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Image courtesy of Deposit Photos
Cllr. John Maher, deputising for the Lord Mayor of Cork Cllr. Deirdre Forde, will launch Cork LGBTI+ Awareness Week on Monday 15th May at 5pm in the Atrium in Cork City Council’s civic offices.
The theme for this year’s Cork LGBTI+ Awareness Week is Together Always – United in Diversity! The launch will see the Rainbow Flag raised by the city for a ninth consecutive year, continuing the strong visual display of solidarity with the LGBTI+ community. In support of this, the Lord Mayor said:
I welcome the LGBTI+ Awareness Week programme of events and encourage everyone to participate in the Awareness Week. Cork is a City of Welcomes and this is just another opportunity to showcase all that is good and positive about our city and the communities within it.
2023 is significant as it marks 30 years since the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Ireland. It is also a year which saw important hate crime legislation being presented to the Dáil. The keynote address of this year’s LGBTI+ Awareness Week recognises this important milestone and is titled ’30 Years: Decriminalising Homosexuality to Criminalising Hate Crime’ given by LGBTI+ activist and campaigner Arthur Leahy and policy officer with the Irish Council for Civil Liberties Luna Lara Liboni. This will take place at the formal launch of the event on Monday.
Continuing the topic of hate crime and hate crime legislation, a panel discussion focusing on Public Services and Community Organisations Responding to Hate will be held in Cork City’s Central Library on Tuesday 16th May at 2pm.
For a full list of the events taking place around the city during this week, please see the accompanying programme.
This year has already been a monumental one for Cork City and the LGBTI+ InterAgency Group. Cork City is currently the only Irish member of the Rainbow Cities Network (RCN), a global LGBTI+ best-practice policy group founded in 2012. The Rainbow Cities Network was founded between the cities of Amsterdam, Barcelona, Cologne, and Turin as an informal network designed to share good-practice approaches to LGBT issues in their respective cities. The group now contains 48 cities, including Cork City which achieved full membership in June 2020.
The Rainbow Cities Network meet once a year, and this year’s RCN Conference was hosted by Cork City in partnership with the LGBTI+ InterAgency Group, where the city was formally awarded with its certification of membership. The theme of this year’s conference was Combatting Hate Crime towards LGBTI+ Communities and centred around a series of workshops designed to inform the first policy guidelines for European cities that do not yet have LGBTI+ policies in place under the program ‘Europe for Citizens’. This was an amazing opportunity to be able to situate Cork City within a global framework of LGBTI+ policy for local authorities.
