24/06/2026
The Civil Service’s decision to withdraw from all Pride celebrations in Northern Ireland has left many LGBTQIA+ employees across Government, including arms-length bodies, feeling hurt, fearful, and wondering if their visibility or equality matters.
Pride is many things to many people. It is a celebration of LGBTQIA+ people, identities, lives and culture. It is an opportunity for LGBTQIA+ people, and inclusive organisations, to be loud, proud, and visible both in the major cities and in more rural areas. Above all, Pride is and has always been a movement for equality, for rights, and for equal treatment under the law.
The neutrality of the Civil Service is vital to ensuring confidence in the Service, including in their employment practices and delivery of all Government services. However, a blanket ban on all staff from taking part in events under the Civil Service banner - as they have done for years - is not ‘neutrality’. Neutrality is recognising and working to undo the historic and contemporary inequality facing LGBTQIA+ staff and citizens; the alternative, the path now chosen by the Civil Service, is to allow that inequality to remain unchallenged.
The LGBT+ movement is one of the most successful movements the world has ever known. In six decades, it has lifted tens of millions from criminalisation and on the pathway to equal treatment under the law. In Northern Ireland, where there was once state sponsored imprisonment and violence, there is now equal treatment in goods, facilities and services; marriage, partnership and family rights and visibility.
There has been significant effort expended in recent years to politicise and make controversial all LGBTQIA+ people, identities, expressions, and lives, using the anti-trans moral panic as a basis to curtail broader LGBTQIA+ rights. Specific work has been done to portray this community, its organisations and its celebrations as ‘ideological’ in nature, rather than as ordinary people fighting for equality and recognition within a world which is not built to support them.
The civil service and arms length bodies have long used Pride as an opportunity to build relationships and trust within LGBTQIA+ communities, ensure that LGBTQIA+ staff within their services feel supported and represented, and send a message that LGBTQIA+ service users know that their identity will be respected if they need care or support.
Every step for equality has had its place in Pride. Public bodies go to pride not to endorse every message, every placard, every campaign. They go to Pride to support equality for all LGBTQIA+ people, to demonstrate that their workplaces and their services will welcome them with open arms. In a country where many feel that the Government does not work for LGBTQIA+ people, this function is vital for ensuring that those people still know that services are there for them.
We would urge the head of the Civil Service, Jane Brady, the Minister for Finance John O’Dowd, and all relevant decision-makers to reverse course, and commit to being brave and supporting all of their LGBTQIA+ staff and citizens. We would welcome any civil servant affected by this decision in The Rainbow Project’s bloc across all Prides in Northern Ireland.
