IRELAND: Civil Unions Begin

Barry Dignam and Hugh Walsh (above) today become among Ireland's first gay couples to be joined under the nation's civil partnerships law. The law went into effect on January 1st with a three month waiting period.

Theirs is not the first civil partnership to take place here – six civil partnerships have already been registered in the State arising from court-granted exemptions to the usual three-month notice which couples must give to the General Registrar Office. Mr Dignam admitted that when the couple originally found out that they were to be the first gay couple who were to avail of the new regime without first seeking an exemption to do so, they did consider postponing the ceremony given the media attention that would inevitably follow. “We did have an opportunity to move the date but we felt that we would have been cheating [gay] people who had been through an awful lot of hardship – those who had been ridiculed and even jailed in the past,” he said.