AN OPERA featuring former DUP MP Iris Robinson’s views on homosexuality is to be staged in Belfast.
Abomination, A DUP Opera will include Mrs Robinson’s comments from a radio interview in which she said homosexuality was “an abomination”.
Composed by Conor Mitchell, it will open the 2019 Outburst Queer Arts Festival at the Lyric Theatre on November 8.
The production will fuse “opera performance with drag, cabaret and political satire”.
Mrs Robinson, the wife of ex-First Minister Peter Robinson, sparked outcry over remarks including that homosexuality made her feel "sick and nauseous" and that gay people could be "cured".
At a committee session on the management of sex offenders, the former Strangford MP and MLA also said: "There can be no viler act, apart from homosexuality and sodomy, than sexually abusing innocent children."
In December 2009 she quit politics, saying that she was suffering from a mental illness.
In January 2010 it emerged she had been having an affair with 19-year-old Kirk McCambley – and that she had obtained £50,000 from two property developers to help him secure a tender for a south Belfast café.
A Stormont report released almost five years later found that Mrs Robinson committed a "serious breach" of the assembly's code of conduct.
