Irish novelist Colm Tóibín has revealed why this referendum is so important.

At a lecture in Trinity College last night, Colm Tóibín – who is openly gay – revealed how important the discussion around the referendum is for gay people and why it is imperative to LGBT rights.

“It [the referendum] has allowed us to set out publicly and communally who we are and how we wish to be treated in our country in the future. It has allowed us to have a public debate with our entire nation about our need for recognition and equality.”

In the piece in The Irish Times – which has been abridged from his lecture -Tóibín speaks of how gay people have always had to live with a cloak of invisibility for fear of retribution. He says that this defense mechanism is the reason that heterosexual people do not recognise love between same-sex partners to be the same as their own.

The Wexford-native says that, because gay people have been censored for so long, there is not a written history of LGBTs, reflecting this self-inflicted invisibility.

“As gay people, we grow up alone; there is no history. There are no ballads about the wrongs of the gay past, the gay martyrs are mostly forgotten.”

And this – Colm Tóibín says – is why the referendum is so important.

“Because we are not talking about abstract rights, abstract discrimination. We are not even talking about sexuality. Rather, we are talking about love, […] indeed how much of an imperative, that our love should be ritualised and copper-fastened and celebrated in marriage in the same way as everybody else’s love.”