David Norris still sees his destiny as Ireland's first gay president

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/12/david-norris-ireland-gay-president

James Joyce railed against family, religion and nationalism as the nets that Ireland casts around its artists and free-thinkers. As the annual celebration of his greatest work, Ulysses, begins those same traditional values have come back to haunt the leading Irish authority on the country's most famous novelist.

While senator David Norris prepares for the annual Bloomsday festivities – when thousands dress up in Edwardian attire and follow the same mock-epic journey Joyce sent his novel's protagonist, Leopold Bloom, on – he knows he is also fighting for his political survival.

Until a fortnight ago this bearded, gregarious Joycean scholar seemed on course to become not only Ireland's, but Europe's, first openly gay president. Successive opinion polls put him way ahead of his nearest rivals in the race to succeed Mary McAleese as the republic's head of state.

But like his literary hero, Norris is now bearing the brunt of the country's conservative forces. Two weeks ago, Helen Lucy Burke, a Dublin restaurant critic notorious for her waspish reviews, went on an Irish radio programme to remind the country what Norris had said in an interview with her nine years earlier. The Protestant gay rights campaigner had appeared in Magill magazine and spoken about the ancient Greek tradition among adult males of having sex with young boys. Although Norris strongly denied having endorsed adults engaging in sex with children, and has campaigned for victims of child abuse, the quotes proved explosive. Even his supporters feared that his campaign had been stopped in its tracks.