The car was promptly fetched and the speakers attached and he said: “Before I knew it I was driving my car at the head of the first Pride Parade in Belfast and I was only just about out to my parents at that stage.” “Somebody said ‘who’s got a car’ and they said ‘Niall’s got a car’.” “They were probably borrowed off somebody who didn’t know what they were being used for and had to be strapped to the car and wired into the ignition,” he added. I was rapidly waved on at that stage so it was the easiest way of ever getting through a checkpoint.” © Belfast PrideĪfter reaching his start point, Niall discovered “somebody had turned up with a set of speakers - like people strap to cars for preachers”. I said Gay Pride and offered them a balloon. I was stopped on the way down Corporation Street by a police or army checkpoint and they sort of asked me what the balloons were going to be used for.
That day I had gone off to pick up some helium filled balloons and they filled the back of the car. “I ended up driving my car at the head of it. It involved a walk, which he said some described as “a bit of a dash”. That first year Niall said “there was probably about 100 people - maybe not even quite as many as that”. The Belfast man said they learned “many years later” it was a set up with other people involved in “NIGRA who knew exactly what was going to happen”.
and before we knew it we were arranging a parade in Belfast and it just metamorphosed itself into existence.” “We had this young lad, the person who came up with the idea, challenge other people who had been around for longer at that stage. T-shirt from Belfast's first gay pride on show at the Ulster Museum Niall added: “There was some young person there who’s name I don’t recall and he came up with the idea, why spend money to take people away when we could have a gay Pride parade in Belfast to which everybody said ‘we can’t’.”īut Niall said the plucky young man’s attitude was ‘why not?’ and so a seed was planted. “There was a meeting organised to decide who would get their travel paid.”īut it would seem that would be last meeting of that kind. “There was money left over from his case which had been used by NIGRA to send a few representatives across to London Pride every year,” explained Niall. Some sexual acts between consenting adult men were still illegal in Northern Ireland even though England and Wales had changed their laws - and in 1981 he won his case leading to a change in NI law. Jeffrey Dudgeon, then a Belfast shipping clerk, filed a complaint with the European Commission for Human Rights after being quizzed by the RUC about his sex life for around four and a half hours. NIGRA, which is the Northern Ireland Gay Rights Association, were the organisation that took Jeff Dudgeon’s case the European Court of human Rights.” Niall told Belfast Live: “The first one was in 1991. But after a young man who’s name he doesn’t recall questioned why Belfast had no Pride festival of its own - that’s exactly what happened. Niall Gillespie has spent many of the last 31 years leading, organising and cleaning up after the now huge event which brings NI’s gay community and more together every summer.Īged 24 and “just about out to my parents”, he says he never expected to be driving his car at the head of the parade. A Belfast man who has given years of his life to Pride has revealed how he came to lead the city’s first ever gay rights parade in 1991.