Panti Bliss: I'm Drunk On Yes

"Yes. It's such a little word but today it feels so big. YES. Has one simple syllable ever meant so much before? Not to me anyway. I've never asked anyone to marry me, but today it feels like I asked a whole country to marry me and they said Yes. And I'm delighted. Ecstatic. I'm over the gay moon and drunk on Yes, and like any happy groom on his wedding morning, I'm truly, deeply, madly in love. I am in love with the whole country.

"Groups of men and women all across the country - students with shaved heads and grandmothers with headscarves, indefatigable activists and groggy-from-night-work taxi drivers - knocking on the doors of their fellow citizens in the pursuit of a simple and beautiful idea: the we are all equally deserving of respect.

"On Friday, Ireland agreed with that simple proposition. Forty years after those first brave men and women stood up and said, 'no more', the people of Ireland said Yes, and what must have seemed impossible all those years ago has been achieved: Ireland's LGBTI citizens are full and equal citizens under the law." - Panti Bliss, writing for the Sunday Independent.