Hello, everyone. Thank you very much for welcoming me here today. I hate following people like Andy Goodman because it makes me feel incompetent immediately because that’s exactly how you tell a story and I’m not going to show you how not to tell a story. My name is Brian Sheehan and I’m really delighted to be here and I’ve come from Ireland and I’m really delighted that you arranged some rain so I’d feel really at home over the last day. I came for a tan, it hasn’t happened yet. I’m going to talk to you today about an extraordinary moment in Irish history but in fact I think it had ripples all across the world when Ireland voted yes to marriage and became the very first country in the world to vote for marriage by popular referendum last May the 22nd. And I’m now going to make you weep I hope. That, I’ll speak to you a little. I was co-director with a woman called Gronya Healy who you’ll see later from Marriage Equality of the Yes Equality campaign, the main yes organization. And I’m also the executive director of Glenn the Gay and Lesbian Equality Network who’s been around for 20 years campaigning for LGBT quality in Ireland a version, the Irish version of the HRC I suppose. But first of all I’d like to show you a little video which you might watch which captures I think what it felt like to be Irish, to be gay on this day. We’ll know in a matter of hours if Ireland’s made history and become the first country in the world to vote for marriage equality. Canting of what will be a record number of votes gets underway at 9 o’clock this morning. When you’re in here today you will be the face to the world of what’s happening on this count centre, there will be people from all over the world here and there will be people who don’t agree with us here. We have to remember the respect and dignity that we brought to this campaign and we will make sure on the last day of this campaign that respect and dignity will be as real in this room as we made it in every single corner of our capital city. Members of the public are being invited to witness the results of the referendum at Dublin Castle today. 2000 people will be able to see the results unfold on a big screen which will be erected in the courtyard of the castle. With high turnouts of over 70% reported in some parts of Dublin and other areas of the country when polls closed at 10 o’clock last night, voting in the marriage referendum will reach record levels. By mid-morning a clear picture of how Ireland has decided on the marriage referendum will be known with most observers expecting it to have passed comfortably. It’s been an amazing social media trend of people all through the last day of the referendum. I hope that this will be their best to make it home and help see this referendum passed. I have quite a powerful, carrying voice. Why did you fight so strongly for this and what does it mean? I felt our family wasn’t recognised as being a family. It is now and I can’t thank the people of Ireland enough for what they did last Friday. I’ve seen that about 500,000 times and I still get emotional every time and particularly by the man at the very end you heard is a man called Vivian Cummins who had campaigned for many years to have his marriage and his family recognised in Ireland. There’s something very moving about the way he speaks, I think, that set a tone or that captured the tone that had been used all through the referendum. That’s what I want to talk about a little today in a very short space of time. There are loads and loads of medium will have an archive eventually and there is a book out. I can only hope to capture a small portion of what happened over then but in essence it was a public communications campaign. Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. Martin Luther King quote was the opening line in a column on the Friday before the referendum in the Irish times. It was written by Ursula Halligan. Ursula is one of Ireland’s most prominent TV journalists, political correspondents for the main commercial television station. It was arresting and riveting and perhaps the most poignant account across the entire referendum. She said she was horrified at her silence, at her loneliness, at a life wasted and useless as she for the first time came out in public as a lesbian having told her family just weeks before. In her closing paragraph she said if Ireland votes yes it’s more than about marriage. It will tell Irish lesbian and gay people that they belong and that they can surface and live fully human loving lives. The man in the centre there, this is Fathers for Yes launching National Canvas Day. The man in the centre is a man called Tom Curran. Tom is the General Secretary of the governing Finnegale party, deeply devout man, a life guided by his faith as he says. Two weeks before the referendum we woke up to Ireland’s biggest selling newspaper with a column by Tom. He talked about his son Finnegan and now Finnegan like his other three children were carved from the palm of his hand quoting Isaiah. He said when Finnegan told him he was gay he knew, he recalled Isaiah and he knew that he loved his son the same as he loved his other three children. He said he had come on a journey and as a man of faith he urged people to vote yes. He said it was the right thing to do, the moral thing to do. About a week before that James Mitchell, student from Trinity College in Dublin, made a video under the hashtag go ring your granny which where he as he said had the first ever proper conversation with his granny about being gay and asked her to vote yes. Granny responded in a video that was instantly viral and she said I love you. I have been your number one fan since you came out. You are very brave and of course I am voting yes and she said I love you from the top of your head to the soles of your feet. Why wouldn’t I vote yes? Those three stories were just tiny glimpse of the personal stories that have come out across the referendum. In yes equality we didn’t orchestrate them. In fact we didn’t even know they were going to be out in advance. But what we did do is try to set up an environment where those kinds of stories could be totally fooled but much more importantly where they could be heard. The seeds for how we set up that environment were sown over the previous 20 years or preceding 20 years in Ireland which has been on an extraordinary journey on LGBT equality. We move from decriminalization of homosexuality as late as 1993 through full the equivalent of federal employment protections for lesbian and gay people in 98, full goods and services equality in 2000, civil partnership in 2011 and in 2015 on approaching the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Republic of Ireland we moved to some kind of extraordinary moment where LGBT people became equal citizens in our own country. So we had a family’s bill that for the first time treated lesbian and gay families the same as other families including adoption. We had the marriage referendum and the marriage bill and in Ireland only a government can bring forward a referendum. And we also had a gender recognition act in which Ireland became the fifth country in the world to allow transgender people self declare and get their identity, their real identity recognized. Those changes were very hard, one and the other opposition all the way through but the real engines of change were people, were LGBT people who post decriminalization came out ever increasingly to their families, their work colleagues, their friends and post 2011 when civil partnership came in loving lesbian and gay couples became open about who they were and people saw that actually the love and commitment of a lesbian and gay couple is the same as that of anybody else and it isn’t that much to be frightened of. Over Glenn has been behind much of those changes along with many others and we had a core strategy for change that looks at three things. One was about consolidating your support, never assuming that those who support you will always support you, they have different political priorities, you’ll never be at the top of their list but also they’ll never, you can’t wait for your side to get into power, you have to work with everybody. Our second piece of that was winning over the movable middle and I suppose we did that by understanding that people’s natural fear of change wasn’t necessarily hostility to lesbian and gay people and very importantly we sold which sounds like the wrong word but we explained gains as gains for everybody, equality is not a zero sum game and our biggest challenge was never to leave losers because if you leave losers then your changes can be reversed and the third part of that was about neutralizing the opposition. Too often we love the row but letting that go really mattered. One of Glenn’s founders and indeed co-chair still, Keir and Rose coined a phrase at one point a Glenn went around the country stirring up apathy but it kind of worked. When we came to the referendum our research said a few things, it said that young people were intensely for marriage, couldn’t understand if anyone voted no but turns out they weren’t great voters. Women 40 to 65 were very strongly for it because they were influenced by their children and probably would vote yes and men 40 to 65 were very soft yes voters and immediately they were challenged by no messages, went straight away to a no, couldn’t quite understand why lesbian and gay couples would want to get married. I mean look at their experience, was the version we kept coming back. I’m not passing any comment, we get what we want but we knew that the real triggers were about equal citizenship that captured people and fairness and equality and we set out a strategy based on that research that actually tried to capture those things. A strategy which in essentially was a public communication strategy for the referendum and it had three or four components, the first was a framing component, then there was a values component, a tonal component and then there was messaging and messengers. The framing component was about trying to find the way in which we could describe what we wanted in a way that appealed to everybody not just to LGBT people and our allies so in fact it did become about equal citizenship. The referendum in Ireland was whether lesbian and gay couples, lesbian and gay people could be entitled to equal citizenship for the first time. If you held that value highest then even if you didn’t like marriage you would vote for it because the higher value, the higher issue for you was equal citizenship in a republic and as I say 2016 this year Ireland celebrates the 100th anniversary, the proclamation of our republic. The values piece, I’ll skip over that, the values piece here, this is our very first billboard poster and it said loving equal fair, inclusive, there are many words to describe Ireland today and made the 22nd we need just one, yes. We actually believe it, we believe that those values are values that describe Irish people and the Irish nation and because we believe it it hung true, it was authentic, we’d used it many times before, we’ve always thanked Irish people as Vivian did at the end of that film for the generosity they had in allowing us to be equal. That set a tone for the campaign and it was a positive tone and it was going to be respectful and we would find messages and messengers to do that. The way we, I suppose we could never hope we had neither the time, the money nor the people or the resources to mount an extraordinary massive campaign but what we could do at yes equality was set the parameters for a campaign that the campaign could then follow and we came up with a campaign, a national conversation under the headline I’m voting yes, ask me why and that was an entirely different approach to politics and Ireland, it was an entirely different approach to persuading people, I’m not going to demand that you vote yes, I’m going to ask you, I’m not going to lecture you, I’m going to invite you to a discussion and that tone carried through all over the country, this is an image of an open mic night down in a city called Limerick where we had those all over the country and asked people to come and say why they’re voting yes, we didn’t ask them to explain them, we didn’t expect them to be knowledgeable about every issue, we didn’t expect them to have an answer for the no voters, we just asked them to think about why they would vote yes and to say it and that liberated people all over the country. We ended up with having conversations in pubs and community centres, in workplaces, primarily across dinner tables back to Mammy and Daddy, sometimes Daddy did what Mammy said and it was easier in the long run, but we set up 70 ESI college groups around the country and one particular group, those groups went out every night and had conversations on doorsteps and one particular group went to 142,000 houses and had conversations at 142,000 houses in a Dublin area, that’s the level of support, interestingly mainstream media missed it, mainstream media focused on the parameters of Twitter, the nasty end of social media and thought that’s where the debate was, it wasn’t and it wasn’t until one of the main political journalists was at a railway station and he saw ESI quality people saying I’m voting yes, could I tell you why and handing a leaflet to somebody and people usually take leaflets and run on and drop them but actually you could see people stopping and coming back to have a conversation and the mainstream media suddenly changed because they now understood what was happening all over the country, social media was incredibly important, are the under 40s young anymore, sorry I’m too late, social media is going to be critical but our biggest challenge was to move online offline, there was no point in people sharing social media stuff amongst themselves, it was about trying to reach other people but we did that then by finding messengers and messengers and flooding social media with positive content and actually having the discipline to to ring up and say to people you have to take that down when content went off message and and and we just flooded social media with messengers that mirrored the people who were trying to reach, primarily middle-aged men, this is a middle-aged man believe it or not but this is the most, it’s Mrs Brown, it’s the most popular character in British and Irish television and it is a man but those we used religious figures, we used sporting figures, we used everyone who even if they weren’t that positive about the marriage piece were very clear that they wanted equal citizenship but most people were clear that they wanted the same rights of their parents and the most powerful advocates became parents who would say things like I have four children, I’ve treated them all equally, it’s not right that the state will treat one of my children as a second-class citizen. I’ll skip on. Social media became extraordinarily important in terms of trying to stimulate conversations all over the country. This is the map of the last week of social media sorry of the referendum campaign and it’s marref which was the hashtag. We had one billion impressions which I hear is the same thing as a World Cup football final so I was pleased. One billion impressions from half a million tweets, it was just extraordinary and another phenomenon that started was the home to vote phenomenon where young people who’ve been forced to emigrate by choice or by economic necessity in the recession we’ve just had all over the world came back home to have a stake in the republic that they had been forced to leave and about 30,000 people came back to cast their vote slightly legally because they you know there’s all rules about foreign voting if you’re not living in Ireland or that we’ll skip all that but it was absolutely critical. It didn’t matter we won. And I’ll finish on two things the fascinating pieces having broadened out the argument and the communications about families about people about parents and the very last week the last couple of days we brought it back to an individual and then we brought it back to a real person who said I am part of you I am part of your community your family please allow me to marry and let me just finish up with my favorite moment of the campaign. This is Gronje Healy who with myself were co-directors of the campaign. On the last week we were going down Grafton Street which is the main shopping street in Dublin and we were looking for a photo op we were handing out the 500,000 badge we there are some for people in the audience but these are badges that people would buy for two euros which is about three dollars I don’t know why but anyway we got rid of millions of actually was one for three euros was ten for five euros somebody else did the math so I was going around with a basket and I said this gentleman approached me I said would you like a badge and he said I’d be delighted and I thought okay so I said would you like to accept the 500,000th badge and be photographed for the papers and he paused and he looked me straight in the eye and he said I’d be really honored to do so and with that he spruced himself up fixed his shirt fixed his hat and came and with the twinkle in his eye posed with Gronje and I and that’s the moment I knew we’d won the referendum but it’s also a moment when we knew that we’d done something else we had designed and run a campaign not us everybody that had reached the hearts and minds of Irish people that had allowed people like this man Vivian Sheehan who grew up on the west coast of Ireland but lived in Dublin all his life his children were grown up he lived on his own but allowed him to be his better self and vote yes yes equality and everyone working for yes equality set out to change a constitution we did but we changed a country and in doing so we added hugely to the moment of change across the world thank you very much