Rundale

El Reid-Buckley

Dr Michael Barron has been a social justice advocate since the 1990s, working professionally as a youth and community worker within LGBTQ+ communities and their intersections. Barron’s legacy remains influential across LGBTQ+ life in Ireland: from co-founding BeLonG To, Ireland’s National LGBTQ+ Youth Service, to facilitating the many regional Pride celebrations that have been supported over the years through his work at The Rowan Trust. His work has been far-reaching and impactful, anchored by the principles of mutuality and community care, and continues to reverberate through generations.

His latest book, How Ireland’s LGBTQ+ Youth Movement was Built, also demonstrates these fundamentals by giving voice and space to LGBTQ+ young people, and how LGBTQ+ youth and youth workers have helped to shape this ‘New Ireland’ we now live in. In doing so, he chronicles the familiar timeline of LGBTQ+ rights and policy development: decriminalisation in 1993, the employment acts in the early 2000s, and the landmark passing of marriage equality by popular vote in 2015.

This will be a familiar trajectory to most, yet as Barron underscores in the texts, there is a distinct lack of youth representation across its retelling; not just in terms of public policy, but also in LGBTQ+ writings about these decades of social change. Barron’s book aims to reshape these narratives and offers an alternative view of some of the landmark ‘gains’ in LGBTQ+ rights in Ireland from an insider perspective. He traces the transition from LGBTQ+ youth being “unmentionable” in much of Irish public life and policy, to the introduction of a National LGBTQ+ youth strategy since 2018.

It is an essential book for all of those who work within the broad spectrum of LGBTQ+ Studies in Ireland but also has impacts outside of scholarship in terms of public policy and youth work practice. Therefore, this book is not just for academics, but provides a raw and real reflection on LGBTQ+ activisms in an accessible way from Barron’s personal standpoint.

To me, the most powerful aspect of the book is Barron’s use of memory and autoethnography. There is often a pressure to be emotionless in scholarly work, as if that is meant to bring about more objectivity; an idea that we cannot care that much about what we do lest we have a feeling that may sway our ability to analyse data rigorously, or present it without bias. This particularly affects LGBTQ+ researchers, as queer research done by queer people has often been disregarded as ‘me-search’. Yet Barron’s book is teeming with robust, empirical research throughout, and the personal vignettes only bolster its findings. It points to the very real realities that people do not see behind the press releases and policy reports: that there are people with a vested interest in making the world a better place beyond the pull of ‘high impact’ publications.

Within the reflective vignettes, Barron takes opportunities to highlight the complexity and nuance of emotions of what it means to be an LGBTQ+ person doing LGBTQ+ work. In particular, I found his centring of ‘bad’ feelings refreshing, as they are often not promoted (or tolerated) in LGBTQ+ social movements and their messaging due to the dictation of respectability politics that promote constant positivity and politeness. Barron allows for his experiences of burnout and trauma to exist in the same spaces as his hope and optimism for better futures on the horizon, rather than to assume that these are mutually exclusive and incompatible feelings.

Further, his insider insights demonstrate that policymakers in Ireland have trended towards generalised experiences to try and ‘blanket-fix’ problems; something which may often be disregarded as a personal opinion rather than an objective fact. However, Barron provides detailed, longitudinal evidence of the need for specific policies around homophobic and transphobic bullying. He also describes the tireless campaigning to successive governments to show that historically, the strategies and procedures around bullying were too vague to tackle anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric in schools. Through evidence-building and political lobbying, Barron and his colleagues were able to validate transphobia and homophobia as legitimate issues.

While it may seem that Barron is completely promoting lobbying as a favoured political action, he also acknowledges the frustrating nature of its longue durée. Successive policy changes can seem quite quick on the surface to the public, but in fact, as Barron’s research reveals, its slow cruelty often takes deep toll on the individuals, communities and organisations that drive such change.

Another limitation that Barron focuses on is the constraints of funding, and the resourcing of LGBTQ+ organisations; particularly paying attention to how funding relationships with state bodies and philanthropists limit their ability to have freedom of expression, represent marginalised individuals and challenge the status quo. Barron’s acknowledgement of this is something that I have often not come across, particularly of my own experience of working within the NGO sphere. However, I do think that Barron could have been more assertive in his critiques. In particular, I am thinking of how NGOs are increasingly integrated into global capitalist relations, how this can influence what is ‘acceptable’ activism and what is not, which in turn can have knock-on effects to surveillance and policing. While I acknowledge the necessity of advocacy work in the frame of the world we live in, I suppose my bigger dream is that someday they will not need to exist. But in the realm of children and young people’s rights, these dreams may take much longer to be realised than for adults in the same communities.

One of the greatest contributions that I have gleaned from my reading of Barron’s book is that the majority of people do not consider children and young people in their ideas of revolution and liberation. He discusses the drawbacks of the legal definition of a child, which allows children and young people to be restricted in a whole host of ways: from their economic independence to their ability of movement. It follows arguments for considering children and young people as an oppressed class as they are “presumed incompetent and incapable of managing their own lives”.

Barron details the ‘double whammy’ of LGBTQ+ children and young people’s experiences in that they are both restricted by their legal positions as children, as well as the societal tolerance of homophobia and transphobia that structures almost all aspects of their lives. He traces how LGBTQ+ children have been historically caught “in the crosshairs of the religious and socially conservative forces in Ireland”, yet also notes the demonstrable lack of pushback of such from wider LGBTQ+ social movements. He argues that this is because LGBTQ+ issues were widely seen to be incompatible with children and young people at best, and a threat at worst, until very recently. As Barron’s text clearly points out, these lines of argument lead to the fact that we ultimately fear the children we would otherwise have protected, and rightfully argues for centring the rights of LGBTQ+ children and young people within the framework of social rights for all. This is a particularly salient point in the current political climate, whereby anti-trans rhetoric–purported mainly from conservative and far-right vantage points–continues to parrot the need to ‘protect children’ against queerness and transness while simultaneously denying the existence of queer and trans children.

Barron also draws upon testimonies from people he formerly supported as a youth worker and demonstrates the longitudinal benefits in creating safe and supportive environments for LGBTQ+ young people: in building confidence and allowing them to pave their own pathway to advocate for themselves (and others) once they have reached adulthood. This in turn fosters an intergenerational community of support and knowledge-sharing that allows for positive and progressive LGBTQ+ social reproduction that can be facilitated through LGBTQ+-specific youth work. This is gorgeously captured in Danielle’s speech to a trans youth group at BeLonG To, of which she was a member ten years previously, reprinted by Barron as part of his memory work in Chapter 4. She recounts her own experiences alongside acknowledgements of both the struggle and strength of young trans people, demonstrating that they are not alone but not powerless either. It is this same sentiment that also runs through the book, moving away from the sometimes-paternalistic reflections on research participants that can be found in academic work.

In fact, Barron rallies against reductive claims by researchers that suggest that reporting negative lived experiences of LGBTQ+ youth is leading to, and in turn can reinforce, norms of inherent suffering and victimisation. Instead, he argues such detrimental experiences are not enforced but truly lived, and these facts are required to be presented to policymakers before change can occur. But outside of these formal processes, he also acknowledges that the young people themselves should be–and are–the experts in their own experiences and are actively involved in shaping reports and policy.

Overall, Barron’s book offers a powerful insight into the building of specific LGBTQ+ social movements in Ireland that is both rigorous and reflective. It closes beautifully, giving us the main takeaway that children and young people’s liberation is bound up with all our liberation, and that requires us to organise and resist with love and care, to protect our future freedoms, together.