‘I part not from effeminacy’: Queer Behaviour in Gaelic Ireland

Abstract

Despite Ireland’s reputation until recently as being sexually conservative and repressive, in fact this country has a long-documented history of what might be described as ‘queer behaviour’. Repressed Ireland lasted for little more than a century: from roughly the end of the Great Famine in the 1850s down to the end of the 1950s when the modern revolution in sexual ethics began. The reasons for that relatively short-lived repressive interval owed as much to the economic conditions of society, as they did to contemporary religious and socially approved moral systems.

Before the Famine, things had been a lot more relaxed and, in their own way, liberal. Since the completion of the English conquest of Ireland in the early seventeenth century, evidence for such behaviour occurs largely on account of scandals and court proceedings. But for the thousand years or so before that records of various kinds from Gaelic Ireland—law tracts and penitentials, saints lives and sagas, medieval prose and poetry—provide us with an insight into the more varied intimate and emotional lives of the people of those times. This chapter teases out and reflects on that evidence.