There was only one place in my town growing up that felt safe to me. It wasn’t the school, it particularly wasn’t the church, or the parish hall or the local disco or sports clubs. All of those found their own ways to target and exclude. It was the library. In my town in the 1980’s it was a side room in a council office. To be honest it looked like it had been assembled as an afterthought, but it was very well run. The person who ran it was the only adult in the town who made space for me to make own choices.

Every gay kid in Ireland in the late 80’s instantly knew what she represented - what she embodied- was revolution. Your older brothers couldn’t see it but we could: she was the future moving through the present. She only had to open her mouth and mountains fell. We had grown up in the thick imprisoning silence that had swallowed Ann Lovett and Declan Flynn and countless others - and she broke it. Jesus did she break it. That voice was like a god speaking from a cloud. Electrifying. Weirdly recognizable. As if it had always been there.

Last year, outside The Boboli Gardens in Florence, an elderly Italian historian looked at my ID and my name and launched into a very considered discussion of The Nine Years War and the last stand of the Gaelic aristocracy just before the Plantation. He was delightful. I was agog. The principals - Hugh O’Neill, Red Hugh O’Donnell and my own namesake - seemed as real to him as the people around us. Maybe more so. He really KNEW his stuff. “The north remembers,” he said - I think echoing GOT - and then he tapped his nose. You don’t expect this do you?