WORLD AIDS DAY: LOOKING BACK AT THE START OF HIV AND AIDS IN IRELAND. BY SANDRA HARRIS.

 

WORLD AIDS DAY: LOOKING BACK ON THE START OF HIV AND AIDS IN IRELAND.

BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

Sunday the first of December was World AIDS Day, and our national broadcaster aired a programme a few days earlier to mark it: MEMORIAL: HIV AND AIDS IN IRELAND. A physical memorial to all the Irish people who died of AIDS stands now in the Phoenix Park, a gorgeous sculpture using the little red AIDS support ribbon people wear on their lapels as inspiration for its shape. I haven’t been out to visit it yet myself, but I hope there are seats provided so that people who want to reflect about times gone by and people who’ve passed can do so in peace, tranquility and comfort.

 I was only a young one myself when AIDS first began to be talked about and noticed in America. That first little headline from 1981 in an American newspaper, RARE CANCER SEEN IN 41 HOMOSEXUALS, was something I had no clue of until much later.

Young gay men began to present to doctors in their droves with the strangest symptoms: fever; swollen lymph nodes; a horrible skin disease called Kaposi’s Sarcoma that left unsightly purple blotches and lesions on the body; a fatal pneumonia called Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia or PCP; and other mad symptoms of diseases, say, that you might usually only find in birds or other animals, but which became opportunistic infections that attacked AIDS patients because their immune systems were in such poor shape.

I don’t remember hearing about AIDS at all really until about 1985, when Rock Hudson died, and then again in 1987 when a scary ad came on the telly with the tagline, CASUAL SEX SPREADS AIDS. As far as I remember, it featured a horny couple who were obviously going to get it on with each other, until the scary voice came on and told them what could happen if they did.

The ad was powerful but not, strictly speaking, correct. It wasn’t casual sex that was the problem, but condom-less, unprotected sex. You could have as much casual sex as you wanted, so long as you were careful about it and wore a condom. Which, in Ireland, you couldn’t do until 1985, when condoms were made legal for people besides lawfully married couples who could get them on prescription from a doctor.

And I bet the good Catholic doctor only prescribed them as a last resort, for when Mary or Sheila or Bridie’s health would be adversely affected by yet another pregnancy. In holy Catholic Ireland at the time, condoms were nothing but the devil’s balloons, as far as the outraged Church was concerned.

The Church had a super-strong grip on the population of Ireland back then, and was frequently backed up by the long arm of the law and the government. That’s why we were able to have such a shocking history of industrial schools run by savage Christian brothers and nun-led Magdalen Laundries and orphanages that left the people they were supposed to be caring for mentally and physically scarred for life. Some of these poor victims chose to end their lives because of the unfairness of what had been done to them in the name of God.

Back in the early ‘Eighties, homosexuality was still a crime, an actual crime, so, when AIDS came to Ireland, the government issued no help, funding or even information to our gay men because it would have been seen to be endorsing and supporting criminal acts, if you can credit that.

Homosexuality was finally decriminalised in Ireland in 1993, but, beyond a few information leaflets and a small bit of funding, the government and our Health Education Board still didn’t do a whole lot to help people through the crisis.

Like in America, where the Gay Men’s Health Crisis was founded in 1982 to help people living with AIDS, it was the gay men of Ireland who had to mobilise themselves into action groups like Gay Health Action or GHA (formed in 1985) in order to raise awareness of the disease that was by now claiming hundreds of lives yearly.

The GHA fundraised and dropped information leaflets into pubs and clubs and anywhere people might meet for fun and/or sex. They linked in with drug-prevention and haemophilia organisations as well, and were probably wholly responsible in Ireland for the notion that AIDS was an illness that could affect anyone, not just gay people. They were the only group out there educating people on the risks of unsafe sex and sharing dirty needles. Without them, the number of Irish deaths might have been much higher.

AIDS ACTION ALLIANCE (now HIV Ireland) was formed in 1986, intending to create a single lobbying platform for all people living with AIDS, not just the poor stigmatised gays; however, the haemophiliacs broke away from this group, not wanting to be associated with the illegal ‘gay’ aspect of the disease, and set about seeking monetary compensation for haemophiliacs who’d received transfusions with contaminated blood products.

Methadone clinics and Drugs Task forces were established to deal with the drug addiction/sharing dirty needles element of the AIDS question. Safely sheltered in my little country home, I had no idea at first that a disease called AIDS was scything its way through the hopeless addicts on crime-and-drug-infested Dublin housing estates and in the filthy stairwells of Dublin Corporation flats.

There was a terrible stigma surrounding the whole subject back then. Still is, some people believe. You couldn’t really tell anyone if you had it, because of the awful shame, guilt and the whole culture of blame associated with it. You went home to die of it, if they’d let you in, and, if they didn’t, well, I guess then you died in a hostel or a hospital bed, alone and heavily stigmatised. (By the late ‘80s, the first clinic for HIV and the treatment of STDs opened in St. James’s Hospital in Dublin, so at least there was that.)

When my favourite television presenter of the day, Vincent ‘Fab Vinnie’ Hanley, who’d presented MTV-USA for the past several years, passed away in 1987, I was gutted but I didn’t have a clue what he’d died of until years later, because no-one seemed to be telling the truth about his death. 

The only celebrity whose death was openly stated as being from AIDS was Freddie Mercury, who passed away in November of 1991. Even then, it wasn’t revealed to the world until the very last minute, the day before he died in Garden Lodge, his London home.

Before that, though, I’d been to university where sexual free-for-alls were the name of the game. Nobody spoke about AIDS, no man I ever slept with ever suggested we use a condom, no man I ever met seemed to carry them.

I had a vague notion that there were free condoms for students’ use somewhere in the Students’ Union building, but I wasn’t walking all the way down there on my own, not if no-one else was bothering. Anyway, I wasn’t ‘sophisticated’ enough to be the kind of woman who carried condoms.

I joined in the sexual free-for-all and shed my virginity like an unwanted skin. How I emerged unscathed, how any of us did, is a pure fucking miracle. And I still don’t know anyone personally who’s either died of AIDS or is/was living with it. How the hell did I get so lucky as to be completely untouched by this awful scourge?

I know that AIDS still exists today, though I don’t hear much about it, except once a year on World AIDS day. That’s how I found out about the memorial in the Phoenix Park. Apparently, it’s not a death sentence any more either, did you know?

 You just have to take one pill a day and you’re grand. So the people who have it tell us anyway. And if the levels of HIV in your blood are undetectable, you can’t transmit it to anyone else. Hmmm. I don’t know if I’d want to take that risk, not any more.

I feel desperately sorry for the people like poor Freddie Mercury, who died of what I personally call ‘Bad AIDS,’ the AIDS that existed before the good anti-retrovirals came along and extended the length of victims’ lives and helped them to feel better for longer.

They suffered to the fullest extent of what this ghastly plague had to offer; blindness, skin cancer, dementia, the wasting away to nothing, the stigma, the isolation, the sheer terror of what people would think of them if they found out.

In America in the ‘80s, AIDS was so feared that people who contracted it frequently lost their jobs, incomes and housing. That might have happened in Ireland too for all I know. 

Like I’ve said, a lot of Irish people genuinely might not have even heard of the disease till 1985, when Rock Hudson died, or even later, when Freddie passed, so God knows what we were not privy to during those years thanks to the media or the government or whoever. God knows what we were not told about.

 Anyway, Christmas is coming and it might be a good time to visit the memorial in the Phoenix Park, breathe in some clean fresh air and think about all those who didn’t make it. Happy Christmas and a Happy New Year to all my readers.