Katherine Zappone is the first open, married lesbian in Irish politics. Appointed to the Seanad in 2011, she went on to win a seat in the Dáil in 2016 as an Independent Progressive. She negotiated with Fine Gael to join its government and was subsequently appointed Minister for Children and Youth Affairs.

Katherine brought her convictions and experience as a human rights advocate and educator to her work as a politician, influencing Fine Gael’s social agenda for marriage equality and reproductive justice, and prompting its economic agenda to include combating children’s poverty and reducing income inequality. She was the first politician to establish a legal entitlement for parents to receive economic support for childcare.

Katherine’s life-partnership and eventual marriage to her late spouse, Ann Louise Gilligan, shaped all her political work. Theirs was an extraordinary love story. Prior to politics, Katherine and Ann Louise were known for the case they took against the Irish state to have their marriage recognised in Ireland. This legal action kick-started the marriage equality movement, resulting ultimately in a constitutional win in 2015.

A MEMOIR OF
FACING LOSS AND
FINDING HOPE

KATHERINE
ZAPPONE

Copyright © 2025 Katherine Zappone

The right of Katherine Zappone to be identified as the author of the work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in Ireland in 2025 by

Hachette Books Ireland

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

‘A Vote for Love’ poem by Michael Murphy, permission granted by Michael Murphy, reprinted in Ministry of Dreams: Collected Poems (2019). ‘Yes’ poem by Brendan Kennelly, permission granted by Suzanne Fairless-Aitken of Bloodaxe Books. ‘Spinning Women’ poem by Anne O’Reilly, permission granted by Anne O’Reilly, who wishes to keep the copyright. ‘Beloved’ lyrics by Zrazy, permission granted by songwriter Carole Nelson. Book extract from The New Heart of Wisdom by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, permission granted by Tharpa Publications, UK.

Author photo: Emily Quinn. Cover design: headdesign.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781399747950

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For Ann Louise

Prologue

May 2018

I glance out the study window of The Shanty, my home in the Dublin mountains. August, my golden retriever, lies on the floor close to my desk. She sleeps quietly in the emptiness of the house. It’s just the two of us now, after Ann Louise’s passing eleven months ago. I have been hunched over the desk for most of the morning, working on the text of my next Dáil speech as minister for children. The birdsong outside interrupts my concentration, which is why I look out to the small enclosure, filled with wooden tubs of late-spring flowers. The magnolia tree has begun to bloom magnificently again, a gift from our solicitors to celebrate the initiation of the case we took against the Irish state because it would not recognise our 2003 Canadian marriage. Fifteen years ago. My stare freezes. Grief enters, and slows me down, again.

Eventually I pull my attention back to the desk and notice an unopened envelope. It is likely another sympathy card – I am lucky enough to have received many from people across the nation, each one easing the pain, at least for the moment. I open it to find a beautiful letter from a colleague who worked with me to save Seanad Eireann from abolition, a referendum put before the Irish people in 2013. He had met Ann Louise a couple of times, witnessing the playfulness and fidelity of our love. His letter concludes by quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald, from a letter in which he spoke about his wife, Zelda: ‘I love her, and that’s the beginning and end of everything.’

I put down my pen. I cannot work anymore.

I see Ann Louise running to class in high heels, at Boston College, where we met in 1981. We were going to be late because our squash game had run over, she defeating me yet again, as one of Ireland’s champions in the sport. Her spirit held exuberance so naturally. Her beauty blew my mind. How magnetised was her power. My life would never be the same. We would begin a life journey together, looking for social change based on love.

This study where I work used to be part of the learning space for women from Tallaght West who were determined to get a second chance at education. We had transformed our garages into a community education centre – right outside our kitchen door. I see Ann Louise standing in front of a flip chart, the paper covered with the words ‘feminism’, ‘imagination’ and the French feminist philosopher ‘Luce Irigaray’ in her vigorous script. Her face fills with an invitation to each woman to step on to the path of finding her own life dream. Much later it is these same women, and their families, who join us to line Dublin’s streets as we march together for marriage equality. What solidarity we feel. They are not afraid of difference. They rejoice in our love and a referendum that represents the heart of a nation opening towards us, and people like us.

And that was only part of it. In 2011, she gave up a dream that the two of us would start some new work so that I could pursue politics. I tried to do politics differently. Time and again she showed me how to be collaborative: ‘Be kind, Katherine. Trust your team.’ Before a challenging cabinet meeting she’d ask, ‘How can they be your companions in what you want to achieve? And how can you support them?’ Her petite frame appears in my memory as she listens to how I find allies in the politics of modern Ireland. My drivers, political and constituency teams, civil servants, neighbours and family. We did change the world. But mistakes were made and the opposition and media wore me down at times, calling me to rethink who I am and how to keep going in the midst of a torrent of public criticism.

August still sleeps. I stare into the future, realising even more deeply that Ann Louise is no longer here. What does ‘everything’ mean now? I am heartbroken. A couple of minutes pass. Maybe writing will help me to live with grief and heartache, and to find meaning again. Remarkably, Ann Louise herself stretched towards new meaning in the last year of her life by writing. But her book remains an unfulfilled intention, because something happened to her and she was not able to complete it, despite her best fight. Maybe I can take up the mantle and do it for both of us. To make a record of our last years together and reach for the new.

I pull out a drawer to find an empty journal. I crack the spine and write one line:

Somewhere between grief and joy …

And I am transported back to a time, before politics or illness or grief, when our home was filled with the happiness of our forever love.

CHAPTER 1

The Phone Call

It is May 2011 and Ann Louise and I wake up to the sunshine coming through the back window of our upstairs bedroom in The Shanty. I love lying next to her. We have both slept well. The room feels cosy and safe. I think it is because our home is made of cedar. It was one of the features that so attracted me to the house when we first set eyes on it in April 1985. I am ‘originally American’, as I often say, and we make wooden houses there, not too many concrete ones. An English hotelier from Liverpool, Major Gamble, had built The Shanty in the late nineteenth century as his hunting lodge. He may have hunted in the Dublin and Wicklow countryside on visits from England, but ‘lodge’ is a bit too grand for this small wooden house with a sagging apex. A leaking conservatory fronts The Shanty, and shabby cedar shingles line its sides and cover its roof. But as soon as you enter the sitting room, the warmth of wood cladding from top to bottom envelops you, especially when the copper-hooded canopy over the fireplace casts its heat. Outside is always two degrees colder than down in Dublin, and the snowdrops, daffodils and tulips bloom late in the big garden. We have a small paddock attached to the home property, where we delight in raising various types of hens, tending an organic garden, harvesting berries and finding solitude and silence in a one-room log cabin for painting and writing.

Brittas, in the foothills of the Dublin mountains, showers well-being on everyone when the sun shines. The air is crystal clear. I slip out of bed to open the bedroom windows and gulp the breeze. I remember the day in 1991 when President Mary Robinson arrived at our front door to help us celebrate the fifth anniversary of The Shanty Educational Project. She announced, ‘The air is so pure!’ I felt both happy and awestruck in her regal presence.

In her inaugural speech, Mary appealed to Mná na hÉireann, the women of Ireland, and it was like the opening of a new era. Ann Louise and I were part of this flourishing, though we were often slowed down by barriers held solidly in place: what a family was supposed to look like; how women were told to behave. In the mid-1980s times were bleak, with little or no educational opportunities for those who left school early, especially women. They worked in factories or bakeries or whatever jobs could be found to bring money into a household. Inner-city communities, characterised by an architecture of greyness, were monuments to poverty. Housing estates on the outskirts of Dublin, Tallaght being a primary one, were originally designed to remove unwanted sights from the urban middle classes, intended ghettos that became communities. At that time, only the privileged had places in third-level colleges, and ‘second chance’ education was almost non-existent. There were few women in public life, and childcare was only for the wealthy. Rural poverty was extensive, though hidden.

But we were young and full of energy for something better, imagining that Ireland could be a different place if only people had equal access to education. Our dream was to found an educational centre for those – especially women – who wanted a second chance at learning, and we finally located The Shanty as a place to do so. We wanted to form a small community of committed people and to share our home with them as a way to begin. We believed that we could help to dismantle sexism, classism and other forms of social inequality. Ours was a spiritual as well as an educational venture, and our table would be open to all – for food, drink, compassion, merriment, visioning, storytelling and decision-making. Idealism filled our bodies and spirits, and it seemed to become magnetic. More and more people wanted to join us, and there were few bad days in the beginning.

Over the next fifteen years, at least one hundred women, and a handful of men, entered our property each week to take another chance at their education. Their children were minded in the community centre in Jobstown. Women and men, inside and outside Tallaght, worked side by side with us to ensure that more and more people could access their right to education.

While often exhausted by the non-stop work (including our respective teaching positions in St Patrick’s College and Trinity College Dublin), Ann Louise and I were following our dream together. People related to us as a couple, though we were only ‘out’ to close friends. It sometimes felt like a high-wire act. We did not want to deny our relationship in the workplace but we knew that we risked negative consequences if it became public knowledge, especially from those with the most power. We carried on, though, because we had each other and a growing community of friends and colleagues. And we believed, somewhat naïvely, that the good would always win the day.

We worked with adults and young people from the Tallaght regions to plan a ‘community forum’. Maria Jordan-Kelly, from Brookfield, Tallaght West, and Ann Louise published a report entitled The People Speak. This led to a plan to build a community education learning centre – for adults and children – within Tallaght West. Friends lobbied politicians. Community leaders raised awareness, held fundraisers. We travelled to America to garner financial support. Together we managed to raise one-third of the money we needed, with no commitment yet coming from the state.

Early in June 1997 the people of the community took a vote. Their decision was final. It was communicated to all local politicians, two of whom were members of the Irish cabinet. Women, men and children would spend the evening celebrating their graduation from Shanty courses, and then leave the Jobstown community centre. They would bring tents and sleeping bags and march to the Dáil, hand in a letter of protest, march back and put up their tents. They would camp out until the government gave us the balance of the money, £600,000.

Just as the graduation ceremonies were ending, the doors of the community centre burst open. The minister for local development and one of the TDs in our constituency, Chris Flood, strode in, virtually jumped onto the stage and said he had an announcement to make. That afternoon in a special meeting, the cabinet members had agreed to subvent our project by a once-off capital grant of £600,000. It went towards building what has now become the largest independent community-based education centre in Ireland. The roof came off the community centre that night. The people had spoken and the government had heard. The tents were put away for another day.

Over the course of the next year we built An Cosán, a centre for learning, leadership and enterprise, with a large number of dedicated and generous people from the Tallaght communities and beyond. Located in the heart of Jobstown, one of Tallaght West’s four villages, An Cosán opened its doors in 1999.

So, it was calmer these days at The Shanty. Ann Louise had retired early from St Patrick’s College in Drumcondra, where she had been a professor of education for thirty-five years. We had started a consultancy together to help respond to social and economic challenges. And with close colleagues and friends, we were building a campaign for marriage equality, to support our legal case to get the Irish state to recognise our 2003 Canadian marriage.

Ann Louise starts to run her morning bath, and I descend the spiral stairs. In the kitchen our beautiful Siena is stretched out on the wooden floor, waiting for her morning rub. We brushed the long-haired Lassie dog just yesterday, and what a job that always is. But it’s worth it. She is gorgeous. Siena, named after St Catherine, is our fourth collie – succeeding Habermas, Julian of Norwich and Paulo Freire. They were all special and loved the activity of the women coming and going.

I begin to prepare breakfast, casting my eye over the empty egg-holder. I’ll get Ann Louise some fresh eggs, I think. It’s the day for it. This morning four eggs have been laid by our hens. I feel like a gleeful child as I scoop them up. While Ann Louise is the real genius as a natural chef, I at least can cook a good breakfast. We talk about the day over delicious scrambled eggs and the brown bread Ann Louise baked the day before.

She is preparing to give coaching sessions to a couple of her clients. I need to go into Dublin. We are preparing to go to the Supreme Court with our marriage equality case. We lost in the High Court, but we are appealing it. I want to meet with our solicitor, Kevin Brophy, to talk about strategy before a consultation with our barristers in a couple of weeks. At least things are moving again. I feel satisfied and hopeful. When we started preparing to take a case in early 2000, never did we anticipate that it would last so long! Just as well, or we may never have started.

Ann Louise is more philosophical about how time has lengthened our legal journey. She has been reading several Buddhist texts and has discreetly taken up a disciplined meditation practice each day. She lives in the present considerably easier than I do. Her meditation often fills The Shanty with a peaceful yet vibrant energy. While it seeps into me a little bit at times, I rarely find that kind of peace within myself. My restlessness comes from my father. As a businessman and charitable leader, he spent his life looking for ways to make a major impact, and it rarely happened for him the way he wanted it. He was a deep thinker, though, and that also influenced his efforts to improve the lives of others. Maybe I am taking up his mantle. I do feel driven to do something great. Followed by doing something else great. That’s not to say that this is my sole motivation for the way I live my life and forge a professional path, but it is always there. Right alongside my deep desire to make things right and good for others. This I feel at my core too. But the pursuit of greatness is stuck in my gut, where a feeling of never being good enough lies. Because I am female? Because I am lesbian? Probably.

*

After breakfast I dress, leaving aside the country clothes for something a little more smart yet casual. I step into Ann Louise’s red Renault van, the only transport we have – but useful for carrying animal feed and whatever is needed for the flowers in the long bed at the front of the house and the vegetables we grow in the paddock.

I drive the long distance to town and park in the city centre. I have the morning to do shopping before meeting the lawyers. The late-spring sun on Grafton Street warms my face and I welcome it. I have started to worry about the Fianna Fáil government’s enactment of civil partnership legislation in 2010 and its potential negative impact on our future court proceedings. ‘Why do the gays need marriage equality if they get all those rights in civil partnership? Why do these women need more?’ ask many in Irish society. I am worried that this legislative change could influence the Supreme Court to rule that civil partnership is enough, and that it is allowed within the constraints of the Irish constitution.

My head starts to feel heavy, as it often does when such thoughts swirl in my mind. Where did the peace of the early morning go? I walk past the street corner where newspapers used to be sold and my mobile rings.

‘Hello, Katherine. This is Mark Garrett’ (Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore’s political advisor). ‘I wonder if you would be free within the next forty-five minutes to take a phone call from the tánaiste?’

‘Of course,’ I respond with, no doubt, a stunned voice.

While I had been a member of the Labour Party for a brief period when Pat Rabbitte was its leader, I let my membership expire when his leadership came to an end. Why did his successor want to speak with me?

I start to look for a quiet place to take the call and slip into the Carmelite church on Clarendon Street. Such serenity amidst the lighted candles, each one lit for a special cause, slowly energises my spirit as I wait. I decide that I’d better head into a stairwell, though, so that I won’t disturb those at prayer. When the phone rings, I answer immediately.

‘Hello, Katherine. This is Eamon Gilmore.’

I admired Eamon’s courage to form a government at such a challenging time. We are still in the midst of the bank bailout by the International Monetary Fund and the European Union, and subject to all the conflicting austerity programmes initiated by the previous Fianna Fáil-led government.

‘I would like to recommend you to Enda Kenny as one of his appointees to the Seanad,’ says Eamon after the pleasantries. ‘As partners in government with Fine Gael, we have agreed that I may recommend a certain number of people to take up the seats of “taoiseach nominees” mandated in the Irish constitution under Article 18.’

Eamon is asking me to become an Irish senator, without going through the convoluted process of getting elected to the upper house! I am astonished. I have spent the last decade of my professional and personal life knocking on the doors of those who held powerful political positions – those on the ‘inside’. Now I’m being invited in! For a moment, I can’t find my breath. And then unexpectedly my voice says, ‘It would be a privilege, Tánaiste.’

Oh my God – what will this be like? Between my various work commitments and our legal case for marriage equality, I am kept more than busy. But this will be an opportunity to try to change things from the inside. Will it be easier? I hope so. Will I know how to do it? Not right away. But it still feels as if I’ve just won the lottery!

I start to phone Ann Louise and then this huge sadness descends. My father had passed away just two months before. I spent the month of January with him in Seattle, where I grew up and where all my family still live, to cook for him, mind him, take him to a basketball game or two. He was grieving, deeply, for my mother, his beloved wife. She died six months before he did. I spent a lot of time just with my arms around him in his favourite chair. I came home to Ireland in early February, only to return again to Seattle to lay him to rest on 17 March. We did not have any unfinished business.

But now, suddenly, I’m looking for him. Where is my father? Do you know, Dad, what has just happened? Why can’t you be here? I go back into the church and sit quietly for a few minutes. The sadness ebbs as I light candles for my parents. A soft joy visits me; a sense of well-being I have never experienced before.

Ann Louise is so thrilled when I ring her. Love, as St Paul says, is not jealous. Though we traverse a similar professional and advocacy territory, Ann Louise is never jealous of me. Her strong sense of self, she says, comes from her father. How about that? Dads and daughters. ‘Katie, that is remarkable news,’ she exclaims. ‘I am so happy for you.’ And then she says something I will never forget: ‘This job will allow you to bring together all you have learned, and all your experience, so that you will be able to make really important public contributions. You will soar.’ The Seanad would provide me with an opportunity to comment on the happenings in Ireland and our world in ways that might make a genuine difference. I wanted to develop law that would advance human rights and argue for government policies that could make our people’s lives better, especially those people whose opportunities had been restricted because of social circumstances and conditions, like those who worked with us and for themselves in An Cosán, and especially people like me whose gender or sexual identity was still considered to be second class. Critics of the Seanad say that ‘all the senators do is talk’. Well, I love public speaking. I love to craft words in order to engage the listener, to inspire action or offer meaning. I couldn’t wait to get started.

*

About a week later, the news was out about Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s nominees. Going through the gates of Leinster House as a new senator was like walking on air. Leinster House was built in the mid-eighteenth century as an exquisite town house, reflecting the wealth and status of its owner, James Fitzgerald, earl of Kildare. The staff at the gates and inside the house knew my name, were exceptionally respectful and full of congratulations. It just kept raining sunshine. Over the years they became like family, always there to assist in whatever way possible, without judgement and with an earnest desire to serve. The aura of the house was filled with power, a power to be drawn on, to use as a basis on which to think and act. It felt, at times, like being clothed in sparkling status when everyone addressed me as ‘senator’. Never could I have imagined that title on myself.

The first order of business was to meet other senators and to decide where my political allegiance lay. As a neophyte, I offered to act as a Labour senator because of Eamon Gilmore’s role in my appointment, and I was looking forward to working closely with Senator Ivana Bacik. At the time, she was acting pro bono as junior counsel in our legal case – Zappone and Gilligan v. Revenue Commissioners and Others (2006) – and was awesome at that job. She was also leader of the Labour Party in the Seanad. I initiated discussions with her on the first day. Later that afternoon I was directed to the Seanad antechamber to take a phone call. With high ceilings, a chandelier, large windows, a fireplace and some fine art, it provides a luxurious setting for senators to work or meet in before entering the chamber itself. I picked up the phone and to my surprise, for a second time, it was the tánaiste.

Eamon said, ‘Katherine, we want you to be an Independent senator. There are enough Fine Gael and Labour senators in the sixty seats in the Seanad for us to win most votes with the whips. So we want to demonstrate our commitment to a new approach to politics. With a good portion of Independent senators, we hope that this will allow the deliberations to be more robust and thoughtful. Be free!’

I will always hold admiration for both Eamon and Enda for that decision. At the time, Enda Kenny was known for his religious conservatism, carrying strong views against abortion and with little openness to marriage equality. Early on in my tenure, I remember giving him a copy of Our Lives Out Loud, the memoir Ann Louise and I wrote in 2008. Afterwards I met him in his taoiseach’s office at the end of the corridor on the second floor of Government Buildings. We sat down in sitting-room chairs between his sizeable antique desk and a gorgeous marble fireplace, and he began by quoting, from memory, several paragraphs from our book. I was dumbfounded.

Entering the Seanad chamber for the very first time during that same week bedazzled me. Used as a ballroom when owned by the duke of Leinster, its historic Georgian ceiling plasterwork and elaborate crystal chandeliers embody an extraordinary grandeur. Because visitors are not allowed on the chamber floor proper, to cross its threshold lifted my sense of responsibility then and every time afterwards, requiring perfect posture and often solemn speaking. I found my voting seat on the left of the cathaoirleach (the chair of the Seanad) in one of the last rows because I was an Independent. While you are required to sit in the designated seat to vote, you may sit anywhere else at other times, as long as it is on the correct side of the chamber. I would soon learn that this would be the easiest procedural rule to understand and follow. Otherwise, Seanad protocol was extensive and complex, and it helped to have an experienced (and friendly) senator share the intricacies of the rules from time to time. There was no rule, however, against sitting back in my big Seanad chair and gazing at the exquisite blue and white ceiling to collect my thoughts before speaking. It was my prime meditative technique, and also helped me separate the wheat from the chaff of other senators’ contributions.

While we were the chamber with less weight than the Dáil, there was always an undercurrent of an intoxicating feeling of power. How would I negotiate such a feeling? I had so much to learn. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, and I did not want to waste it. After the last Seanad vote I would return to my office, respond to emails or more likely read some research or policy documents that would help me to craft a speech for the next day. Often that meant I would get home late at night. By the time I drove through our gate, Ann Louise would have cooked and ate her dinner, watched the nine o’clock news and headed to bed with a good book. She always left me a plate of gorgeous food in the kitchen, though, putting my eggs-on-toast to shame. As much as she adored me, she was fiercely independent and self-contained. And, above all, generous. If I were really lucky, she might be still awake, and I would tell her minute details from stories of my day. It was like writing a diary entry – only better, because I had a lover’s audience. Her eyes would close then, and she would say, ‘See you in the morning, Katie.’