Postcards from a New Republic

The ‘Postcards from the New Republic’ series is a hat tip to British designer, artist, entrepreneur and Socialist William Morris’s News from Nowhere series of articles from 1890 published in the Commonweal, the newspaper of the Socialist League and set in a distant future where Morris’s socialist, and romantic, utopia has been secured. 

Our story’s protagonists are Willa Ní Chuairteoir and Lucy Byrne accompanied by their four children James, Afric, Banba, and Alroy who together enjoy and endure the equity and exigency of the future’s New Republic. 

“He lies there all day dying of shame.

“These were the last weeks of Mark’s life. In a hospital. Alone. In the 1980s. Mark was quiet, kind and he had Aids. Like too many of our gay friends Mark hadn’t been well and then, he just disappeared. Eventually we found him in St James’s Hospital. Mark barely recognised us. A wonderful young nurse took my hand before I went into his room for the first time and said with big loose tears in her eyes, ‘he lies there all day dying of shame’.

“For a second or two I couldn’t breathe, and we just held each other’s hand. It was like we had been swallowed up by the state and society’s vast cruelty and were drowning in the hopelessness of it all. We had just three days with Mark, but we made sure he wasn’t alone for a single second. We kissed him, we held him and reminded him of the million and one reasons why we loved him, and then we buried him.”

Lucy looks up from the draft copy and exclaims with her hand on her heart, ‘oh my God Willa, that is just so raw. Where did you find it?’ Willa is the Editor of Dublin’s oldest magazine ‘The Voice’. This month’s edition includes a big feature on the history of HIV and Aids in Ireland. PrEP+ has been available through the Irish National Health System for decades now, and as a result there hasn’t been a single case of HIV for a long time. 

Willa tells Lucy that her Deputy Editor Gina unearthed some incredible material from the ‘Irish Queer Archive’. Lucy looks at her quizzically, and says, ‘I’ve never heard of that archive?’ Willa nods her head expressively. ‘That’s the thing, neither had I’. 

‘It’s like we’ve erased the stigma and trauma of the past. This magnificent archive has been housed in the National Library since 2008 and has a practically complete set of all LGBTQI+ titles published on the island since 1974, and I only found out about it last month. Me, a gay woman, an activist and an editor of the capital city’s oldest frickin magazine! 

‘I was in the National Library to get some background on the first coronavirus pandemic. You remember we said we’d do a feature on it ahead of the new 5-year vaccine roll out. I’d written the data reference down wrong and ended up pulling up the archive. 

‘I called Gina straight away and we spent the next three days going through the archive’. Lucy nudges Willa with her elbow and teases, ‘So that’s where you disappeared to last month when you were down in Dublin. Why didn’t you tell me about all this sooner?’ 

Willa moves her chair closer to Lucy. They’re in the study up in the attic getting a bit of peace and quiet while Lucy’s Mum Eileen gives the kids their dinner. Willa pulls out the next few layout drafts and says, ‘To be honest, I don’t know hun. Me and Gina were just so overwhelmed with what we had uncovered. We take our rights for granted now that they’ve been in place for so long. Which on the one hand means the battle has been won and that’s great, but on the other we’ve let the history of our struggle slip away’. 

It’s moments like this that Lucy cannot imagine breathing a single breath without Willa by her side. 

Willa gives herself a little shake and says, ‘So after that Gina and I decided that we needed to do the feature. The archive contains a magnificent oral history. Stories of isolation, stigma, such fear but also of community, protest, change and so much colour. There are also some great reminders of the community’s solidarity with others despite all the horrors they faced themselves throughout the 1980s. There’s even a booklet from 1982 that has articles, transcripts of songs and photographs taken during a picket of Armagh gaol. How amazing is that!’ 

Lucy gets up to give Willa a kiss. By the sounds of things downstairs the kids are driving their poor Nana Eileen mad. ‘I better give Mam a hand’. As Lucy heads downstairs she hears Donna Summer’s ‘Last Dance’ start to drift gently out of the study. She smiles. Perfect.