CALL it naivete, call it blinkered optimism, but I'd sort of thought we'd move passed the bad old days when gay people could be hunted for sport in Dublin city centre.

It seemed to me that things had relaxed to the point where two men or women could actually do normal things, like hold hands on the street, without expecting to spend the following night in a coma.

New gay bars seem to open every other month and, in a measure of how far we've come, just 13 years after homosexuality was decriminalised, gay marriage is now a legislative inevitability.

Word had also spread that things have improved: in a measure of how we are seen by foreigners the well-respected Spartacus International Gay Travel Guide last year amended its entry on Ireland to read: "Homophobia is now uncommon throughout Ireland, unlike in Northern Ireland, where cases of homophobic attacks have reached a crisis level."

Not according to the Johnny survey on homophobic hate-crime that was published this week. Johnny is a gay-rights charity and "peer action group" based in Dublin.

And according to its findings, Belfast, and indeed virtually everywhere else in the non-Arab world, is a rainbow-striped paradise compared to Dublin.

It conducted a survey of gay people in the capital and found that nearly half the gay population of Ireland has been a victim of a "hate-crime". (Hate crimes are not defined under Irish law, but if a garda or victim say that an attack is homophobic, this may be a factor in the prosecution case.)

It also reports that during a four-month period last year, 120 people were attacked for being gay.

That's a violent attack on gay people every single day in Dublin.

It's a statistic which dwarves the police figures for all of Northern Ireland, and is also much higher than the official figure for a comparable city, like, say, Liverpool.

Even if only those respondents in the Johnny survey who reported the attacks to gardai are counted, the figure would still be much higher in Dublin than all of the notoriously homophobic six counties put together.

Statistics will always trump anecdotal evidence, but for someone who regularly goes out to the areas mentioned in the survey, the picture that Johnny (which does a lot of very worthwhile work for gay people in Ireland) paints, somehow doesn't add up.

Yes, there are some anti-gay attacks in Dublin, but surely not in these Baghdad-esque volumes. In all my time in and around gay venues in Dublin, I have never seen one violent attack which could have been described as a "hate-crime".

Punches have been thrown (one or two, it has to be said, in my direction), but the motivation was never homophobic (at least not clearly so - who's to say what a drunken yob's motivation really is?).

Not every gay person is going to feel comfortable showing affection in public, but I know many who have, and who have never had a problem.

Some of Johnny's methodology also seemed flawed: the survey does not ask how or why people were attacked, allowing each person to make their own subjective judgment as to their attacker's motivation. Some people were questioned in bars and clubs, which presumably means they had drink taken, and were in groups when they answered the survey.

It also claims to show that all reluctance to report a homophobic attack stems from suspicions that the gardai will not do their job. But there are many other reasons that might be factors.

When gay people do report an attack, they will often not acknowledge that there was a homophobic element, for fear that this will mean that their sexuality will be eventually mentioned in court, not because they mistrust the gardai.

Finbarr Murphy, a sergeant in Pearse Street station, who acted as the unofficial gay liaison officer for some time, told me: "During the period which Johnny took [for their study], there was a spate of attacks on gay people. This might explain why their figures seem so high."

He also told me: "We acknowledge that there is under-reporting of homophobic crime, but there have been many improvements in the way the gardai deal with the gay community, for example we have established gay and lesbian liaison officers who were trained by members of the gay community."

He also added that the areas outside gay clubs and pubs in Dublin are not considered black spots, "otherwise you would not have so many gay people, from at home and abroad, happily frequenting these places".

And he's right: people do not hurry warily into bars like Dragon; they laugh and joke and smoke outside.

Johnny's survey also fails to put homophobic violence, and the attitude of gay people to the gardai, in the context of general street violence and policing in Dublin, instead focussing on the bad experiences of one minority.

In the cauldron-like atmosphere of the city centre on a Saturday night, there are many, many violent attacks. The majority of the victims of these attacks are straight men. And most, like the respondents in the Johnny survey, do not think it is worth their while reporting these incidents to the gardai.

This is not to denigrate the suffering of those gay people who have been attacked, just to point out that Saturday night thugs don't discriminate, and victimhood is not as connected to sexuality as Johnny claim.

Ireland still has many gay rights issues, which urgently need to be addressed (the most pressing of which, to my mind, is the introduction of proper anti-homophobia education for children and teachers in schools), but the level of homophobic attacks on the city streets is not our worst problem.

It might not be much consolation to those who have to spend Saturday night in casualty but, in Dublin at least, violence is an equal-opportunities problem.

www.johnny.ie

www.garda.ie/angarda

/gay.html gives a list of Garda gay liaison officers who can be spoken to in confidence

- Donal Lynch