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Is an Oscar on the cards for Irish actor Andrew Scott?<\/p>\nI\u2019m thrilled for Andrew Scott. His presence at awards season (the Dubliner is tipped to win an Oscar for Elsinore) is much needed within an increasingly heteronormative industry.<\/p>\n
Scott is more than an actor; he is an activist questioning why people still refer to actors as “openly gay”. With enviable charm, he pushes against the establishment, and that is worth more than the weight of any potential gong \u2014 even the bronzed fella!<\/p>\n
It\u2019s also significant that Andrew Scott is an Irish actor playing a man dying from AIDS. According to former Catholic priest, Bern\u00e1rd Lynch, who I spoke with this week, many of the people who died, alongside Ian Charleson in London\u2019s AIDS wards, were Irish.<\/p>\n
Lynch deserves his own film, by the way, but in summary he was the man once known as the “gay priest”, or the “AIDS” priest, famously appearing on The Late Late Show in 1987 to inform the Irish public about his experiences caring for AIDS patients in New York City.\u00a0<\/p>\n
His descriptions were stark. He described searching for volunteers to hold babies born with HIV. He described Irish mothers arriving in America to find out their children were gay and dying in hospital wards there.<\/p>\n
\u201cAre you a homosexual, Father?\u201d Gay Byrne asked him. Lynch\u2019s reply: \u201cNo.\u201d \u201cI had to ask that in the context of what we are talking about,\u201d added the presenter.<\/p>\n
Their exchange is recorded in Once Before I Go, a play by Philip McMahon that explores the tragedy of a young Irish man\u2019s death from AIDS in Paris. It was this play, and my excitement over the release of Elsinore, that led me to interview Bern\u00e1rd Lynch.<\/p>\n
In 1987, Lynch was “openly gay”, at least to his family, but he lied to Gay Byrne.<\/p>\n
Lynch explains:\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n I said I wasn\u2019t gay when he asked, because I knew Irish people were looking for any excuse to disregard my message: that their sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, were losing their lives to a terrible disease.\u00a0\n <\/p>\n
Lynch believes that HIV is still the only virus in the world without compassion.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is still the only sickness you can get and be hated for who you are, and loved for who you are not. It is still shrouded in shame and guilt. Even now, decades later, there are Irish people who simply won\u2019t talk about the loved ones they lost.\u201d And often those loved ones died abroad.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey all left Ireland, gay men and women, because there was no room, no love, no compassion for them at home. They came to London for healthcare. They even opened a ward in Holyhead just for the sick Irish coming off the boat.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lynch is correct that healthcare arrived far too late here, far later than in England, where homosexuality had been decriminalised earlier too. A person in Ireland in 1990 could not have hoped for the same care we see Ian Charleson receiving in Elsinore, Olivia Coleman playing his compassionate doctor.<\/p>\n
This was largely down to the influence of the Catholic Church, says Lynch, and the fight for compassion is far from being over.<\/p>\n
\u201cDecember 1st is International AIDS day and last December was the very first time the Irish Embassy in London had an outreach for people living with HIV, an event to also commemorate the many Irish lives lost here.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The statistics back Lynch\u2019s assertion that Irish people still struggle to be transparent about the virus. HIV Ireland committed to ending new transmissions of HIV by 2030 but reports last summer warn they\u2019re at risk of not meeting their target.<\/p>\n
There are rising cases of HIV in certain demographics, with unacceptable levels of late diagnosis. People seeking pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) are waiting up to a year. People are looking to protect themselves and they are being told to get in line for months.<\/p>\n
The stigma lingers, and the silence, and so healthy people today will contract the virus tomorrow. Ireland is clearly in need of a national action plan for HIV; we still don\u2019t have one.<\/p>\n
Lynch lays the blame at the door of the Catholic Church, the institution that sacked him in the 80s for educating people about safe sex. \u201cThey still believe it is disordered. They still believe homosexuals are doing evil.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lynch\u2019s comments are interesting given the votes cast at the National Synodal Assembly that met last weekend to consider 35 proposals to guide the future of the Catholic Church in Ireland.<\/p>\n
Proposal Two reads as follows: This Assembly recommends that the Church in Ireland would ask the universal Church to develop a more respectful and life-giving vocabulary when speaking about LGBTQ+ people.<\/p>\n
26% voted that the proposal required further discernment. 13% voted against it.<\/p>\n
Close to 40% of the people gathered failed to support a motion to recognise the inherent human worth of members of the LGBT+ community. 42% of those assembled also voted against women taking on roles currently monopolised by men.<\/p>\n
Bern\u00e1rd Lynch sees link between the two proposals.<\/p>\n
\n It is all about power, male power. The Catholic Church\u2019s hatred of gay men has everything to do with misogyny.\u00a0\n <\/p>\n
He continues: \u201cWhat is the worst thing a little boy can be? A sissy! And what is the worst thing a man can do when having sex \u2014 be as passive as a woman.\u201d In fact, it was not his own sexuality but his disgust at the institution\u2019s heinous treatment of women that first made him question his role as a Catholic priest.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was only 24, working as a priest in Knock and I was hearing confessions. Women came to confession far more often than men, and again and again I was hearing women asking for forgiveness because they couldn\u2019t bear the thought of another child.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“They told me about their husbands coming in the door drunk at night, demanding sex. I thought it was pure madness, how the Church was telling these women to keep on having children. It made no sense to me. I thought to myself, if there is a god who believes in this, that god should be hated.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
A lot has changed since 1987, and since those women lined up for confession, and perhaps people in Ireland simply weren\u2019t ready to hear what Bern\u00e1rd Lynch was telling them 40 years ago. Are we ready now? And if we are not, why not?<\/p>\n
Is an Oscar on the cards for Irish actor Andrew Scott?<\/p>\n
Is our failure to care for gay people, and for all people suffering from HIV, linked to misogyny, as Lynch suggests? Ireland\u2019s overall HIV rate (18.8 per 100,000) was the second\u2011highest in Europe in 2024. Numbers remain high. Hundreds of people are stuck on waiting lists.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Given the lonely deaths suffered by Irish people all those decades ago, away from home, from family and love, given all that, shouldn\u2019t we be doing better with the virus now? Bern\u00e1rd Lynch believes that time is on love\u2019s side \u2014 Is Ireland?<\/p>\n
I hope Andrew Scott\u2019s portrayal of Ian Charleson in Elsinore achieves more than an Oscar win. I hope it compels the Irish government to right the wrongs of a terrible past.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I\u2019m thrilled for Andrew Scott. His presence at awards season (the Dubliner is tipped to win an Oscar…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":662702,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,60,4829,43],"class_list":["post-662701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-lgbtq","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=662701"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662701\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/662702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=662701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=662701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=662701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}