In 2015, University of Limerick student Tomás Heneghan took a High Court case against the state for the lifelong ban on gay men in Ireland donating blood in place since the 1980s. “There is no evidence that this has had an effect on transfusion-transmission rates of HIV in Italy,” adds Larkin. Instead, an individual risk assessment is carried out which asks questions unrelated to sexual orientation. Italy currently has no deferral period for men who have sex with men. In the UK, anyone who has had anal sex with a new partner or multiple partners in the last three months – regardless of their gender or their partner’s gender – must wait three months before donating blood.
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But, he argues that people engaging in risky sexual behaviour, be they heterosexual or homosexual, have an even higher rate of HIV. He acknowledges that there is a higher rate of HIV amongst the male homosexual population than most other populations. “It’s hard not to ascribe this to homophobia,” says Larkin, who is studying for a PhD in health economics at the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland. Health researcher James Larkin says it is not acceptable to have a blood donation policy in Ireland that still unnecessarily discriminates against gay men, albeit to a lesser extent. Northern Ireland made this change in 2020.
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The UK blood donation rules for men who have sex with men were changed from 12 months to a three-month deferral in 2017. This current one-year deferral was introduced in 2016 and replaced a lifelong ban on men who have sex with men from donating blood. In Ireland, a man who has had oral or anal sex with another man in the past 12 months is banned from donating blood, even if he uses a condom. Blood donated in the UK, which includes blood donated by gay or bisexual men if they have had the same partner for three months or more, is deemed safe to import into Ireland. In fact, some would argue that importing the blood made the Irish rules – whereby gay men are only allowed to donate blood if they have been sexually inactive for a year or more – seem absurd. The importation of blood from the UK by the Irish Blood Transfusion Service (IBTS) this summer drew attention to the rules that forbid sexually active gay men from donating blood in Ireland, compared to more nuanced criteria for gay blood donors in the UK and many other countries.