HOW the world turns - and how hard that must be to witness by those whose lives would have been transformed if rigid rules had relaxed sooner.
Gay Pride last week may have won some new hearts. This place still has a way to go. Farthest off is abortion as a public health service that a decent society ought to provide.
The gap between progress towards homosexual equality and acceptance of a woman’s right to control her own reproductive process is painfully obvious.
But the giddy cheer of Pride is not the whole story. As campaigning groups well know, across the north young teenagers and even adults are still sick with fear about telling parents and even siblings it’s a girlfriend they crave not a boyfriend, or that their gender is a work in progress.
People now elderly accustomed to hiding part of themselves all their days are still acting an identity they have never felt. The most generous may be glad for the young; small wonder if others feel cheated.
But institutions and organisations given to preaching about sexuality are adjusting their language, tinkering with their image, perhaps beginning to face their lost relevance.
One tweeted photo last week had the DUP’s be-suited and chain-of-office-wearing Brian Kingston, Lord Mayor of Belfast with t-shirted members of a PSNI gay officers group.
No match for Sinn Féin’s Mary Ellen Campbell leading the parade: a startling image nonetheless for the party which blocked the assembly’s vote for gay marriage.
Meanwhile the global Catholic Church, with perhaps the Irish Church most sharply affected, struggles for credibility.
Official denunciation of homosexuality as disordered clashes with suspicion that priests, in considerable numbers, are involved in gay and in straight relationships, while desperate shortage of vocations after the scandals of abuse and cover-up seems to have heightened tensions between liberal and conservative would-be reformers.
Assessment of the internal health of the national seminary recently arrived, in the sort of language conservatives expect from feminist/humanist/liberals they see as out to finish off Irish Catholicism’s reputation. ‘Strange goings-on’ in Maynooth, a ‘quarrelsome place’ with a poisonous atmosphere, anonymous letters depicting a gay sub-culture using Grindr, the app for finding casual sex, the ‘closed strange world of seminaries’.
But this was Diarmuid Martin, Archbishop of Dublin, second most senior cleric in the Irish Church, announcing that he was taking the three – three only – young men from his diocese away to study in Rome.
Once it was beyond the Irish Church’s imagination - and that of the global institution - to question official structures from within, let alone exposing their failings to public view.
The archbishop as before in his twelve years in the post made his move regardless of shock value.
Experts on recent Church history, in particular the Irish Times religious correspondent Patsy McGarry, have reported his near-isolation from the rest of the hierarchy since his first, hard struggle to winkle diocesan records out of his predecessor, Cardinal Desmond Connell.
But where Martin focused on gossip about sexual promiscuity, real or alleged, as scandalous and bad for trainee priests, some new recruits have apparently been told they are too rigid, ultra-orthodox; conservatives complain about liberal Maynooth teaching.
The cumulative effect of insider truth-telling is still rolling, Ireland north and south healthier every time another dogmatic institution develops a crack. Insistence on a celibate and male-only priesthood may in the end be abandoned out of sheer need, rather than fairness to women, say. Yet the charge of hypocrisy must be beginning to tell.
It’s been a week for strong statements, urging realism and a measure of modesty on diehards.
‘Speaking as a Protestant, a Presbyterian and a unionist, unionists and Presbyterians should feel they have moral permission to back equal marriage’, said Ruth Davidson, delivering the Amnesty Gay Pride lecture under the banner ‘Marriage Equality, from Scotland with love.’
The gay leader of the Scottish Tories and a bonny speaker, she said she ‘came to believe in equal marriage because I’m a Christian.’
The question she couldn’t answer except by saying ‘keep fighting the good fight’ was from a west Belfast teenager who asked ‘how to get around’ her Catholic school blocking her bringing up gay issues.
But Davidson did recall Scottish Church campaigning against equal marriage, and how ‘very vocal’ Catholic opposition ‘piped down a little’ after a gay sex scandal involving the country’s archbishop.
It was delivered as a modest enough throwaway remark with a smile, however, from a savvy practitioner of a trade with its own scandals.
