Fighting for Equality or drowning in bureaucracy?

BY UNA GILLESPIE

Despite the fact that equality and human rights were keystones of the Good Friday Agreement, with ensuing legislation and the establishment of both the Equality and Human Rights Commissions, there have been ongoing serious attempts to undermine these aspects of the Agreement both in principle and in application. Equality is still anathema to not only unionists but to the British government and a wide range of civil servants and key decision makers. How often have we heard unionists and their cohorts state that equality and human rights are part of a pandering to nationalists and therefore should be opposed by unionists? How often has this offensive rhetoric been challenged by the British and Dublin governments?

The most consistent aspect in this debate, whether it is about equality or human rights, is that despite fine words and commitments from the British government, they never learn the lessons of the past. In this aspect, they are totally consistent. The same mistakes that have been made with the Human Rights Commission have been made with the Equality Commission, including:

o Appointments made by the NIO;

o People appointed to the Commission do not necessarily have to have any experience in equality issues;

o The appointment of politically partisan commissioners: Chris McGimpsey of the UUP to the Human Rights Commission and Daphne Trimble to the Equality Commission;

o Political interference from the NIO and other state bodies as to how the Commissions carry out their work;

o Inadequate resources to enable the Commissions to carry out their roles effectively;

o Internal problems within the Commissions themselves that have a negative impact on the job they are required to do.

The continuing issue of religious and political discrimination is still one of the most controversial in the north of Ireland, eliciting a range of responses all with one target in mind: to deflect the agenda away from ensuring equality for nationalists and Catholics and to develop the new notion of unionist victimhood. This agenda has been pursued down a number of avenues. Five years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, we see a number of fundamental issues that are operating as barriers to the implementation of the equality agenda:

o There is no agreed political position that discrimination still exists and has to be a governmental response which is long term, strategic and addresses the fundamental issue;

o The anti discrimination legislation that has been in place for over thirty years has failed to redress the discrimination against nationalists in this state;

o There has been a failure to establish an Equality department with a Minister;

o Targeting Social Need (TSN) as a policy will not in itself deliver on equality of outcome;

o The effectiveness and powers of the Equality Commission are dubious and are not designed to be equal to the task at hand.

Does discrimination exist?

There is no agreed political position that religious and political discrimination actually exists, despite what the Good Friday Agreement might say. The Ulster Unionist Party line is that while individual cases of religious discrimination may have existed in the past, this is no longer the case and that, in a nutshell, if nationalists would only stop complaining about discrimination, then their Protestant neighbours would be able to live 'at ease' with them.

Sinn Féin's Dara O'Hagan summed up the current political situation regarding equality when she stated: "Since earliest times, the Fair Employment debate has been characterised by an inability and unwillingness on the part of unionist commentators, in both the political and academic spheres, to acknowledge that systematic and structural discrimination against Catholics and nationalists in the north of Ireland occurred. Thus, a whole body of literature and polemic, some of it quite clearly racist and sectarian in character, has been written which in essence blames the victim for their own situation.

"Thus, Catholic unemployment and social and economic disadvantage could be explained by Catholics having larger families, preferring to remain on state welfare, having an unsuitable education system, something in the Catholic psyche which mitigated against having a 'Protestant work ethic', not to mention that they were fifth columnists working to destroy the northern state so why give them jobs anyway."

The new mantra is that government policy has no role to play in addressing the existing discrimination between Catholics and Protestants in the north of Ireland. This is the same party that demanded British government intervention to the tune of over £1bn to try to save the shipyards from closure. There was no crying from that quarter then about the waste of public money. It is noted that unionists are not, therefore, against state intervention and positive discrimination per se, but they are only opposed to it when it means positively and actively tackling Catholic and nationalist disadvantage.

The British government abdicates any responsibility for the institutionalised discrimination upon which this state was built and maintained for decades. This has led to the 'community relations' approach to the conflict i.e. that the conflict was about two warring communities that could not live together and each being equally as bad as the other. It ignores the sectarian foundations of this state and the institutionalised sectarianism which is alive and well in all levels of government today.

Many government departments and public bodies now adopt an approach of trying to find a 'balance' that will not upset anyone, i.e. if resources are to be targeted at nationalist areas then the equivalent has to go into Protestant areas. This is despite the fact that deprivation/poverty is a highly sectarianised map with almost 80% of the top 50 most deprived wards in this state being Catholic. This did not happen by accident but the geography of deprivation and poverty will remain the same unless interventions are targeted where the need is greatest. Finding balance simply maintains the status quo.

Five years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, the issue of religious discrimination is being pushed off the agenda as reflected in the emphasis on community relations in the latest Joint Declaration. While government departments and the Ulster Unionist Party would have people believe that the issue is resolved, the evidence states otherwise.

The results of the 2001 Census of population shows that the unemployment rate for Catholic males is 1.8 times higher than that of their Protestant counterparts. The Labour Force Survey Religion report 2001 states that the unemployment differential for men is 2.1. This is exactly the same as it was 20 years ago!

Catholics in this state account for a disproportionate share of total unemployment, with the Labour Forces Survey Religion report 2001 stating that Catholic men account for 63% of total male unemployment, a percentage significantly higher than those recorded for most of the 1990s. Catholics continue to be underrepresented in higher occupational grades and have a disproportionately low employment share in the private sector. For instance, in 2001 Catholics accounted for 44% of the economically active but only 41% of employment in the private sector.

The most socially disadvantaged areas in the north of Ireland, such as West Belfast and areas west of the Bann, continue to be those where there is a high percentage of Catholics and nationalists. Poverty continues to be highly related to religion.

Failure of anti-discrimination legislation

Going back as far as 1973, the NI Constitution Act stated that discrimination was unlawful by a public body. This was replaced by the Fair Employment Act 1976, which not only stated that it aimed to eliminate discrimination but also to promote equality of opportunity. By 1987, however, research carried out by the Policy Studies Institute, for example, showed that the vast majority of employers in the north felt that the Fair Employment Act 1976 had little if any impact on their behaviour.

Following the publication of a report by the Standing Advisory Commission on Human Rights in October 1987, the debate shifted from people having to prove intentional acts of discrimination by employers to the need to reduce/eliminate unjustified structural inequalities in the marketplace, whether they were caused by discrimination or not.

Further pressure by the MacBride Principles Campaign in the US led to the implementation of the Fair Employment Act of 1989. This brought new aspects into play in terms of ensuring fair employment practices were implemented by employers: monitoring of workforces, the introduction of penalties and sanctions and the use of affirmative action, goals and timetables to redress the issue of underrepresentation. In essence, it now became a criminal offence for employers not to submit their monitoring returns to the Fair Employment Commission. Despite this, no employer was ever brought to court for being in breach of this aspect of the legislation.

Under continued pressure regarding continuing inequalities in the state the British government then introduced the PAFT Guidelines (Policy Appraisal and Fair Treatment). This had no legislative weight and was only guidelines for employers, government departments and public bodies. It relied on political goodwill and voluntary compliance and history has shown that both were very noticeably lacking. The Standing Advisory Commission, recognising this in its 1997 report, recommended that the PAFT guidelines should be given a statutory footing. This was rejected by the British government, with the publication in March 1998 of the white paper 'Partnership for Equality'.

However, the signing of the Good Friday Agreement saw this recommendation come into action, with the introduction of Section 75 of the NI Act, which brought the equality provisions of the Good Friday Agreement into force.

Section 75 and the proposal for the preparation of a Bill of Rights for the north of Ireland have since formed the focus for many groups and organisations working on the issues of equality and human rights. If anybody thought that the Good Friday Agreement provisions meant a new impetus and political goodwill to ensure full human rights and equality for all citizens, then in this area, like many others, the jury is still out.