Written by writer Amy Clarke
On 22nd May 2015, crowds gathered outside Dublin Castle awaiting the result of Ireland's marriage equality referendum. When Panti Bliss announced a resounding YES, the celebration felt like a rupture in time. Ireland, a country once defined by shame and strict Catholic doctrine, had voted overwhelmingly to embrace queer love. Three years later, the country voted to repeal the Eighth Amendment, ending decades of reproductive oppression for Irish women. The LGBTQ+ community came out in force again, insisting that equality had to be total, not selective. These victories felt seismic, yet astonishingly recent.
Because just thirty years earlier, Ireland was a very different place.
Homosexuality was a criminal offence until 1993. Being a woman was not, technically, but being the "wrong sort" of woman certainly faced trial by church and community. Women could not access contraception without restriction, could not divorce, and could be institutionalised on a whim by their own families for perceived "immorality" in the Magdalene Laundries. Those who tried to escape were returned by the Gardaí. Many never left. Ireland's modern history holds realities that today feel closer to The Handmaid's Tale than to the progressive nation celebrated at Dublin Castle.
It's this Ireland that sits at the heart of Mammy's House: a country where the church supplied the doctrine and the community supplied the enforcement. For gay men, that enforcement was written into law. For women, it lived in the parish, the family, the neighbour who noticed everything. Two different courts, handing down the same verdict: conform, or be cast out.
For LGBTQ+ Irish people, leaving home was less a choice than an act of survival. Many were disowned by their families outright; others hid their truth entirely and got out as fast as possible. Growing up inside that system leaves shame and guilt sitting in your being like instinct, something you struggle to outrun no matter how far you go.
Being Irish in the UK, meanwhile, was not the experience it is today. Due to IRA bombings, Irish people were widely distrusted, and an accent alone could mark you as suspicious. Landlords refused tenants while employers turned people away. The Irish community lived under a shroud of political tension that had nothing to do with sexuality. And yet, for queer Irish people, London still represented a kind of freedom. Being viewed with suspicion for your nationality was, somehow, still the better option than the oppression of home.
When AIDS became prevalent in Ireland in the mid 1980s, the state was catastrophically unprepared. The government refused to acknowledge the crisis; the church condemned those affected. Men travelled in droves to the UK for NHS care, often hiding their diagnosis from their own families, leaving under the guise of a "big job" only to face illness and isolation in a foreign city, and in many cases to die alone, taking their stories with them.
Ireland's denial was rooted in something simple yet brutal: AIDS wasn't an "Irish problem," because queer people were not seen as legitimate members of the Irish population. It wasn't until 1987, when Dr Fiona Mulcahy became Ireland's first consultant in the field and pioneered a specialised HIV and AIDS care unit at St James's Hospital in Dublin, that the country saw any real medical response.
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| Amy Clarke |
But the ongoing battle for government intervention sparked activism. Senator David Norris fought tirelessly to decriminalise homosexuality, supported by Mary Robinson, whose later presidency marked a real turning point in separating church from state. Their work laid the foundation for the Ireland that would eventually vote YES and Repeal. But in the 1980s, that progress was impossibly far away.
This is the collision of histories Mammy's House sits inside: queer migration, the AIDS crisis, and the particular weight of being Irish in London. Underneath it all runs a quieter, parallel form of policing aimed at women. Gay men were criminalised outright; women faced their own trial by community, raised to obey, to sacrifice, and to never seriously entertain their own desires. It isn't a separate story, but the same architecture of control, applied along a different axis. Shame in Ireland didn't stop at LGBTQ+ sexuality. Women's sexuality, heterosexual or otherwise, was dismissed as non-existent, yet condemned the moment she dared to embrace it.
These stories matter now because the London Irish LGBTQ+ community played a real role in queer history, one that remains largely undocumented even as its effects echo through generations. Fleeing home for a country with more lenient laws, building a chosen family, finally feeling like you belong: that pattern is still a lifeline today for people navigating displacement from countries that criminalise homosexuality, womanhood, or both. Preserving these stories ensures the lives lost to stigma, shame and neglect are honoured, and that the Irish queer diaspora is recognised as part of both Irish and British history.
Mammy's House is a tribute to those who lived through this era: those who fought for change, those whose stories were almost lost, and those who crossed the Irish Sea alone to spend their final days in an AIDS ward in a foreign country, unable to tell their family the truth for fear of being disgraced instead of embraced. History like this isn't distant. It lives in the people who survived to tell it, who've spent the last forty years hoping someone would think what they went through was worth preserving, and it lives on now in this play, which strives to honour them all.
Mammy's House runs at Upstairs at the Gatehouse from 1st - 13th September 2026. For tickets and more information please visit https://upstairsatthegatehouse.ticketsolve.com/ticketbooth/shows/1173674251/events?_gl=1*s2zbku*_ga*NTU1MjUzNTQ1LjE3ODY3MjAxOTE.*_ga_9ZN3PPE10G*czE3ODY3MjAxOTEkbzEkZzAkdDE3ODY3MjAxOTEkajYwJGwwJGgw&TSLVq=d770de32-e991-4db0-8ff8-31efd7c2bd9a&TSLVp=91395539-9699-475f-a911-a4905a9adce2&TSLVts=1786720199&TSLVc=ticketsolve&TSLVe=upstairsatgatehouse&TSLVrt=Safetynet&TSLVh=3adc9ac34c204cdc81e6ea36c4b40ea5
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