Friends of Eon: The 1970s group that paved the way for transgender equality in Ireland

People came from far and wide for gatherings in the Turk’s Head in Dublin, and many would change into something more fitting when they arrived

Sun Nov 15 2026 - 06:00 • 5 MIN READ

Some time in 1978, in the Turk’s Head pub on Parliament Street in Dublin, the Friends of Eon held their first meeting. A group for trans women as well as, at that time, people who identified as transvestites, it was established by Claire Farrell and another woman known only as Lola. It was the first group of its kind in Ireland and it continued into the late 1980s.

Farrell, who died recently, later went on to become a board member at Teni (Transgender Equality Network Ireland), which was founded in 2006, and she was very involved in the campaign that led to the Gender Recognition Act in 2015. “[Friends of Eon] are kind of a grandparent organisation to Teni in many ways,” says Daire Dempsey, executive director of Teni. “There’s a very clear through line, not only in the work but also in the people.”

Dempsey is sitting in a cafe near the Turk’s Head on Parliament Street. They’re wearing a Friends of Eon T-shirt commissioned by Teni and designed by the artist Brian Teeling based on the group’s membership cards.

Teni is celebrating the legacy of Friends of Eon as part of Trans Awareness Week (which runs from November 13th to 19th). They don’t have contact with many former members but they and the Trans Archive are interested in hearing from anyone who might have once been involved (they can be contacted at friendsofeon@teni.ie). They promise confidentiality, keeping in mind how difficult it was to be out [as a trans person] in earlier decades.

“They picked the Turk’s Head because there was a lesbian night there,” says Dempsey. “They saw that that night was advertised and they intuited from that that the owner would be open to having their group meeting there too. We’re all following in each other’s footprint and, again, the lesbians are leading the way, putting in the hard graft for us.”

‘The risks to being a really public trans person right now are so high, but it’s also more important than ever to be out there as trans people and by doing that, to challenge the misinformation that’s out there around us’

—  Daire Dempsey, Transgender Equality Network Ireland

Where did the name come from? “The name is from Charlotte d’Éon de Beaumont, who was an 18^th-century French spy sent into Russia in disguise as a woman and who returned and continued to live as a woman for the rest of their life.”

What did Farrell and her friends want from the group at the time? “It was a social club, a place where people could come and be themselves,” says Dempsey. “And Claire said that people came from all over Ireland for it… A lot of people would get changed when they finally got there. This was the one place where you could be yourself… Before that, the women who founded it could only ever be themselves by going to London for the weekend. That in many ways is a thing of the past… I can walk around today as myself in a Friends of Eon T-shirt because of the work that they did for me.”

It’s important, says Dempsey, to remember not just the activist struggle but also queer joy. “We need space to come together around the issues, but also just to have fun and to have friends and be able to go out dancing and be able to express yourself… I think that sometimes that’s the piece that we lose when we talk about this. Getting to be who you are, and getting to do that with other people who are in the same community as you…. There’s so much power in just getting people together.”

Many of the members became focused on activism. Claire Farrell was subsequently very involved in Teni and the campaign for gender recognition. “She had a beautiful quote at the time [where] she described herself as being in the departure lounge of life and that she wanted to leave as the woman that she was.”

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Trans people have felt particularly under fire in recent years. Targeted by right-wing politicians and scaremongering misinformation and hate online, many trans people feel more unsafe in public than they did five years ago. Dempsey believes this has been a successful attempt by the right to misdirect people’s anger about quality-of-life issues onto a vulnerable minority they know little about. “We are only 1 per cent of the population,” they say. “Most people don’t know anyone who is trans. The risks to being a really public trans person right now are so high, but it’s also more important than ever to be out there as trans people and by doing that, to challenge the misinformation that’s out there around us.”

Teni’s current focus is advocating for trans healthcare – about 2,500 trans adults are currently on a waiting list for the country’s only public gender clinic. The organisation also counters misinformation about trans people, painting them - much like gay people were depicted in the 1980s – as a predatory threat. And it is campaigning for the extension of the Gender Recognition Act to include non-binary people and people from Northern Ireland (at the moment a loophole in the law leaves the latter unable to apply for a gender recognition certificate).

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But amid the need for activism, says Dempsey, it’s important to note the progress the community has made and the work of pioneers such as Friends of Eon who came before. “We see people come into community spaces and community work when they need it, and then if someone moves through their transition, they might go do all of the other things that life has to offer,” they say. “It means that we don’t always have sight of what it means long-term in someone’s life to be trans. It keeps us in perhaps an over-exaggerated sense of the urgency of the current crisis.”

When Friends of Eon started, it was the only group available for trans people in Ireland. “People had to come from everywhere to attend it,” says Dempsey. “Now there are support groups and social groups that meet in so many towns and counties around Ireland. There are so many more people who are out now as trans, and there are so many more opportunities to engage in community… Overall, since the 1970s, things have improved such that more people are able to come out, more people are able to be themselves, and they can be themselves where they are and where they’re from. It doesn’t have to be a thing that you can only be trans in Dublin on the weekends.”

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