David Norris’s life in politics: ‘People had the idea that gay people are monstrous. I wanted them to see the human’

His first election slogan had the virtue of truth: “Vote No 1 Norris for an end to the quiet life in the Senate.”

It is tempting now to imagine the immaculately groomed candidate from the Trinity College or Dublin University constituency gliding effortlessly into the upper chamber ready to give it a good shake-up. The truth is that it took numerous attempts over 10 years to finally make it in 1987.

This week David Norris announced that his record-breaking service of 36 years will end in January. “I’m nearly 80. I want to give young people the chance to prepare their campaigns,” he says. “Young people have different problems now… communication, Twitter, all that kind of stuff, things I’m not familiar with. I think it’s time to go.”

The wonder remains that the man once described by the Guardian as “a witty, boastful, posh, Protestant, piano-playing, unashamedly intellectual Joycean scholar” was elected in the first place. He was the first openly gay man to achieve elected office in this country, and among the first in the world.

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That was a year before his lonely 14-year legal challenge to the Irish criminalisation of homosexuality finally succeeded in the European Court of Human Rights – by a single vote with the Irish judge ruling against – and five years before homosexual acts were decriminalised by minister for justice Máire Geoghegan Quinn. In the shadow of the incendiary 1983 abortion referendum, he also the first to include abortion in his manifesto.

If all that failed to banish him from public life, the cut-glass British accent might have done it. His tilt at the Seanad began just a few years after a government minister raged against Georgian Dublin conservationists as a “a consortium of belted earls and their ladies and left-wing intellectuals”.

We settle in his dining room, a low-lit inner sanctum where he occupies an armchair up close to the television, attired in customary three-piece suit, unlit cigarette in hand

By way of comment, Norris points at a grainy old photograph of the Earl of Upper Ossory’s country manor – “The last earl in my family died out in the 19th century,” he says, as if settling the matter.

That photograph hangs in the senator’s meticulously restored Georgian home on Dublin’s North Great George’s Street – the house and the street in the north inner city which he rescued from certain depredation over 40 years ago when the North Great George’s Street Preservation Society was born in his drawing room.

Last Thursday morning, a few doors down, a big gathering of young foreign visitors in the splendid Georgian surrounds of the James Joyce Centre attested to that Norris alchemy of Joycean and conservationist passions laced with guile. The house’s survival depended on his playing up its “very small” connection with a Joycean character, Maginni the dancing master in Ulysses, and that’s how he did it.

We settle in his dining room, a low-lit inner sanctum where he occupies an armchair up close to the television, attired in customary three-piece suit, unlit cigarette in hand. A coal fire provides warmth and the table is set for dinner. He is being “kept alive by pills” to prevent rejection of a liver transplant and takes Ozempic to control diabetes.

“I don’t really believe in looking back,” he repeats, when questions tire him. His memory for detail has faded. Certain topics spark a lively reaction, such as the old court cases which bring forth references to the Emperor Justinian, the Napoleonic Code and Brehon Law – he would have liked to be a barrister in the style of Rumpole of the Bailey.

[ As David Norris discovered, it matters a lot who is appointed to the Supreme Court ]

Suggestions of a democratic deficit in the Seanad provoke an animated defence of its electoral system – “we have an electorate of 60,000 which is a hell of a lot more democratic than the 11 that are put in there by the Taoiseach with no election at all”. Given a choice, he would have the Seanad and Dáil elections on the same day so candidates would have to make their minds up beforehand.

Questions about the infamous 2011 presidential campaign are met with accusations of a hostile media offensive. Had he learned anything, since his nine-year-old meanderings about sexual induction in Ancient Greece that mired him in controversy about the age of consent? He was finally sunk by letters written in 1997 to the Jerusalem high court on Oireachtas stationary seeking clemency for Ezra Nawi, his former lover, an activist who had been convicted of the statutory rape of a 15-year-old Palestinian boy. “Well, I learned about the power of the media,” he says.

[ David Norris: A generation of young men are free of guilt and shame ]

[ David Norris: 'I have already recorded my own eulogy' ]

Embedded in all this are clues to Norris’s endurance. There is the unshakeable confidence that comes with privilege – “I came from well-connected people”, he agrees – and the luck to have studied and worked in the only Seanad constituency that would have elected a candidate on his brave manifesto.

There is that characteristic ebullience, love of life and openness to humour in every circumstance. There is the “discipline”, as he calls it, of his devoted membership of the Anglican Church. And there is that persistence carried with grace, the determination to speak out, to act, to fail again, to take the long view.

When Donal Barrington was consulted about the legal challenge in 1980, the future Supreme Court judge told Norris he would win but that it would be long and difficult. That suited the client’s purpose.

When he arrived in the Seanad in 1987, he felt that people were ‘suspicious’ of him: ‘I did feel they thought I was going to jump on them and rape them.’ He used humour to win them over

In 1975, when the stigma of homosexuality was such that RTÉ offered to put Norris in shadow for an interview, he insisted on showing his face: “People had the idea that gay people are monstrous… I wanted them to see the human, to break the conspiracy of silence. The longer the case dragged out, the better it was for my campaign.”

Though highly entertained at times by the court proceedings, he was borne along by a fierce sense of injustice: “At one time I knew seven people who’d been murdered in Ireland and England, which is very unusual for somebody of my background.”

On another occasion, he found a petrol bomb blazing on the roof of the Hirschfield Centre, a gay hub and discotheque in Temple Bar; some years later it was destroyed by fire.

[ David Norris on 40 years of saving North Great George's Street ]

When he arrived in the Seanad in 1987, he felt that people were “suspicious” of him: “I did feel they thought I was going to jump on them.” He used humour to win them over. “I made jokes.”

The jokes don’t come so easily any more. Memories of his late partner Ezra, an Israeli who remained a friend, “are beginning to fade”. Following the marriage equality referendum, there was a wistful note in a blog for the Irish Research Council in which he described the “unusual experience of having made the transition from being a criminal as a result of being gay to… where I could now marry another man (if I could find one)! I spent so much time pushing the boat out that I forgot to jump on myself and the next thing I saw was the boat rounding the harbour and little figures waving back to me standing alone on the beach.”

He’s not a lonely person, he says, and doesn’t long for a soulmate. “I read, I watch television, I enjoy life. At the moment of death we’re always alone and facing infinity.”

He hopes there is an afterlife – “no one knows”, he says.

Before that final adventure, his retirement plans include spending part of the year at his holiday home in the little Cypriot village of Arsos – once a meeting point with Ezra travelling from Israel – where he sits in the sun and reads and paddles around the balmy water.

On that note, he heads off to buy more coal for the fire.