David Norris (politician)

Norris, a Trinity College Dublin lecturer in English, challenged Ireland's Victorian laws against sex between men in the Irish courts, losing in the Supreme Court in 1983. His barrister, Mary Robinson, later president of Ireland, took the case to Strasbourg, and in Norris v Ireland in 1988 the European Court of Human Rights followed its Dudgeon ruling. The Irish government took five years to act, and the 1993 law, steered by justice minister Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, set an equal age of consent rather than the compromise many expected. Norris was by then a senator, and served until January 2024.