles
“There was money left over from his case which had been used by NIGRA to send a few representatives across to London Pride every year,” explained Niall. Some sexual acts between consenting adult men were still illegal in Northern Ireland even though England and Wales had changed their laws - and in 1981 he won his case leading to a change in NI law. Jeffrey Dudgeon, then a Belfast shipping clerk, filed a complaint with the European Commission for Human Rights after being quizzed by the RUC about his sex life for around four and a half hours. Niall, left, at Pride 2018 with his partner Clint