Clonmel performance shines light on Ireland's forgotten AIDS history

​​LGBTQ+ rights activist, journalist and DJ Tonie Walsh was recently invited to deliver this year's Vincent Hanley Lecture at the Junction Arts Festival in Clonmel, which took place in July of this year.

Speaking to The Nationalist he says that he knew almost immediately that a conventional lecture wasn't what he wanted to give.

He had been approached by Clonmel Junction Arts Festival director Rebecca Lenehan following the success of last year's first Vincent Hanley Summer School.

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While the invitation was to deliver a lecture, Tonie instead created an immersive, mixed-media performance exploring grief, loss, guilt and survival during the AIDS pandemic.

"I thought long and hard about it," he said.

"A lecture would have had merit, but it wasn't really what I wanted to do. I didn't want it to come across as some dry academic exercise."

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Instead, Tonie combined spoken word with archive images and visuals to tell the story of one of Ireland's most overlooked chapters. Although he would have preferred to perform the piece entirely from memory, he admitted the script was still being revised just days before taking to the stage.

"It ended up being about 7,000 words," he said.

"I'd love to do it again without the script and turn it into even more of a performance."

Despite admitting he’s a bit self-critical of his writing afterwards, he said the response from the Clonmel audience convinced him the production has a future beyond the Summer School.

He also speaks about how Ireland has never fully confronted that period of its history.

"There's a paucity of cultural references to the pandemic, and there's still a certain silence and difficulty in the way we remember it.

"For obvious reasons, there was a culture of shame and stigma attached to AIDS at the time, and to some extent that still exists today. We have to push through that world of shame and stigma if we're going to get a better understanding of what people actually went through.

"The fact that the government in the day just dragged its feet on providing condoms at the time, which were still partially illegal.

"They weren't available because the church refused to allow their use, I think there's a lot still to unpick from the period.

"It's a significant part of Irish history that hasn't been thoroughly excavated or remembered," he said.

"I wanted to look at the coping strategies and survival mechanisms of people who lost friends, family members, lovers and partners, and to understand the impact that loss had on individuals and on society."

The performance was also an opportunity to place Vincent Hanley's life and death within the realities of Ireland in the 1980s.

"Remembering Vincent was one of the reasons Rebecca and I wanted to do this," he explained.

"It's important to locate his death from AIDS-related complications within the cultural and political currents of 1970s and 1980s Ireland. When he died in 1987, homosexuality was still illegal.

"Gay men had no employment protections and could still be prosecuted.

"That's the context people have to remember."

While much has changed since then, Tonie says that he believes Ireland still has lessons to learn, particularly when it comes to sexual health.

“Our sexual health education isn't fit for purpose," he said.

"There aren't enough STI clinics and people should be able to access factual, non-judgmental healthcare without feeling ashamed." He pointed to Clonmel as an example.

"For a town of around 19,000 people serving a much wider catchment area, the STI clinic operates one afternoon a week. That simply beggars belief."

He also argued that investing in preventative healthcare like PrEP makes economic as well as social sense.

He explained that the medication usually taken to manage HIV costs more than €1,000 per month, while preventative medication such as PrEP is significantly cheaper.

"If you compare the cost of treating someone with HIV for life against preventing infection in the first place, the argument is obvious," he said.

After the show, one audience member suggested it should be performed in schools.

"I thought that was a wonderful idea," Walsh said.

"I'd really like to develop it further and take it to other audiences."