The end of the lifetime blood donation ban
After more than thirty years, gay men in Ireland were allowed to give blood again. A student had fought for it.
On 16 January 2017, Tomás Heneghan walked into a blood donation clinic on D'Olier Street in Dublin. For the young student from Galway, it was more than a routine appointment. That day he was among the first openly gay men allowed to give blood in the Republic of Ireland in more than thirty years.
The lifetime ban on donations from men who had had sex with men dated from the eighties. With the emergence of HIV, the Irish Blood Transfusion Service excluded this group across the board, regardless of individuals' actual behaviour. The rule lasted for decades, even after testing methods and medical knowledge had long since changed.
Heneghan refused to accept this. In the spring of 2015, he was turned away in Dublin after honestly stating that he had had sex with men. He went to the High Court. The pressure had an effect: the blood service had the rule reviewed by international experts, and in the summer of 2016 Health Minister Simon Harris announced the end of the lifetime exclusion. Heneghan then withdrew his case.
The hurdle had not disappeared entirely, however. Anyone wanting to donate now had to have abstained from sex with men for twelve months. After his donation, Heneghan spoke of a civic duty, but called the remaining deferral unnecessary, discriminatory and disproportionate. He called for each person to be assessed individually according to their risk behaviour, instead of putting an entire group under general suspicion.
With the one-year rule, Ireland was in the middle of the European field. Countries such as Italy and Spain were already assessing individual behaviour rather than sexual orientation at the time. In the following years, the Irish deferral period was shortened further. But the day on D'Olier Street remains the moment when a decades-old stigma first visibly began to crack.