Same-sex couples should not be allowed to raise children, Danny Healy-Rae has argued, saying that they could not provide a “natural balance”.
The Kerry TD said that only a man and a woman should be allowed to raise a child
Danny Healy-Rae, a Kerry TD, told Hot Press magazine that he was not “anti-gay” but believed it was wrong that an adopted baby would not have a choice about being raised by a gay couple.
Mr Healy-Rae had voted against marriage equality in last year’s referendum because he was concerned about married same-sex couples who would go on to have families.
“I’m not anti-gay. What these people do is their business and I’m fine with that,” he said. “If they want to have that type of relationship, again, I’ll say: that’s their business.
“They do what they want to do and I wish them well with that. And let them have the friends that they have. But what I thought was wrong with that was the little baby had no choice.”
He added that “time will tell”, as their children grew up, whether same-sex people could be appropriate parents, but he believed that children should be raised by heterosexual couples.
“I don’t believe the natural balance is right to have two men or two women caring for a baby. It’s a more natural balance to have a man and a woman,” he said.
Mr Healy-Rae said he was against abortion in all circumstances and did not believe that the Eighth Amendment needed to be repealed. He said that he believed that “there are ways” of dealing with unplanned pregnancies within the existing legislation.
Mr Healy-Rae caused controversy this year when he claimed that global warming could not be caused by man because God controlled the weather.
He said that Noah’s Ark was a factual historical event and that scientific evidence that supported climate change was financially motivated.
“The first thing I have to say to you, I never read all the Bible. But I found the Bible to be correct in many instances,” he said. “The idea that man is responsible or in charge of the weather — that’s nonsense.
“I feel that maybe the people who are for that view are getting a lot of finance towards what they’re probing, that’s why they’re so vehement about it.”
A row broke out this month over anonymous allegations of a gay subculture among priests training at St Patrick’s College in Maynooth. Mr Healy-Rae said he had found the story very upsetting and believed that such controversies could be avoided if priests were allowed to get married. He did not clarify whether he meant same-sex marriages or heterosexual ones.
In an extensive interview, he spoke about his relationship with Jackie Healy-Rae, his father, a former TD who died in 2014. He said he still missed his father and often went to phone him before remembering that he had died.
He denied that he and his brother Michael, another TD, had gone to the funerals of people they did not know to canvass support. “I’ve been going to funerals before I ever went into politics,” he said.
John Halligan, junior minister for training and skills and an independent TD for Waterford, told the magazine last month that prostitution should be legalised and regulated. Asked the same question, Mr Healy-Rae said that sex work was “something down in Waterford — but not [in Kerry].”
He also said he believed he had the right to “immobilise” intruders to his house by shooting them in the legs.