Tarlach Mac Niallais (1963 - 2020) was an LGBTQ+ activist and disability rights advocate for over three decades. Born in Belfast, Ireland, he began campaigning on LGBTQ+ and Republican prisoners’ rights issues in the 1980s, and protested Ian Paisley’s anti-gay Free Presbyterian Church and the Democratic Unionist Party.
He moved to NYC in the mid-1980s and became involved with the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization “Lavender and Green”, where he became a formation manager, and was active in the protracted struggle by LGBTQ groups to be fully included in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade up Fifth Avenue in the 1990s until 2016, when the Lavender and Green Alliance and other Irish LGBTQ groups could finally march in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. He died of complications from the COVID-19 virus on April 1, 2020.
