Michael Barron, the activist and cofounder of the LGBTQ+ youth organisation Belong To, is sitting at a cafe across from Fairview Park in Dublin where, in 1982, Declan Flynn was murdered in a homophobic attack and just the day before an Indian man was assaulted. Barron is bearded and nail-varnished with his husband Jaime Nanci’s first name tattooed inside his right arm and he’s wearing a T-shirt that says “Queers against racism”.
A man who looks to me like he might be homeless comes right up to him, points at the T-shirt and says: “I like that.”
“Thank you,” says Barron.
The shirt was given to him by an Indian activist in Galway the previous weekend where he was participating in a National LGBTQ+ Federation (NXF)-run “Activist Academy” training 26 young people in the principles of activism. He’s just published a book about the recent history of such activism, How Ireland’s LGBTQ+ Movement was Built: Civil Society in the Pursuit of Social Justice, based on his recent social work doctorate in Maynooth University.
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He started his activism workshop with Toni Morrison’s quote: “The purpose of freedom is to free somebody else.”
Barron grew up in Carrigcloney in Kilkenny, the youngest of six children. His family had a farm and later a pub. It was a difficult time to be gay. “[Kilkenny] was an extremely macho, homophobic environment,” he says. “It was all about hurling. It didn’t matter how well you did in anything else if you weren’t good at hurling. Being gay, ultimately, you were not masculine enough. It absolutely wasn’t possible to talk about. I had really good friends growing up, a group of outsiders and a bunch of us came together. We found each other through music more than anything else.”
He talks about how important music was to his gay identity, specifically Boy George, Erasure, Madonna (though he says he’s disappointed in some of her recent statements about Gaza) and Sinéad O’Connor. “I was in a really religious school with [some teachers] who really hated me in a kind of violent way at times and then this incredibly powerful woman was coming singing about the Church and how destructive it had been to our society. I remember, often thinking, ‘Do people realise what she’s singing about?’”
He came out in 1995, in his third year studying history and English in Trinity College, but his activism began in the context of racial and economic justice when he was living on Eccles Street in Dublin. “There was a huge amount of racist graffiti everywhere, so my initial entry point was wanting to do something about this racism.” He volunteered with the Refugee Council, teaching children with very little English in under-resourced schools. “It opened this other world to me.”
He went on to study youth and community work in Maynooth where he absorbed the ideas of James Baldwin, Judith Butler and Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. In 1999 he met his friend the late Eoin Collins from the Gay and Lesbian Equality Network (Glen): “The first LGBT activist I ever met. I didn’t even know that [being an LGBT activist] was a thing that people did.”
By then he was working with homeless teenagers for Focus Ireland. “The circumstances that they lived in were atrocious,” he says. “It was my early exposure to mental health issues, drugs, poverty, but young people’s queer identities were in the mix. That wasn’t being addressed. [The government] were trying to do something about the economic issues or the drug issues, but they weren’t addressing the sexuality or gender identity issue.”
Establishing Belong To and the pushback from mainstream churches
In 2002, partly influenced by this work, Barron, Fran McVeigh, Billy Rabbitte, Paul Rudden, Joan O’Connell and Denise Croke established Belong To. Barron was working for the Gay Men’s Health Project. There had been some precedent. He praises O’Connell who ran “an incredible group called OUTyouth” from the premises of the Gay Switchboard. They wanted it to be treated as a youth group like any other. “Some people wanted the lower age we worked with to be 17 and me and Fran argued pretty hard that we didn’t want to start from a homophobic bottom line … Other youth groups worked with kids from 12.”
Belong To is now a well-established and internationally emulated youth organisation, so it’s easy to forget what a unique proposition it was in the early noughties. There was a lot of pushback, especially from the mainstream churches. “The very notion of setting up a group for LGBTQ children and young people, went to the very heart of what the conservative Christian right-wing groups make hay of,” says Barron. “It’s a specific meta trope and it relies on the horrible stereotype that gay men are a danger to children.” He notes that whenever a minority is discriminated against, they’re painted as a danger to women and children. “We used to get really threatening letters in the post and quite a few negative news articles.”
Like what? “Church Anger as Gay Campaign Targets Schools was on the front of [one newspaper] … A bishop said [in that article], ‘I don’t think there are many young people who are gay and this campaign would tempt them into being gay’.”
Was the negative response frightening? “I was only 26. So, I was young, driven and idealistic ... I think if I got what I got 15 years later it would have been worse. But I was quite bullish.”
What were the main issues for LGBT young people at that point? “The two issues across the board were school being a problem and mental health damage as a result of homophobia … Bullying was a huge issue. A lot of kids were experiencing a lot of violence.”
They made a lot of headway with the Department of Education and schools. They impacted government youth and anti-bullying strategies and established LGBT youth groups around the country. They ultimately created safe spaces for LGBT young people. It’s important to work within the system without being coopted by it, he says now. “Some organisations mistake access for success. [They] get slightly intoxicated by being in the Dáil.”
They had what they called a “no small tables” rule. They refused to be restricted to just LGBT-specific issues at events and meetings. “There is no single issue when it comes to the queer community,” he says. “It was about having pride in and respect for the young people we were representing. We weren’t going to be in a side room. We needed to be at that decision-making table.”
There are now 90 Belong To-affiliated LGBT youth clubs nationwide. It was exhausting work, he says. “It meant meeting the guards and schools and meeting the HSE and spending months and months working. The youth sector in Ireland and education sector in Ireland are better for all kids, as a result of that 20 years of work. They genuinely opened doors for all sorts of other communities and issues to be talked about.”
He stresses the role Belong To played in the marriage equality campaign. Many of the canvassing groups sprang from Belong To groups and the young people they worked with also informed the messaging. “A lot of people went to the US and Massachusetts in particular to find the answer to a lot of LGBT issues. But the message in Massachusetts and elsewhere was, ‘love is love’. We knew that was a crap message, so we shifted the message from the individualistic and neoliberal ‘love is love’ to the community message ‘What kind of society do we want children to be in?’ When you ask people that question, and then you allow them their own space to figure out the answer, the answer is almost always good. People want their children to grow up in a fair society.”
There has been a rise in anti-LGBT rhetoric across the world since then and Barron is not complacent. He has worked with activists from South America to Africa to Russia, so has some international perspective on this. “There’s more money put into three anti-LGBT organisations in the States than is put into the entire LGBT movement globally,” he says. “That’s where we’re at in 2025 … My fear is people in the liberal middle will give way to the far right. It’s what the Labour Party in England is doing in terms of trans people and banning protests … This book is trying to give people who are activists and have a conscience on all of those issues some hope and some tools to resist that slide. We have been here before.”
He worries about the “corporatisation of everything”, the way multinationals lobby for legislation, government services are outsourced and corporate algorithms dictate what people see online and pit organisations against one another. “The far right are getting their ‘information’ from Facebook and Twitter and it plays out on the ground,” he says. “It played out in Fairview Park with the Indian man beaten up yesterday … The answer to much of it is really simple: turn off the recommender system. The system was set up to advertise, to get our data and then advertise [to us], but it’s also being used to box people into different groups.”
He also thinks that the term “activist” gets sullied when it’s purely associated with people arguing online. Real activism, he says, is painstaking and slow and it works. It’s local and it involves youth workers and community groups and “self-organised communities”. It’s a ground-up process that involves patience and giving people space to think and learn. When they set up LGBT youth groups and spoke to community members and guards the training involved letting people talk a little about the homophobic ideas they might have. “Let them talk about the homophobia, what they’ve heard and then talk with them in a non-judgmental way … It’s the work of having people feel empowered to be able to have a voice and come to those [progressive] conclusions themselves and not be told.”
‘Marriage equality felt like a quick victory, but people were fighting for years’
He wants young people to take courage and hope from the history of activism. “Marriage equality felt like quite a quick victory for a lot of people, because they came in late,” he says. “But people were fighting for years.”
He wants the people who care about social justice to look at what they can do to help their immediate communities. He has worked, in recent years, alongside groups like the Hope and Courage Collective, The Irish Council for Civil Liberties and the Transgender Equality Network of Ireland (TENI). Nowadays he’s also much more focused than he once was on the emotional impact activism can have on activists, the ways in which the best of them can minimise their own experiences in order to help others. But he still passionately believes what he terms defiant, brave “queer optimism”.
There’s joy in the work, he says. “When you can see the links between marginalised communities, the Traveller community and migrant communities, the connections being made between different groups, it’s this wonderful puzzle clicking into place. When you see this brotherhood or sisterhood amongst different people, it’s actually a really gorgeous place to be.”
How Ireland’s LGBTQI+ Movement was Built: Civil Society in the Pursuit of Social Justice by Michael Barron is published by Policy Press, Bristol.
