All the commentary on how the referendum was ‘about more than marriage’, how it went ‘beyond the letter of the law’ to touch on something deeper, something psychic, confirms that the campaign for gay marriage is not about achieving social equality — no, it’s about securing parity of esteem, which is very different. The march of gay marriage has a stronger relationship with the new culture of therapy, and the need for recognition, than it does with the more longstanding ideal of legal equality and the need for rights. What is being sought here is not really the right to marry but rather social and cultural validation of one’s lifestyle — ‘societal empathy’ — particularly from the state. What we have witnessed in Ireland is not a new dawn of social equality but the further entrenchment of the value of cultural equality, and this is far from positive.

Ireland’s focus on recognition rather than rights, and the celebration of gay marriage as a means of validating gay people’s sense of worth, echoes the discussion about gay marriage in nations across the West. Time and again, the language used has been that of therapy rather than autonomy. In her excellent 2004 essay ‘The liberal case against gay marriage’, Susan M Shell noted the way that early agitators for gay marriage seemed to be primarily concerned with ‘relieving adult anxiety’, what some of them referred to as their ‘elemental fear’ of not being ‘valued’ (1). Activists spoke of how ‘the lack of legal recognition [for our relationships] rankled more and more’. In the words of the authors of The Politics of Same-Sex Marriage (2007), activists primarily want ‘the sanction of the state for our intimate relationships’. This search for state sanction, for external recognition, has been echoed in the response to the Irish referendum. ‘My country has acknowledged that we exist’, said a gay Irish businessman.