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Issue 42, 2017

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Putting the focus on equality issues

VIEW, Issue 42, 2017

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, like many other people, have been depressed by recent developments in the United States following the election of Donald Trump as US President.

But the outrage and protests which followed his temporary ban on refugees and people from several, mainly Muslim countries, has given me renewed hope that equality and justice is not so easily set aside.

Closer to home we have witnessed the UK government saying it cannot accept any more child refugees, who are fleeing war in Syria and other countries, because, By Brian Pelan Co-founder,VIEWdigital it says, it cannot cope with their needs.

The decision means that children will Email: brianpelan@viewdigital.org be left in refugee camps instead of being moved to safety in the UK. exhaustive examination of all equality This issue of VIEW, set against such issues. Rather, it is an attempted snapshot worrying international developments, of where we are now and the considerable is concerned with the issue of challenges that lie ahead as we wait to see equality and how far has it progressed in how the ramifications of the Brexit vote Northern Ireland.

We are delighted to have received the are played out.

Two equality stories in this issue really support of the Equality Commission caught my attention. for Northern Ireland in the production of The story of the young Catholic this issue – but, of course, the views expressed by the contributors are their own. mother who is waiting to be rehoused and the fact that Catholics still top the The magazine can never be an

Northern Ireland Housing Executive waiting list, several decades after the launch of the Civil Rights movement, must be of huge concern to all those who believe in equality.

And Mark Langhammer’s article on the lack of education opportunities for working class communities, including Protestant working class boys, means that all those who support academic selection and grammar schools have to ask themselves why is it that so many children are left behind and facing an uncertain future of low-paid jobs and rapidly diminishing welfare support.

The existence of laws around equality is a welcome and necessary thing. It provides a vital avenue for people who feel they have been discriminated against because of their colour, creed or sexuality.

I want to pay a special mention to all those who were asked to contribute towards our equality issue.

I also hope that as you read through the magazine you are stimulated, provoked and challenged by the ideas and opinions on offer.

And please feel free to share your thoughts with me.

Regulated by IMPRESS, the independent monitor for the press.

Contact IMPRESS at www.impress.press

Editorial VIEW, Issue 42, 2017

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was fighting for our love, for what we were to each other.

The searing simplicity of Denise Brewster’s words on BBC Radio Ulster’s Evening Extra programme brought a lump to my throat. And I, like many of you, cheered the Coleraine woman’s victory after a long legal battle to receive payments from her late partner’s pension.

Denise lost her fiancé, Translink employee Lenny McMullan, on Boxing Day 2009. She was denied payments from his pension scheme because Lenny, with whom she’d shared a home for 10 years, had not filled in a nomination form.

Married couples, and those in civil partnerships, are automatically entitled to the payments.

The resulting legal challenge took seven years to conclude at the Supreme Court, where the refusal to pay out was deemed unlawful.

The landmark judgment has delivered justice and financial security to Denise, as well as a significant extension of the rights of unmarried cohabitees across the UK. And it’s an important victory for equality. As former pensions minister Steve Webb said: "It is unacceptable for cohabiting couples to be treated as second class citizens. We need pension scheme rules which reflect the world we live in today."

But the world of the workplace remains steeped in inequality, fuelled by post-recession employment practices which employers like to call “flexible”. I call them unfair.

Look around your workplace. It’s likely that some female colleagues are being paid less – considerably less – than male workers doing the same job.

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VIEW, an independent social affairs magazine in Northern Ireland

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By guest editor, journalist Yvette Shapiro

The employment market, as the song says, takes every kind of people. But we’ve all got rights. And we’re all entitled to equality

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And whether it’s the public, private or voluntary sector, there’ll be a hotch-potch of employment status and security: full and part-time staff (the gold standard); contract workers; casual employees; zerohours contractors; freelancers; agency workers and interns (paid and unpaid).

That obviously ill woman who never takes a day off? She’s got no sick pay rights, so she can’t afford not to turn up. That man who never challenges his supervisor’s bullying? He’s on a zero-hours contract and can’t risk losing the work.

Since choosing to take redundancy from an iron-clad, secure public sector job some years ago, I’ve found myself on various rungs of this employment ladder, very few of them secure, and some downright precarious.

Take it from me: standing up, speaking up and asking for respect and equality can, in some cases, mean that you’re signing your own death warrant in employment terms.

But those who take a stand often find the law on their side. Shortly after Denise Brewster’s victory, the Court of Appeal backed Gary Smith, a self-employed London plumber who claimed he was entitled to basic employee rights, like paid holidays, because he’d worked solely for one company for six years.

It’s one of several legal cases – including those involving Uber and Deliveroo – which have turned the spotlight on the so-called “gig economy” in which at least five million of us are now working in some capacity.

The employment market, as the song says, takes every kind of people. But we’ve all got rights. And we’re all entitled to equality.

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the BIG interview V

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In a wide-ranging discussion VIEW editor Brian Pelan talks to Professor Eileen Evason, left, about poverty and welfare reform in Northern Ireland and the ongoing struggle to achieve equality and tackle inequality

IEW: With regards to poverty, how far have we progressed in terms of equality for people in Northern Ireland who are suffering from the effects of it?

A: We have to distinguish between poverty and equality.You could have a society that has some inequality but doesn’t have any or very little poverty. And then you could have different kinds of societies where poverty is inevitable. Over the last 30 years the UK has moved to a neo-liberal model and that means high levels of inequality and growing poverty. Whilst pensioners are less likely to be in poverty now, we have had a growth in low pay and insecure employment. A major problem in Northern Ireland is families in working poverty. Alongside that we have the disability issue. That is not surprising as we have had 30 years of poverty alongside conflict.You then get a disproportionate concentration of people with ill health. Just as we were starting to move to a better place in the UK the economic crash happened in 2008 and that moved us back again. Another problem over the last 30 years is the way in which benefits and services have been cut.

Austerity has come back with a vengeance.

Q: A recent study from Imperial College London and published in the medical journal The Lancet found that poverty and poor education are linked to ill health and early death. Will the welfare reform measures ease or exacerbate the situation in Northern Ireland in terms of equality and inequality.

A: What they will do is provide some help – a significant amount of help. The 2011 Welfare Reform Act was brought in for

My first thought was to get the plane out of here. But the fact of the matter was that something had to be done and I decided to do it Great Britain but didn’t apply here initially. We then had a very long debate here, which was followed by a very long stalemate. I was then asked to produce a report on how we would mitigate the effects of the Welfare Reform Act in November 2015. I produced the report in about six or seven weeks and we now have a programme in place. We now have help to assist people from the effects of welfare reform, for example, the bedroom tax won’t apply here, The welfare mitigation package is a four-year programme and will be reviewed in three years’ time. We don’t know what will happen after that. The cuts have come in but we have had help. The effects of welfare reform are nothing like we have seen in Great Britain.

Q: Do you accept the criticism from Green Party leader

Steven Agnew who said he feared people had been “conned” by measures designed to helped those most affected by welfare cuts and that the welfare mitigation package appeared to be “the renaming of an already existing budget”.

A: The Discretionary Support Scheme has now replaced what we use to call the Social Fund, but the Social Fund was a minute fragment of the benefits system. I don't like and I am totally opposed to what the Conservative government has done over the last 10 years. However, it was becoming very clear by late 2015 that we had two options. Either we got welfare reform from England – tooth, nail and claw, or we got welfare reform with mitigation and alleviation. The sensible thing was to choose the second option. What would Steven Agnew have done?

Q: What happens after 2020 in terms of welfare mitigation?

A: There has to be a review. This is a time-limited package. It is up to community groups, voluntary organisations and women’s groups to follow what happens and decide which bits that work and which bits they are going to campaign to keep. I particularly didn’t want to do the report.

My first thought was to get the plane out of here. But the fact of the matter was that something had to be done and I decided to do it.

Q: There have been some concerns expressed from those who work in front line advice services that the Welfare Reform Advice Services Consortium (made up of Citizens Advice, Advice NI and the Law Centre NI)) won’t be able to deal with the scale of numbers from people

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Professor Eileen Evason at home in her study in Belfast

who need help with benefit decisions. What do you think?

A: It only started its work last November so I am surprised by those concerns. The criticisms may well be correct but we need to give it some time. My work on welfare mitigation had to be very fast to get agreement between the political parties.

The process was very rushed and I would have preferred if we didn’t have to make the cuts in the first place. I would also have preferred if I’d had six months to complete my report.

Q: What about those critics who would say that you have a contradictory position on welfare reform in that you say you were opposed to it, but by delivering your report, you helped to deliver it.

A: The issue was would we get welfare reform without the mitigation. I was very concerned that we would end up saying to welfare claimants that we had a chance to get some help but we chucked it away.

Q: What are your views on the idea of a universal basic income being introduced in Northern Ireland (whereby all citizens or residents of a country regularly receive an unconditional sum of money, either from a government or some other public institution, in addition to any income received from elsewhere) to help alleviate poverty and address issues of equality and inequality.

A: We have to think very carefully about how we do social security and living in a society where so many people just can't

One of the things that always bothered me about the equality agenda is that it never touched the real thing – which is class get work. The UK as a whole has a much more niggardly, mean attitude towards people in need. The philosophy is that nobody should get tuppence unless they can prove that they have a dire need for that tuppence. The idea of a universal basic income is simply counter to the attitude we have.

Q: New figures in the Northern Ireland Poverty Bulletin in 2016 have revealed that 25 percent of children were living in poverty in the year 2014/15. This is an increase compared to 23 per cent on the previous year. Are they being denied their equality rights?

A: It is a very serious situation to have a society where a quarter-of-a-million children are living in poverty. That is a consequence of inequality in income.

This is also a consequence of a government making cut after cut.

Q: Does the film I, Daniel Blake (directed by Ken Loach), which looks at the effects on a man struggling with changes in welfare benefits, have a specific message for Northern Ireland.

A: The message is that we must maintain the advice and support services we have.

We must also retain that structure after 2020. We also need to address equality in terms of employment and wages.

Q: What are your views on the effects of a hard Brexit being implemented in terms of the equality situation.

A: If we get a hard Brexit we will really be in trouble, especially in Northern Ireland.

All bets will be off then. It’s like a perfect storm. I don't know where we'll be then in terms of welfare reform. I'm appalled by it. I haven't felt so depressed by what’s happening around it in a long time.

Q: Where are we now in terms of implementing equality in Northern Ireland?

A: We know there has been progress in terms of employment. In terms of managing class and religious divisions, we have made much less progress. One of the things that always bothered me about the equality agenda is that it has never touched the real thing – which is class.

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EQUALITY COMMISSION VIEW, Issue 42, 2017

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We can each decide that we will treat everyone in our society with respect and decency

Michael Wardlow, Chief Commissioner of the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland, says that in any discussion about our shared future here, in this small place we choose to call home, the words we use, particularly when we engage with our perceived “other”, are important

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leanor Roosevelt once said: “If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavour.”

It seems clear that life is just as unpredictable today as it was when those words were spoken. Global uncertainty continues to be the backdrop against which we live our lives, now in increasingly diverse communities – places where we are consistently presented with a plurality of views on many subjects which can influence how we live alongside those who are different from us.

In such uncertain times opinions – particularly when strongly held and passionately expressed – are too often substituted for and, more worryingly, accepted as fact. Passion can be valuable and important in any debate, but it is not in itself an indicator that the opinion put forward has been well researched or that is well founded. We need to be sure we can recognise and distinguish between opinion and fact when we consider how we might move ahead together over the coming months.

In any discussion about our shared future here, in this small place we choose to call home, the words we use, particularly when we engage with our perceived “other”, are important. Humpty Dumpty once said a word ‘means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less’, and in keenly contested discussions words are rarely received as neutral by that “other”.

Words spoken cannot be unspoken and words heard cannot be unheard. We

may regret saying something but, even when we admit our failings to one another, such encounters can leave a legacy and influence how we relate to one another in the future. All this is part of the complexity of human nature and reflects the diversity of our backgrounds and life experiences.

Such experiences can lead people to fear difference and be suspicious of the increasing diversity of our neighbours, particularly when they reflect another culture, religion or orientation. People often describe prejudice as inherited, but we are not born with prejudice – it has to be learned. And, if it is learned, it can be unlearned. We can learn better.

Of course, it is more difficult to recognise and challenge our own personal prejudices than to identify and draw attention to the same prejudices in others.

When pressed, we can often justify them from our community narrative, our own past experiences recalling how “we” were treated by “them”. How “others” treated us, however, is never an acceptable reason to justify applying a similar treatment to “them”.

There is a considerable body of evidence to confirm that diversity – whether on boards, in employment, within our social circles or amongst our friends – benefits all that come within that group. In purely business terms it is clear that increasing diversity often brings rewards – financially, socially, in product reach, in company experience and in developing new ideas and markets. In a social context, research also indicates that being alongside

someone from a different background in a safe and supportive environment tests and can modify our received stereotypes about that person. In short, diversity is not something to fear, but something of value to promote.

In attempting to sustain such a positive view of diversity, it is vital that we recognise the significance of promoting equality of opportunity, particularly amongst those most on the margins. This is not done simply by acknowledging and meeting the legal requirements under anti-discrimination law but by recognising that promoting and facilitating diversity is a good thing to do. So this is a task for all of society, not just for the Equality Commission.

Over the past forty years our society has developed laws which protect people from discriminatory treatment. That was the result of hard work and perseverance by many campaigners and an important signal from the legislature of what sort of society we want. Changing discriminatory attitudes, though, poses an even greater challenge – and needs a continuing focus by people throughout our community.

Prejudices persist but we do not have to let our engagement with others be defined by them. We can each take a decision not to be part of an old, out-ofdate dynamic which views difference with suspicion and hostility. We can each decide that we will treat everyone in our society with respect and decency – and make our own personal contribution to the development of a truly shared society .

COMMENT

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Uncertainity over Brexit vote

Professor Dagmar Schiek from the School of Law at Queen’s University examines the possible implications for anti-discrimination law in Northern ireland following the vote to leave the EU

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hat does the UK’s withdrawal from the EU mean for anti-discrimination law in Northern Ireland?

The short answer to the question is: “All that is certain is uncertainty, but there is a risk that efficiency and traction of antidiscrimination law, and possibly also some substance, will be lost.”

Anti-discrimination law in Northern Ireland has different sources, and EU law is only one of them.

For Northern Ireland specifically, the 1998 Belfast Agreement and its successors aim to erase factual inequalities between the “two main communities” in Northern Ireland. Equality legislation for Northern Ireland goes further: under section 75 of the Northern Ireland Act 1998, public authorities are to have due regard to promote equality of opportunity between persons of different religious belief, political opinion, racial group, age, marital status or sexual orientation, between men and women, persons with disability and without and persons with dependants and without.

Combating discrimination and ensuring equality in politics and society has been an important element of the European Union’s law and politics.

The EU has banned discrimination on grounds of nationality as well as pay discrimination on grounds of sex from 1957, has legislated to ensure that these aims are achieved in the employment field from 1968 for nationality and from 1974 for sex discrimination in the employment field, expanding the legislation to combating discrimination on grounds of racial and ethnic origin, religion and belief, sexual orientation, age and disability, as well as sex beyond the employment field from 1999.

The result is a complex web of EU regulations and directives, banning discrimination on all the aforementioned grounds in employment, on grounds of sex and ethnic and racial origin, also in social security and access to goods and services, and only on grounds of racial and ethnic origin also in health care and education.

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Alternatively, there is still the option that specific solutions are achieved for the island of Ireland in Northern Ireland by legislative orders issued by the UK government – UK equality law mainly does not apply in Northern Ireland, with the exception of the Disability Act 1995.

All this results in a high degree of complexity of equality law in Northern Ireland, which may be enhanced by the UK exiting the EU. According to the UK government’s White Paper of 2 February, a Great Repeal Bill will, while repealing the European Communities Act 1972, will “convert the (…) body of existing EU law (…) into domestic law”. The White Paper also promises that “Parliament (and, where appropriate, the devolved legislatures) will then be able to decide which elements of that law to keep, amend or repeal”, with some more specifications to be made in a future White Paper on the Great Repeal Bill.

In Northern Ireland, matters of combating discrimination and equality are in principle transferred matter (subject to change), while legislative orders implementing EU directives were based on the Westminster competence in international relations.

For the future, the NI legislative Assembly may attain a holistic competence to legislate for equality in Northern Ireland (again, subject to change, and notwithstanding the fact that implementing any UN conventions on discrimination law remains a reserved matter). This might present an opportunity to create more comprehensive equality legislation for Northern Ireland.

However, that legislation will have lost its basis in EU law with the UK’s withdrawal from the union. In the past, the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland has proactively used the option to bring cases before the European Court of Justice to further equality law in Northern Ireland, and by implication in the whole of the European Union.

Examples comprise matters of maternity law or the notorious question of whether women can be refused posts in the police force of Northern Ireland because weapons on a woman might be looked upon unfavourably (this has been resolved in favour of gender equality as can be observed by everyone). Leaving the EU, these opportunities are lost.

Further, standards of protection will diverge between the UK (and Northern Ireland) and other EU Member States (such as Ireland). For example, while equal treatment of EU citizens in employment matters must presently adhere to the same EU legislative standards, it is not certain whether the relevant prohibitions will remain in force unaltered after the parliaments in Westminster and Stormont have spoken. Thus, Irish citizens working in Northern Ireland might lose their protection by this specific equality clause, as will UK citizens working in Ireland.

Alternatively, there is still the option that specific solutions are achieved for the island of Ireland. Given the specific relevance of equality issues for Northern Ireland, and the proximity to Ireland, maintaining the validity of EU equality law might be an element of these.

In any case, this is the time to consider in more detail what future legislation in the field is adequate for and needed in Northern Ireland.

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Gerard O’Donnell, left, with his partner Michael Conlon at their home in Belfast

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I don’t believe anybody should tell you who you can or can’t love for the rest of your life

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Equality campaign: Same-sex couple Michael Conlon and Gerard O’Donnell tell VIEW why they believe Northern Ireland needs to hold a referendum on same-sex marriage following the vote to allow it in the Republic of Ireland

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n 2015, Patrick Corrigan, Amnesty International’s Northern Ireland programme director, said at a rally in Belfast: “We are all here today because of a simple idea: all people are equal.

The state should treat all people equally.”

The march was organised following a referendum in the Republic of Ireland in 2015 which delivered a resounding Yes vote to allow same-sex marriage.

A total of 1,201,607 people (62 percent) voted Yes and 734,300 (37.9 percent) voted No. Same sex couple Gerard O’Donnell and Michael Conlon, who live in Belfast, told VIEW why they believed that they should have the same marriage rights as those who live in the Republic.

“I don’t believe anybody should tell you who you can or can’t love for the rest of your life,” said Gerard.

He and Michael have now held three ceremonies to celebrate their love and commitment to each other.

They were married in a civil partnership ceremony in Belfast; that was followed by a huge celebration at a castle in the Republic in which a pagan witch presided over the event. And finally, they were married in Dublin in 2016.

“Those rights should be awarded to everyone, and you shouldn’t have to cross the border to get married,” said Michael Gerard said: “We met in Dublin about 10 years ago. I'm a photographer and a videographer.”

Michael is the CEO of a community development organisation in Dublin and commutes from Belfast.

The couple recently decided to move back to Belfast.

“I think it’s disappointing that when you move back that your marriage is reduced back to a civil partnership again,” said Michael.

“Marriage is normal. It should be nor-

Celebration: A couple congratulate each other after the Republic of Ireland voted to allow same-sex marriage malised. It shouldn’t be even up for a discussion anymore. If Catholic Ireland can trust their electorate and put it to a public vote, then why shouldn’t Northern Ireland put it to a public vote?” Michael said he had witnessed signs of change happening in Northern Ireland. “The big change that I have noticed when we started looking for a house in Belfast was that a lot of our friends who had grown up in Catholic areas had started to live in what were perceived as Protestant or unionist areas.

There is a bit more of a flexibility now in terms of where you can live.

“When we campaigned in the Republic and knocked doors and told voters about the personal relationship with the person you loved, you saw something change in their minds, and some of

them probably were still a No vote, but it made them think.

“A friend of ours had to explain to her eight-year-old child what the marriage equality referendum was about. He was upset that we weren’t legally married. He thought we were a normal married couple and couldn’t get his head around why people had to vote after seeing me on Sky News. We felt this was a real sign of a change in attitudes that happened during the campaign.”

Gerard added: “Our lives are completely like every other married couple, I can’t see a difference between us and a straight couple at all. There is no difference. Only the fact that they can get married here, and they can adopt and we can’t.”

COMMENT

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Odd crumb of progress is not enough

Joe Kenny, who lost his sight at the age of five, argues that disability does not enjoy the same access to equality as gender equality, age equality or sexual orientation equality

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ISABILITY – let’s face it, starting any word with ‘DIS’ and it’s seldom a good thing?

When I use that word, either as a noun or an adjective, so begins an interesting inner conflict.

But we need a word or way to describe things, I hear you cry.Yes, but in classification and putting things in boxes, so begins the road to inequality – not all boxes are treated equal in the great warehouse of life.

I’m testing out this belief that I’m not actually disabled. It’s society around me that understands my lack of eyesight as a problem.

How can I hold this belief? If I do, surely I must know that I can’t go around blaming everyone else for the challenges I face in real life.

Really if you look at it, am I just refusing to accept a truth obvious to everyone but me, and unless we turn every light out and halt the march of progress, it makes no sense.

But I believe, with a big brave attitude shift, time and resources could be channelled in a different way. It doesn’t take a major leap; it just takes those with the purse-strings of power to stop saying DDA (Disability Discrimination Act) over and over again in meetings and to just get on with it! It’s time we stopped contenting ourselves with the odd crumb of progress from the table of the already-equal.

I’m blind and have been so for 35 years now. I lost my sight at the age of five from complications or something to do with congenital glaucoma.

So as a blind man living and working in Belfast, what do I think represents inequality in my life today?

Inequality is telling four blind school leavers that, according to statistics, unlike 1

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Inequality is telling four blind school leavers that, according to statistics, unlike your sighted peers, only one of you will get a job

your sighted peers, only one of you will get a job.

Inequality is showing a blind person 100 published books and then saying “but you can only read seven of these”.

Inequality is the fact that here we are in 2017 and people who can’t see too well are still denied even the basic literature in a form they can read independently, either from our health and social care service, Social Security Agency or electoral and political process.

In my opinion, as a society we’re trapped in a hamster wheel of providing the most, to the most, for the most – telling ourselves that there’s nothing to be done and that’s just the way the world works.

It's apparent to me that disability does not share the same access to equality as, say, gender equality, age equality or sexual orientation equality. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s all vital and I’m not the one saying that one fight for equal rights should be prioritised over another.

We’re still in the midst of viewing disability through medical-tinted glasses.

People with disabilities are to be cared for more than made equal. One flick through the recently ill-fated Draft Programme for Government tells its own story.

If we ever get another working Northern Ireland Assembly, maybe we’ll get ourselves a minister for disability and all will be well?

Growing up, it took me a long time to finally realise that a lot of perceived inequality is in the eye of the beholder. I remember the peace I felt the day the penny dropped that I was the master of my own outlook, and that you can choose how you feel and whether you let the inequality that’s buffeting you from outside, inside.

I think it's a really worrying time for disability policy

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Dr Bronagh Byrne tells of her concerns for equality rights of disabled people in the wake of the Brexit vote

rightness, passion and determination are qualities which Dr Bronagh Byrne, who lectures in social policy at Queen's University, Belfast, has in abundance.

In a recent interview with VIEW, the 37-year-old academic, who is from County Down, told of her passion for disability issues when it comes to striving for equality.

“I’ve been deaf from birth. That’s probably why I’m so passionate about disability issues.

“I went to a mainstream primary and grammar school and I was the only deaf person there. It was interesting but frustrating at times.You had to raise other people’s awareness all the time, but I also didn’t want people to identify me as that disabled person or that deaf person. I felt very independent and I was determined to be the same as everyone else.

“I would have been resistant to anyone who was trying to patronise me. I didn’t want people just to think of me in terms of being deaf. We all have something different about us. For some people it could be about being a single parent, their background or where they live.

Bronagh believes that society still has a long way to go in terms of equality for people with disabilities.

“We have made some progress over recent years in terms of legislation or at least what they look like on paper. We’re very good at producing lots of lovely glossy pieces of paper but we usually end up

putting them on the shelf and forgetting to look at them again.

“I also think it's a really a worrying time for disability policy. The current economic upheaval around Brexit is a concern and disability has not even been mentioned in terms of the debate around it. People need to remember that a lot of the progress we’ve made in disability policy has come from being in the European Union, for example building regulations which made them accessible, and the legislation and EU directives that underpinned it.”

Bronagh believes that there has been some progress in terms of disability and public awareness of it. “We are seeing a lot more disability cases emerging in recent years and a lot more media coverage around it. I don’t know if that’s because there are more examples of discrimination happening. I think it’s more the case that with an increasing awareness of legislation we are seeing more people making a complaint. More disabled people are becoming aware of their rights.”

She also voiced her concerns that whilst disabled people have been making noises for a long time, they also haven’t been taken seriously enough. “I think we need a much stronger disability movement in Northern Ireland. We don’t have a very co-ordinated body of disabled people compared to the rest of the UK. “I also think we’re in a sort of ironic situation at the moment. In 2017 we’re in a position where disabled people have never

had more rights internationally than they do at the moment, but then various countries are seeing funding being cut. We are also seeing disabled people become more invisible and the imposition of welfare reform. Even though disabled people have never had more rights, those rights are becoming increasingly violated.

“We have made progress in terms of disability legislation. It’s been piecemeal but it’s still been progress. Society is much more accessible than it has been in the past. But we also are a position where disabled people are seen to be expensive – almost like a threat to society. There’s almost a tendency at the moment where we need to rein disabled people in. We need to make sure they’re not ‘too independent’ because that’s ‘too expensive’ and ‘we won’t have the money to do that’. It’s a very concerning time for disabled people, not just in the UK, but globally.

“We’re also in a position where the numbers of disabled people across the world are growing rather than falling. We have more older people, we have more disabled people living into adulthood and we have better technology.

“We should be doing much more to uphold the rights of disabled people, but instead we see an increase in poverty and benefits being cut and independence reduced. We’re almost going back to the old injustices of the world where we’re trying to marginalise disabled people even more.”

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We want our children to be the best they possibly can be

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Nursery school principal Clare McAllister, above, tells VIEW editor Brian Pelan of the struggle to ensure that children’s equality rights to education are met amidst a climate of economic cuts in budgets

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t Michael’s Nursery School on the Stewartstown Road in west Belfast is quiet from the babble of children at the end of the day when I visit, apart from a couple of classroom assistants who are preparing for the next day.

School principal Clare McAllister is in her office immersed in the paperwork that, according to her, never seems to end.

She is married with two daughters.

“One will be 25 years of age soon and she’s living and working in England. I have a second daughter who is currently going through GCSE hell at the moment. A testing period for everyone in the household,” laughs Clare.

“I started my teaching career in a school in Lisburn. I spent a number of years in primary four and primary three and then I became interested in early

years. I became responsible for the nursery unit that was attached to that school and spent eight years there.”

Clare then applied for the position of principal at St Michael’s. “I’ve been here three years now,” she said “It’s a challenging but rewarding job. I am passionate about early years and it’s where I want to be. But within the nursery sector the problem is, for the most part, we are teaching principals, so we are teaching full-time. It doesn’t matter whether you have a school that has 500 pupils of 50 pupils – you still have the same administrative issues and problems.

“I have three hours of secretarial support per week, which is completely inadequate. And there’s absolutely no parity with my peers in the primary sector.

“We’ve fought very hard for parity but we haven’t got there yet, so it’s challenging.

“In regard to inequality, we, as a school, are about ensuring that we offer the same education to every child. But obviously there are children with varying difficulties and backgrounds. We want to make sure we have a curriculum that’s accessible to all of our children.

“We have to make sure we put measures in place to ensure that we can offer equality for both sexes and all kinds of interests. So we know that with boys, the formality of a classroom situation doesn’t sit very well with them and doesn’t facilitate learning at their age. Boys develop differently. As a result we have focused very heavily on our outdoor environment and learning outdoors.

“This year we have a cohort of 52 children in our school, two classes of 26. A real mix of abilities and we also have one newcomer pupil. Amongst this overall

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Playing outdoors: Some of the children at St Michael’s Nursery School in west Belfast number we have some children coming to us with learning difficulties, although the number of children with special educational needs varies from year to year.

“We do not have any additional budget to support a child who has social, emotional and behavioural difficulties. We are seeing children who are coming into the nursery sector with really poor speech and language skills. At the minute there is a nine-month to a year waiting list for a child to be seen by a speech and language therapist in the community.

“Unfortunately, due to this delay there are many steps and stages in the process that these children are missing out on because the process is so lengthy and arduous. We need a different system where a child with significant needs can be fasttracked to ensure their needs are met.

“We are doing all that we can with

our limited resources in St. Michael’s. We’re currently one of only two mainstream nursery schools in Northern Ireland that have Makaton-friendly status. A lot of special schools use Makaton. It is a language programme which uses signs and symbols to help people to communicate.

“We felt that some of our children needed an extra hook to be able to access the curriculum, so we decided to invest in Makaton through training all our staff – it has been a worthwhile investment.

“For example, we had a non-verbal child last year, who was exceptionally bright but was unable to communicate with the staff or his peers. We used Makaton with him and eventually through its use he started to understand, so we know it works.”

Clare also talked about the difficult economic conditions for schools across

Northern Ireland.“Budgets in general have been really squeezed and we have to work within very challenging constraints. We need our government to provide adequate resources to the whole education sector – after all we are investing in our future.

“But within this, we also need full and proper resources for those children with special needs starting from nursery right through.

“Here in St. Michael’s we continue to be proactive about how we tackle all the challenges we face. Our budget is tight, there is no denying that. But I have to ensure that we support the needs of every single child to the best of our ability. I have to make sure that I do that because we have a high expectation of our children and we want all of our children to succeed at whatever their level so they can be the best they can possibly be.”

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Louise: We need to encourage primary schoolgirls to take up STEM subjects

Passionate: Louise Kerr who works as a delivery manager with Synergy Learning in Holywood, Co Down

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By Una Murphy

ouise Kerr knows it can be tough for women working in IT. So she is keen for the industry to do more about it. She told VIEW that the 24/7 culture and rapid changes in technology means that stepping back from work because of family life and other commitments for even 12 to 18 months can mean it is difficult to catch up.

Louise, who studied computer science at Queen’s University, Belfast, also wants to see more women applying for jobs.

She is a delivery manager with Synergy Learning, a small company with fewer than 50 staff, based in Holywood, Co Down, and she is keen to help address gender inequality.

It is the latest company to publicly

commit to recruiting more women by signing the Equality Commission’s STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) charter to improve the gender balance in its workplace.

Louise would like to see more guidance from the education authorities about how to engage girls aged 10 years and older who drift away from STEM subjects.

“We are a small company, how can we do more?” Louise said.

2014-2015 saw a drop in the number of women graduating from UK universities in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths, she added.

“How do we increase this number?” she said.

“We need to engage girls from primary schools and find out how to

encourage girls to take these STEM subjects forward.”

“Building girls’ confidence could be part of the strategy to encourage them to tackle the subjects,” Louise said. “As an employer you have to employ someone based on merit and ability not on gender.

You recruit the best person to do the job.”

Louise said that having support at home enabled her to juggle the work-life balance. “I have a fantastic network at home. I have two young children and my husband is the primary carer. he does 80 percent which allows me to have my career.”

Short of cloning Louise’s husband, the solution may be for bigger IT companies to take the lead and provide a joined-up approach working with teachers to ensure more women like Louise make it in Tech.

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Many potentially difficult situations can be pre-empted by having clear policies in place

Eileen Lavery, Head of Policy, Advice and Compliance at the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland, welcomes the fact that many of our workplaces are now welcoming and open to people from all communities and backgrounds

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t is a fact that the great majority of Northern Ireland’s workplaces have developed into, and been maintained as, shared spaces, welcoming and open to people from all communities and backgrounds. That is a tribute to the many employers who, working alongside the Equality Commission, have striven to create good working environments which are now largely free from overt sectarian “labelling” and where intimidating behaviour is recognised as unacceptable.

This is no small achievement in a society where too many aspects of life are still separated and often contested. It has not been easily arrived at, and maintaining it requires continuing care and sound judgment.

One issue that still causes concern in some workplaces is the acceptability or otherwise of anything, such as personal emblems, badges or branded clothes, which could be regarded as an expression of identity or community background.

The Equality Commission has always given advice to employers on these issues and publishes guidance based upon the legislation, the Fair Employment Code of Practice, and relevant tribunal and

court decisions. One of the key points we make is that having a good and harmonious working environment, as provided for in the Code of Practice, is not necessarily the same thing as a “neutral” one where all expressions of a person’s identity and culture must be sanitised or stripped away.

The Commission’s guidance distinguishes between different kinds of symbols or emblems.

Some, which are seen as being directly linked to inter-community conflict in Northern Ireland, have the potential to be disruptive or to make those of a different identity feel uncomfortable or unwelcome and are best avoided. Others, although they may be associated primarily with one religion or community, are seen as not directly linked to the inter-community conflict in Northern Ireland and may be regarded as unlikely to create an intimidating or hostile working environment.

In considering these issues employers need to take into account the context in which any emblem is being worn and the surrounding circumstances of their own workplace. The distinctions which employers have to make are not always

easy ones, but people often have a good understanding of whether cultural or religious emblems are being used appropriately or not. Many potentially difficult situations can be pre-empted by having clear policies in place, communicating these to all employees, and by implementing them with a good dose of common sense.

The Equality Commission cannot take employers’ decisions for them on these issues. It does not make rulings on what is an acceptable display or what does or does not constitute discrimination under the Fair Employment and Treatment Order – that is a matter for the Fair Employment Tribunal, if a complaint is brought before it.

We do provide advice to anyone seeking it and our guidance is available on our website at www.equalityni.org. We urge employers to consider our guidance and have policies in place which reflect the law and the Code of Practice.

We also urge all in the community to show sensitivity and mutual respect, both in how they give expression to their own culture and identity and in their response to the proper expression of these by others.

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Malone College principal Máire Thompson with some of the pupils at the school

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We have a high value system which embraces and promotes equality

Malone College principal Máire Thompson tells VIEW about the challenges and rewards of educating ethic minority students, including pupils from the Roma and Somali communities and why her school believes in an ethos of diversity

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By Brian Pelan

had a blast of nostalgia as I sat in the reception of Malone Integrated College in south Belfast. One of my sons had attended the school several years ago and I hadn't been back since.

I was waiting to talk to principal Máire Thompson about her experiences of dealing with a high intake of pupils from ethnic minority backgrounds, including Somalia and Romania.

My first question to Máire, when we met up, was what were the challenges of teaching ethnic minority pupils?

“There are no other schools in Northern Ireland, I believe, with such a

concentration of diversity in post-primary as ours,” said Ms Thompson. “When students come here we assess them and we also assess their competency in their own language. We have about 150 pupils at present attending from different ethnic backgrounds “The challenge for me is that the Newcomer Policy by the Department of Education was written in 2008. We are now in 2017.

“Whilst this presents challenges there are also rewards. It's a great opportunity for pupils from Northern Ireland to embrace new cultures and to learn about them.

“I think the society we’re moving to-

wards is going to be much more multi-cultural in the future. The first few years were very challenging in that we had to get to know the new cultures. We invited community leaders to visit the school and we also drilled into our own customs and practices. For example, we have in each of our rooms a religious festival board which rotates at different times of the year. So, for example, we will celebrate Diwali for Hindu students. We have four out of the world's five religions represented at our school.

“Two reasons why we have such a high ethnic intake is that we are situated in south Belfast which, I think, has the highest concentration of ethnic minority families

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Around 150 pupils from a range of ethic minority communities attend Malone College

and that we have gained a reputation of being a good school for students who come from different countries.

“We have a bilingual centre at the school which is opened from 8am to 4pm.

As the students improve their English and make progress they will start to take part in all practical activities such as drama, music, arts and technology. The most important thing is that they are immersed in the school and not seen as separate students.

“Working with Roma pupils would probably be our most significant challenge.

Because of persecution and marginalisation they have experienced as a community, they tend to stick very much together.

“I find the Roma community to be very charismatic, family-orientated and a culturally proud people.

“Three years ago I went to meet members of the Roma community. One of them said to me: ‘I don't want my child to end up in a car wash. I want her to get an education’. Another one said: ‘Some principals won't take our calls. They don't want our children. They don’t make efforts to understand our language and the experiences of our children in education have been horrendous.

“I said to the Roma group: ‘If your child comes to our school they will be treated fairly, we will embrace them and they will be treated like every other child.

And we will try our best to educate them and work with you at the same time’.

“We now have 45 pupils attending from the Roma community. There are many challenges, though, in how we are judged externally. For example, I have had

children arriving here who haven't been to primary schools – such as some of those from Romania and Somalia. And yet those children are still included in my stats. The Department of Education is still saying how many five A* to Cs did those children get at GCSE. In terms of equity and fairness, I have high expectations for all our children, but equally there needs to be an understanding of context and challenges.”

How would your numbers be at this school without your intake of ethnic minority pupils such as those from the Roma and Somali communities, I asked Máire.

“The school would probably not be sustainable. For sustainability, they talk about having over 500 pupils at a school.

The difficulty is that we are in south Belfast and are surrounded by 10 grammar schools. Over the last five or six years there has been a decline demographically in the population. A lot of secondary schools, including schools in west Belfast, are now under pressure.

“I have no regrets though about our belief in inclusivity. We have a very deeprooted value system which embraces and promotes equality and equity. Our school is about education for everybody – all walks of life, all creeds, all religions.

Because that is reflective of society and allows us to produce decent human beings.” As our interview drew to a close Máire informed me about a new challenge facing her school.

“I was informed that some of our students from Sandy Row and the Holyland area in south Belfast will no longer be eligible for bus passes from September because the transport mileage had been miscalculated. For some of our Roma parents that will mean no bus pass, no school. Their parents don't have the money. There is an onus on the Department of Education to ensure that the poorest and most marginalised children are not disadvantaged even more.

“Also, the funding for a Saturday school which was used to help assist ethnic minority pupils and their families came to an end last December, which was disappointing.”

It appears as if ongoing cuts in the Department of Education budget is now starting to hit home and presents new challenges for those who believe in a vision of equality.

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Using the law to challenge discrimination

Anne McKernan, Director of Legal Services at the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland, says the discrimination advice service and the cases we support, however, are just one aspect of our legal work

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dvice, support, investigations – the Equality Commission’s legal work Our legal casework is one of our most high-profile functions. In our last published equality awareness survey, more people (41 percent) were aware of us ‘supporting people to take cases to tribunal’ than any of our other services.

People remember the compelling personal stories reported by the media.

Successfully resolved cases, which focus on people who have experienced discrimination and courageously follow through with their complaints, stick in the public mind.

But these few publicised cases are at the apex of a pyramid which starts with around 3,000 complaints of discrimination per year to the discrimination advice team.

After receiving advice and information from the Commission’s legal team, over 90% of these are either resolved informally, or not pursued further with the Commission.

The remaining 10 percent can apply to the Commission’s Legal Funding Committee, which will consider each case against a set of strategic and financial criteria and decide to fund (or not fund) it.

Typically around a quarter of cases considered by the Legal Funding Committee are supported to the courts or tribunals. The discrimination advice service and the cases we support, however, are

just one aspect of our legal work. The Commission also conducts formal investigations under the anti-discrimination laws, and investigations under Section 75 of the Northern Ireland Act 1998, which cover wider equality issues and the embedding of equality into the policies and practices of public authorities.

Formal investigations may be conducted under the anti-discrimination laws governing disability, gender, race religion or politics. Such investigations may be based on a general principle of promoting equality of opportunity, or they may be based on a belief that a discriminatory act or acts have occurred, in which case they would be confined to the investigation of a named person or persons. In deciding on the subject of a formal investigation, we consider the importance of the issue to equality and its strategic value.

In November 2016 we launched our most recent Formal Investigation, into the treatment of pregnant workers and mothers at work. Over one third of women who spoke to us said that they had been treated unfairly or disadvantaged because of their pregnancy or because they took maternity leave. They believe this affected their finances, their career opportunities, their status at work and their health. The practical spin-off from the investigation includes new guidance for

employers on our website, and new training sessions for line managers.

Investigations under Section 75 of the Northern Ireland Act 1998 are carried out to establish whether or not a public authority has failed to comply with its approved equality scheme.

Investigations can be conducted when we receive a complaint from an individual of such a failure. We will either investigate the complaint, or provide reasons for not investigating.

Investigations can also be conducted at the Commission’s own volition – when the Commission itself has concerns that a public authority may have failed to comply with its equality scheme.

In the interests of improving access to help for people who feel they have been discriminated against, our legal team also runs basic equality law training sessions for other advice givers, such as the Citizens’ Advice Bureaux and trade unions.

As well as advising and assisting people who think they have suffered unlawful discrimination, the Commission also provides advice and guidance services to employers – giving practical help on good practice and compliance with the law.

The Commission also uses its powers of investigation and its research resources to address enduring inequalities and help ensure a fairer and more equal society for everyone in Northern Ireland.

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We urge the government to protect our most vulnerable people from impact of welfare reform

Darren McKinstry, Director of Policy and Research at the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland, says that they want to ensure that people with disabilities living here do not suffer the same difficulties as those in Great Britain as welfare reform measures are rolled out

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isabled people in the United Kingdom are subject to “grave or systematic violations of (their) rights”.

That was the finding of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities 2016 inquiry, which examined the impact of welfare reform on people with disabilities throughout the UK. The report says “several measures have disproportionally and adversely affected the rights of persons with disabilities”. Again this refers to the whole UK, not just Northern Ireland, but the finding is alarming and other elements of the report’s findings, also raise concerns.

The report focused on the rights of disabled people to independent living, to work and employment and to social protection – basic income security and access to essential social services – all issues which are covered by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD).

The Equality Commission and the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission are jointly designated as the ‘Independent Mechanism’ (IMNI) in Northern Ireland to promote, protect and monitor the implementation of the

UNCRPD. We facilitated the visit of the UN inquiry panel to Belfast last year and arranged interviews with key witnesses.

On independent living, the report says that disabled people have been disproportionately affected by welfare reforms such as the cap on household benefits, changes being introduced by the new Personal Independence Payment (PIP), and the lack of acceptance of new applicants to the Independent Living Fund.

The report finds that the cumulative impact in the reduction of welfare benefits has meant a struggle for many disabled people to maintain a minimum level of income, driving many to increased dependency on relatives and into debt.

The report also notes flaws in the processes related to work and employment. It says that assessments for work continue to be focused on a functional evaluation of people’s skills and capabilities and puts aside their personal circumstances and needs as well as barriers to a return to employment.

Despite training for assessors and decision makers, there was evidence of a limited knowledge of disability rights and the specific needs of disabled people. It cites evidence of significant financial, material and psychological hardship

experienced by people with disabilities undergoing assessments.

The NI Executive has agreed a number of mitigating measures to cushion the impact of some of these measures on disabled people. These are, however, only temporary. The bedroom tax, for example, is deferred for four years, yet there is no assurance that enough smaller properties will be available for disabled people who wish to live independently at the end of this time. Similarly, the financial impacts for those adversely affected by the move from Disability Living Allowance to PIP have been mitigated, but just for one year.

As welfare reform is rolled out here and the locally agreed, but time limited, mitigations cease, we want to ensure that people with disabilities living here do not suffer the same difficulties as those in Great Britain.

The Commission outlined its concerns for disabled people’s welfare and protection in our response last year to the Executive’s Programme for Government.

We urge the government to protect our most vulnerable people from the impact of welfare reform as they seek to live independent lives and, for those able to work, seek to find jobs.

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Mother and child: Shauna McLarnon with her baby Jenny Louise

Getting a house would be like winning the Lottery says mum VIEW, Issue 42, 2017

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Housing crisis: Shauna McLarnon tells VIEW editor Brian Pelan about what it is like to live in cramped conditions in a two-bedroom flat with her four children as she endures a lengthy wait to be rehoused

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draft statement on key inequalities in housing and communities in Northern Ireland, (March 2016) from the Equality Commission reported that Catholic households experienced the longest waiting times on the Northern Ireland Housing Executive (NIHE) waiting list for a home.

Catholic mother Shauna McLarnon and her four children are one of the many families on the NIHE waiting list.

Twenty-six-year-old Shauna has four children: Daniel (7), Adam (4), Jessica (3) and baby Jenny Louise (10 months).

She presently lives in Ardoyne in a two-bedroom flat, which is at the top of a four-storey apartment building.

Shauna has lived there for nearly four years now. Three of her children sleep in one bedroom, and mother and baby sleep in the other.

One of the children, Adam, suffers from autism.

She has been on the NIHE waiting list for nearly two-and-a-half years.

She has 132 points but to qualify for a house in Ligoneil, which is her first preference, she would need around 180 points.

She has chosen Ardoyne as her second preference “It’s an absolutely terrible situation,” said Shauna. “There is very little storage. At Christmas time or birthdays I have to get rid of toys that are not broken. But I just have to make space for any new toys I have for them.”

It’s a nightmare for Shauna if the lift in the building is not working.

“Sometimes the lift breaks,” said Shauna. “It means that I then have to shout out my window to somebody walking past to ask them to come up the stairs to my flat to help me carry my pram downstairs.

“I'm also continually nervous about my three older children opening windows in the flat as we are living on the top floor.

“Daniel, Adam and Jessica all know how to push the handle up and push the window out. I have complained about this

Over 37,0000 on housing waiting list The most recent update on the Northern Ireland Housing Executive waiting list – published on its website, states:

• There continues to be a substantial demand for social housing.

Evidence of the need for social housing in Northern Ireland comes from two main sources: local housing needs assessments (using the Common Waiting List for social housing) and the Net Stock Model (developed in partnership with the University of Ulster in 1994 and updated on a regular basis since).

• A new iteration of the Net Stock Model was completed, based on more up to date demographic and housing market data, which helped inform the 2016/17 Social Housing Development Programme.

• At 31 March 2016, the social housing waiting list amounted to 37,586 households, of which 22,645 were considered to be in housing stress, including 12,202 households deemed to be statutorily homeless.

and I have asked can I not get a house faster because of my fears of one of them falling out of the window?

“I feel stir crazy in the flat. I feel as if I am constantly locked up with my kids.

Their behaviour has also deteriorated. We are all living on top of each other. There's no garden where they can go to and play and get a breath of fresh air.”

Shauna is constantly taking her children out to visit relatives and friends. “I just need to get away from the conditions of my living environment,” she said. “I can’t stay for a long time in my house. I need to get away with the children as often I can to try and alleviate the situation.

“All of my family live in Ligoniel. I have to order a seven-seater taxi which costs extra to visit them and get a break. It's a grim and stressful situation.”

I asked Shauna to describe what it would mean for her and her children to get a three-bedroom house with a garden?

“It would be like winning the Lottery,”

,sreplied Shauna. “We need a place to call home.You can't call where we are living at the moment a home. We are all just living in a box, we need proper space to thrive.”

In terms of being rehoused there is nothing on the horizon at the moment, she said. “I contact the Housing Executive about once a week to see if there are any developments, but so far the answer is no.”

Kathleen Kelly, a benefits adviser at the Wolfhill Community Centre, who also deals with housing issues, said: “It’s totally unsuitable for Shauna and her family. The conditions are far too cramped.

“The fact that one of her children has autism has made it even worse. He needs his own room. It’s impacting on his condition by being stuck in a bedroom with two other children.

“Autistic children have sensory issues and having two other children constantly in your space is unacceptable. If Adam had the space he needed his behaviour would improve.”

COMMENT

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Tackling social segregation

Mark Langhammer, director of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, argues that efforts ‘to close the education gap’ have achieved only marginal progess and asks what is to be done?

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he Northern Ireland government’s collapse halted the Assembly Education Committee’s latest inquiry into educational under-achievement.

Our system has long boasted high performance at one end of the scale, paid through a “long tail” of under-achievement at the other. Efforts to “close the gap” in the last decade have achieved only marginal progress. So what is to be done?

The OECD measured the UK’s education systems as the most socially segregated in the developed world, 34th of 34. Northern Ireland is possibly the UK’s most segregated region. This matters because globally successful systems are found in socially integrated societies.

Measured by the lode-star target of five “good” GCSE’s, the results of our poorest students has improved, marginally.

In international studies, Northern Ireland records the highest-achieving primary school pupils in Europe in major international tests in maths. Globally, we achieve sixth best, just behind pupils in the Pacific Rim countries, ahead of persistently high-achieving countries like Finland and Norway and leading the English-speaking world.

At secondary level, international comparisons at age 15 record distinctly average overall performance. Indeed, our elite students underperform with only seven percent of pupils in science and maths and six percent in reading regarded as “top performers”.

Why does our system decline at secondary level? Primaries are generally local schools, with comprehensive intakes.

It has long been accepted academically (if not acted upon by policymakers) that overall school performance improves with balanced pupil intakes. At post-primary schools, where pupil intakes are starkly segregated, performance drops.

There is no lack of research evidence.

Back in 2011, I chaired a working group to produce the Purvis Report, A Call to Action: Educational Disadvantage and the Protestant Working Class. In 2015 the Equality Commission’s Educational Inequalities in Northern Ireland was published. In 2016 QUB research, commissioned by OFMDFM on 1

2

3

More than a quarter of a century ago our society accepted the need to monitor the religious balance of workplaces to achieve fair employment.

Now is the time to treat the acute social segregation in schools in a similar fashion

Investigating Links in Achievement and Deprivation (ILiAD) was politically suppressed before the 2016 Assembly elections.

Decades of research evidence demonstrates that the one key factor in raising performance at school, for the middle class no less than the deprived, is a mixed pupil intake. In mixed-intake schools, pupils learn about each other; see different dispositions to learning; recognise each others’ skills. The most deprived pupils see that education can provide the skills and knowledge to make a different life for themselves. For the most disadvantaged young person, the most important role model is someone who looks like them, who is their age, but who has different attitudes and aspirations to learning and life. So, to really make a difference, if standards are to rise for all, we need socially mixed schools where peer group pressure opens minds, changes outlooks and raises aspirations. Schools without this mix always struggle in the long run.

Broadly, there are two ways to address underachievement. One targets social need (TSN) through compensatory measures to high-poverty schools and localities. The other is through socio-economic integration measures. TSN can work, but only with significant resources over an extended period – to achieve marginal, hard-earned gains.

Evidentially, the zero-cost option of socially balanced pupil intakes works best for all pupils. The sole cost is common political will.

Our focus should be using political/government leverage to encourage socially mixed and balanced intakes in schools. No other single measure would have less financial cost or more educational performance benefits.

More than a quarter of a century ago our society accepted the need to monitor the religious balance of workplaces to achieve fair employment. Now is the time to treat the acute social segregation in schools in a similar fashion.

• 1, www.oecd.org/education/school/50293148.pdf • 2, See at https://www.nfer.ac.uk/timss/timss-in-ni • 3, OECD’s PISA rankings

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They picked on the wrong woman, says Gloria in age discrimination case

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By Brian Pelan

woman who was forced to retire from her supermarket job at the age of 63 against her wishes and who received a £40,000 payout has urged other workers to challenge alleged age discrimination if they believe they have a viable case.

Gloria Dunbar from north Belfast settled her case in 2015 against her employer, Dunnes Stores (Bangor) Ltd, after she alleged that she was discriminated against on grounds of her age when her employment as a security manager was terminated.

Her case was supported by the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland.

The company, in settling the case for £40,000, did not accept that it acted in breach of equality legislation. It also reaffirmed its commitment to the principles of equality.

“If you believe that you are being discriminated against because of your age you should first report your concerns to your management,” said Gloria.

“I did that myself but at the end of the day there was nobody in the company who was listening to my concerns.

“I was devastated when I received a letter from Dunnes telling me of my retirement date. I wanted to work until I was 65 years of age and not have to retire at 63.

“I was living on my own and I had no other income.

“After I had to leave the job I went and spoke to a solicitor. He advised me to contact the Fair Employment Tribunal, who put me in touch with the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland.”

Gloria, who now likes to travel as often as she can, said she has no regrets about challenging the company’s decision.

“They picked on the wrong woman,” she said “You should also never be afraid if you believe you are being treated unfairly because of your age. The staff in the Equality Commission are there to support you.”

Ms Dunbar had worked as a security manager for Dunnes Stores on a full-time permanent basis since 2005. She had 23 years’ experience working in security roles in various stores.

At the time that her employment was terminated she was working in Dunnes’ Annadale Embankment store.

Since 2011 there has been no automatic right for an employer to fix a retirement point based on age. The law provides that if an employer wishes to have an age-based retirement policy, it must be justified.

“This case raised issues regarding the treatment of older workers as they approach or pass what was regarded as retirement age,” said Dr Evelyn Collins, Chief Executive of the Equality Commission.

“Staff who are able and willing to work beyond previously accepted retirement ages must have their wishes fairly considered and when decisions are being made regarding their contracts, performance standards, and continued employment, they are entitled to the same consideration as workers of other ages.

“Everyone has the right to fair treatment in the job market and in the workplace on the basis of individual merits, experience and potential,” Dr Collins said.

“Employers can contact us for one to one advice and/or visit our website (www.equalityni.org/Home) to find out how to stay the right side of the law in managing older workers and retirement. All our advice is free and confidential.”

• More details about this case can be found at http://www.equalityni.org/Footer-Links/News/Individuals/Woman-made-to-retire-settles-age-discriminationca#sthash.BxXkd0nD.dpuf

Gloria Dunbar has no regrets about taking a case against her employer over alleged age discrimination

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Striving for equality for women in law

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By Una Murphy

cup of coffee with Christine Smith QC, member of the Bar of Northern Ireland, is an educational experience.

A high-profile barrister (she was senior counsel to the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry for four years), she is also determined to do her bit for equality by coordinating a Women in Law programme.

She highlights “networking”, “contacts” and “confidence” as key ingredients which are needed to ensure there is an equal playing pitch.

She says “more senior women” are seeking mentoring under the Women in Law programme as well as those starting out in a career in law.

The Women in Law programme is open to both solicitors and barristers and has now been running for three years.

Christine coordinates the scheme for barristers.

“Men tend to pass on work to other men,” she said. “The Women in Law network can help to overcome this.

“I came out of a single sex education where the message from school was that you can do anything and there was no reason why you couldn’t. But the problem is not that you can’t do the job. It is when you get into the big wide world and your education hasn’t prepared you for the social side of the job. It comes back to having a network and making contacts.”

It could be as simple as a group of men having a game of golf on a Saturday and asking for help with a case on Monday, she adds by way of example of how networking can exclude women and

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Northern Ireland barrister Christine Smith

Female High Court judges appointed

In Northern Ireland the first female High Court judges were appointed in 2015. Their appointments were welcomed by the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Declan Morgan, who established the Women in Law group in 2012.

Siobhan Keegan QC and Denise McBride QC, who were appointed the first female Justices of the High Court, were past participants of the Women In The Law Mentoring Programme.

Damehoods were conferred shortly after their appointments.

Honourable Madam Justice McBride and the Honourable Mrs Justice Keegan were the first women to be appointed since the High Court was established in 1921. Northern Ireland was the last place in the UK to appoint women to this judicial office.

Research published in January 2013, carried out by the School of Law at Queen's University, Belfast, ‘Rewarding Merit in Judicial Appointments?’ for the Northern Ireland Judical Appointments Commission explored how the idea of “merit” as a governing factor in judicial appointment worked in practice.

It found that “there was recognition, particularly among more senior respondents, that women were not coming to the top of the professions and that responsibility for this – and for any possible remedy – lies with the wider profession”.

There was also general agreement from those who took part in the research that “the Bar Council and Law Society, as well as the professions at large, had a responsibility to ensure a diverse legal profession where merit could be recognised and developed”.

The report concluded: “The Bar Council and Law Society must consider their role in producing and sustaining the legal culture that gives us the range of judges that society requires.” lead to men passing on work to other men.

“Knowing there are people in the same boat as you makes a difference.

Women in Law offers that support,” Christine said.

It may seem a simple solution to what

Christine says “may be subtle ways of discriminating that are not deliberate”, but she has no doubt that women supporting and meeting other women is a useful way to bring about change and ensure more women have – like her – a successful law career.

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Sexist dress codes challenged VIEW, Issue 42, 2017

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By Una Murphy

awn Purvis knows all about dress codes. As a Stormont politician for more than four years, and then in a high-profile role as programme director of Northern Ireland’s Marie Stopes clinic, she has been in the public eye for many years.

Sitting in her new office in her new role as chief executive of Victoria Housing Estates (VHE), a social housing charity based in Holywood, Co Down, she said she was appalled at “oppressive” sexism dress codes which some women have to deal with in order to stay in work.

Some women are being ordered to wear high heels, make-up or revealing outfits at work in England.

MPs said these “troubling” cases of sexism were evidence the Equalities Act of 2010 (which does not apply to Northern Ireland) is not adequate.

Dawn urged women to contact the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland if they have any concerns about being forced to adopt sexist dress codes here.

“It is sexualising women and saying they are sexual objects and they must dress accordingly,” she said.

Two House of Commons committees have called for tougher equality legislation after gathering evidence of sexist rules on dress codes issued to female but not male workers.

In England, the story of sexist dress codes made recent headlines when Nicola Thorp reported for work in flat shoes as a receptionist in London at PwC accountancy firm. She was sent home without pay after refusing to buy a pair of shoes with two-inch to four-inch heels. She was employed as a temporary worker by PwC’s outsourced reception firm Portico, which has now said it will review its guidelines for staff uniforms MPs on the Women and Equalities and Petitions committees asked women to contact them after Nicola launched a

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Dawn Purvis: “When I heard about this story, at first I was wondering if I was living in the right century”

A petition was launched in Britain that called for the law to be changed so firms can no longer force women to wear high heels to work petition calling for the law to be changed so companies can no longer force women to wear high heels to work. The MPs said they were sent many examples of “troubling” sexist dress codes and said equality legislation was not protecting workers.

“It is oppressive, women should be allowed to dress any way they want. If a woman doesn’t want to wear high heels, because wearing these shoes can lead to problems such as lower back pain, they should not be forced to,” Dawn said.

“When I heard about this story, at first I was wondering if I was living in the right century,” she added.

“I was so shocked by this case but I was encouraged by the number of people who have said this is not right in this day and age.”

Back in her days in the Northern Ireland Assembly, Dawn said that it was a male politician, Barry McEIduff, the Sinn

Fein MLA from Tyrone, who had challenged the dress code for men, which had entailed wearing a jacket and tie, and has been since been relaxed.

Dawn added there were no requirements for women to dress in a certain style, “none that I was aware of”, but she usually wore a black jacket, top and trousers, which her sons labelled her “work uniform”.

“For me, it wasn’t about having a style, it was more about wearing clothes which were functional and I didn’t have to think too much about it.”

Dawn said there were “outrageous” comments in the media on the “style” of women candidates in last year's election to the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Clothes, she added should be “business-like” as well as “comfortable and smart”, and with that final comment she got back to the business of running Victoria Housing Estates.

COMMENT

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Taking sexism out of language

Writer Dawn Baird asks what message do our young people learn from our words about women in the workplace

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quality in the workplace is directly connected to the words we use.

Semantics. As a writer obsessed with words’ origins and impact, I’m convinced that we need to examine and plan our words, particularly where it impacts on equality.

In infancy, we don’t think of semantics; we simply observe and mimic. What messages do our young people learn from our words about women in the workplace?

Consider the following words (titles): woman doctor, woman CEO or woman entrepreneur Then consider whether you have ever encountered their male counterparts: man doctor, man CEO or man entrepreneur. Me neither.

The unpleasant, implied assumption is clear: ‘man’ is redundant in such cases; whereas ‘woman’ is necessary to distinguish a real CEO from a ‘woman’ one. It is sexist and demeaning. It sends out a message – whether you pick it up or not – that ‘woman’ CEOs and so on are somehow inferior, or need to be labelled, lest anyone mistake them for the genuine article.

Equally – see what I did there? We have the following: male nurse, male hairdresser, male nursery assistant (as though real nurses were female, and male nurses are somehow sub-standard, or at least odd).

Let’s just park that for a moment.

The word ‘woman’ is a noun.

Indulge me on a little primary school’grammar. ‘Woman’, like ‘man”, is a noun.

Just like ‘diagnosis’, ‘car’ or ‘icing’. They’re all things: objects, concepts or names.You diagnose a thing (illness), kick tyres on a thing (car), or decorate a cake using a thing (icing).

The word ‘female’ is an adjective.

‘Female’, like ‘male’, is an adjective. Adjectives describe other words; nouns do not. (Confusingly, both female and male can also be used as nouns, but that is irrelevant here).

For example, if you were to add an 1

2

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I’m convinced that we need to examine and plan our words, particularly where it impacts on equality

adjective to a noun such as ‘woman’, (or, indeed, ‘man’ – let’s not be sexist) you might add a word such as ‘intelligent’ or ‘wellread’. She was an ‘intelligent’ woman. He was a ‘well-read’ man.

What you would never, ever say is: She was a ‘woman woman’. In the same way, you would never say: He was a ‘man man’.

Neither ‘woman’ nor ‘man’ are adjectives, and so it would be silly to add either in front of a noun to describe it.

Yet this appears in print everywhere!

Woman CEO, woman entrepreneur, woman chair.

Let’s go back to the bit where I explained redundancy. Not only does it cause immediate offence to many women, it is grammatically incorrect.

Double trouble!

Conclusions and guidelines for when to add gender references to nouns 1. Sometimes, your subject’s gender is the main point of your sentence. If, for example, you were writing about “The first female Prime Minister of the UK in the 21st century”, it makes sense to include it. On many other occasions, it is unnecessary.

2. If you include the gender of the person, employ ‘female’ or ‘male’ (adjectives), not ‘woman’ or ‘man’ (nouns).

3. Be consistent. If you are going to describe the Prime Minister as ‘female’ at every turn, then ensure that you also use ‘male’ to note the gender of men with job titles. I respectfully suggest that you will find few circumstances in which this type of tedium would be necessary.

Never, ever mention ‘lady’, commonly appended to a whole plethora of hitherto apparently incomprehensible things, chiefly, ‘doctor’, ‘parts’ and ‘power tools – unless you refer either to someone’s nobility or Lady Gaga.

You may also dispense with the dreadfully patronising ‘mompreneur’ (unless you also use ‘dadpreneur’).

Sexist, semantic redundancies abound.

There may be a sequel.

EQUALITY NEWS IN BRIEF VIEW, Issue 42, 2017

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Equality book to be launched in Belfast

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atherine Mayer, co-founder with Sandi Toksvig of the Women's Equality Party in the UK, will be launching her new book, Attack of the Fifty Foot Women, in Belfast in March. The book will be published on International Women's Day (March 8) by HQ – an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers.

Catherine spent three decades as a journalist before co-founding the Women's Equality Party in 2015 and she is now the president of the party.

She said: “It wasn't until I started advocating for gender equality on doorsteps and at a meeting of the Women's Equality Party that I realised everyone struggles to imagine a gender equal society because nowhere on the planet does such a society exist. My book works to plug that gap.”

The party now has 65,000 members and has said that childcare will be its top priority, as universal childcare and shared parental leave could transform society at home and at work

Tackling inequality

Nuala Murphy, left, with Sheryl Sandberg

The biggest IT inward investor in Northern Ireland has joined with Lean In Belfast to launch a new initiative that aims to tackle the issue of inequality in the workplace.

The first ALLtogetherNI programmes with Lean In Belfast are backed by Angela Byrne, a senior manager with AllState NI, who is also chairwoman of Allstate’s Women in Technology NI network, and Belfast entrepreneur Nuala Murphy.

Allstate Northern Ireland has 2,300 staff locally and was set up in Belfast in 1999.

Ms Murphy plans to bring Facebook's chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg to Belfast two years after the official Belfast chapter of the 'Lean In' initiative was set up, inspired by Sandberg's book 'Lean In'. “ “Having more equality in the workplace in not just good for individual businesses, it is good for the whole economy, and that is good for Northern Ireland,” Ms Murphy said.

A voice for the transgender community

VIEW, Issue 42, 2017

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By Kylie Noble

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llen Murray, 23, from west Belfast, made history last year when she became the first transgender person to stand for election anywhere on the island of Ireland.

She wasn’t elected, but has been kept busy. GenderJam, which she founded and chairs, found a physical home in south Belfast, in October 2016.

“GenderJam came out of a Tumblr post in August 2013. I basically posted to the internet asking, did any young trans people want to go get a cup of tea? I called it “Young Trans Tea Belfast” and we met up in the Grapevine, which is a tiny little café, off Pottinger’s Entry.

“I was expecting two or three people, but we had 14 people,” said Ellen.

GenderJam formalised in 2014 and became a registered charity in 2016.

Alongside SAIL (a support organisation for the families of trans people), GenderJam is based on University Street. The centre is rented by SAIL and used by several trans community organisations.

Equality issues for transgender people consist of access to gender recognition, education, employment and healthcare.

“Trans people find it very difficult to have access to basic healthcare, GP practices and secondary care because of having problems proving identity or proving residency,” said Ellen.

Problems also exist in relation to the awareness levels of GPs. Many trans people in Northern Ireland are first sent through the mental health services instead of the main health service.

Access to education and employment are linked – if a trans young person struggles to achieve at school, or drops out, their job prospects are decreased.

“Schools in Northern Ireland are not mandated, really, to support transgender people, in terms of allowing them to transition,” added Ellen.

The vast number of single-sex schools in Northern Ireland are “a more tough environment and certainly, there’s that additional exposure of always sticking out”.

Schools not permitting pupils to use bathrooms they feel safe in cause several problems.

“A lot of young people go without using the bathroom, throughout the day and they go without food and drink, which has a massive impact on their education, on their concentration and their ability to focus,” said Ellen.

“It also leads to things like massively higher rates of urinary infections and sometimes eating disorders.

“In terms of forms of equality across Europe, there is a perceived increase in hate crime and hate incidents.

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Ellen Murray: ‘Equality issues for transgender people consist of access to gender recognition, education, employment and healthcare’

“It’s something we have to wait for the numbers on, but because of the increased visibility, and it’s been in the media a lot more, and the surge to the Right politically, has impacted. Trans people are often a very visible minority group,” she added.In the past year alone, 350 different people have been supported by GenderJam, with average numbers at meetings being 25 to 30. A base has also been set up in Newry, with hopes to expand further across the province.

• To get more details about GenderJam, go to https://genderjam.org.uk/contact-us/

INTERNATIONAL VIEW, Issue 42, 2017

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Sisters For Change

Twin sisters Jane, left, and Alison Gordon, who formed Sisters For Change

Brian Pelan talks to Holywood-born Jane Gordon about the work which she and her twin sister Alison are doing fighting for equality and tackling violence against women

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wo twin sisters, both from Holywood in Northern Ireland, have dedicated themselves to tackling violence against women across the world.

It’s a huge challenge but Jane and Alison Gordon are both formidable women in their own right and are passionate about what they do in the organisation they formed called Sisters For Change.

“We grew up in Holywood,” said Jane.

We were born on February 2, 1972, during the Troubles. Along with our brother, we went to study at Oxford University after leaving Sullivan Upper School in Holywood.

“Alison studied English and French and I studied law. The headmaster at Sullivan encouraged us, along with other pupils, to apply for a place at Oxford.

“We were surprised to get in. But we enjoyed the experience and have benefited from it.

“I think in terms of the careers we've chosen and the paths we've followed, growing up in Northern Ireland at the time we did has ingrained a very strong sense of the importance of justice and civil liberties and understanding the devastating damage and impact of discrimination and inequality.

“Our mother founded in all of us a strong sense of social justice. One of my reasons for studying law was very much focused on using law as a tool for positive social change. Alison spent a lot of time in

her career in public service, focusing on government responsibility and how it could be more responsive to its electorate.”

I asked Jane about her views on equality rights in Northern Ireland.

“I did a lot of work on equality issues during my career as a human rights lawyer and I’ve also had the great privilege of working with both the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland and the Human Rights Commission.

“In some respects, Northern Ireland had more developed equality laws than the rest of the UK, and Britain has had to do some catching up.

“We obviously have a strong tradition here of groups and NGOs working to embed equality laws and human rights standards. But the real challenge is to make those effective in practice.

“Our focus on violence against women is to try and make these equality laws real at the grassroots level.”

I asked Jane about the reasons behind the name of their organisation. “We took a lot of time about the name, Sisters For Change,” said Jane. “There are two reasons; the first is obvious. The second is that we had both watched the growing levels of violence against women around the world. We decided to bring all our different skills together by forming an organisation.

“We wanted to work with partners, women's groups and activists around the

world. And to stand shoulder to shoulder with them and to build a sisterhood of solidarity and support to combat violence against the most marginalised women.

“Our work in Britain has focused on how the State responds to violence against black, Asian and minority ethnic women and how the State funds the specialist services who deal with this issue.

“We're coming up to our third anniversary of Sisters For Change. We are still a very young organisation but we've had a significant impact.

“We chose to work in Indonesia and India for a couple of very serious reasons.

One is that they are both functioning democracies with a rule of law, and two, they, according to the World Health Organisation's most recent global study, suffer the highest levels of violence against women anywhere in the world.

“Sisters For Change works with networks of Dalit human rights defenders and women's rights activists across four states in India to combat violence against Dalit women and girls. Dalit – or scheduled caste – is the lowest caste in India. Dalit men and women are the most discriminated group across India and Dalit women and girls are specifically targeted for sexual and physical violence on a brutal and horrifying scale.

“Our work faces huge challenges, but you must work step by step up that mountain.”

COLUMN

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And now for another thing

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Writer Harry Reid recalls how a childhood memory acted as a trigger to once again invoke his belief in fraternity being a vital ingredient in the ongoing struggle for equality

was an orphan for what felt like a lifetime one Saturday morning in the Co-Op store on Belfast’s York Street.

There to visit Santa, my four-year-old hand parted from that of my mother.

Swivelling my head upward and to my right, my gaze sought, but failed to find, the familiar reassurance of her face.

She wasn’t there.

She had gone.

Vanished.

The mental video of this episode flickered unbidden onto my mind’s eye last month as I sat, half-a-century later, in a cinema in the same city.

On the screen, playing ahead of the feature I’d come to see, a short film unexpectedly showed a montage of images of community-based projects supported by funds from the Co-operative group.

Registering the connection, my subconscious squeezed out the disturbing vignette seared forever onto my memory by visceral fear.

As the reprised nausea of the past spiked and began to subside, I became aware of the sheer cinematic quality of what unfolded in front of me in the here and now.

Sumptuously shot, the touching and affecting footage captured a profound sense of connection amongst the human beings, a joyous slice of whose lives were on view.

In contrast to the drawbridge-up looming Dark Ages quality of recent events in Britain and the United States, here was emotional truth.

Simple genuine fraternity was giving the lie to the fear-fuelled fakery of privileged pretenders, pretending to embrace the concerns of ordinary people to fight ‘privileged elites’.

Here were ordinary people communing, and in the process helping resuscitate the increasingly anorexic hope of this viewer.

That this short film had the potential to be so effective became less of a surprise when I discovered that the director was

The pursuit of equality, without the anchor of fraternity, no matter how well intended, is a sterile one, inevitably mutating into the Orwellian tick-box tango we are all so wearily familiar with

none other than the masterful Shane Meadows.

In films such as ‘This Is England’, ‘A Room For Romeo Brass’ and ‘Somers Town’ he has consistently demonstrated himself to be an auteur storyteller of the authentic.

To filmically capture the potency of genuine fraternity is on a power with photographing the poetry of love.

Such achievement also acts as a foil to

reflect a simple truth about prevalent approaches to framing and responding to the dynamics of social affairs.

In the ongoing reordering of western societies in the continuing shockwaves of the feudalism-ending French Revolution, the political Right has taken liberty as their totem, with the Left doing likewise with equality.

Fraternity has largely been overlooked, set aside as something for exploration by Utopian communities.

The pursuit of equality, without the anchor of fraternity, no matter how well intended, is a sterile one, inevitably mutating into the Orwellian tick-box tango we are all so wearily familiar with.

Yet, happily this is being challenged.

For example an article in January of this year by the NI Equality Commission’s Chief Commissioner Michael Wardlow entitled ‘Changing Laws Is Easier Than Changing People’s Attitudes’ argued fiercely for the need for innovative approaches to promoting attitudinal change in relation to equality.

This means harnessing creativity to produce imaginative activity, products and initiatives, fuelled by an appreciation of fraternity, to promote equality.

My York Street orphan experience probably lasted 15 minutes until the warm words “there you are” took me out of tear-filled despondency.

Surely the so much less fortunate children across contemporary Europe, fleeing the savagery of Syria, Eritrea and elsewhere, could have hoped for a little more fraternity from the UK? CastleCourt car park has more parking spaces than the UK, as the fifth wealthiest nation on the planet, has been prepared to offer such unaccompanied children.

Cliché perhaps, but a hurt to one is a hurt to all.

No matter the manifestation of inequality, discrimination or indeed lack of humanity, fraternity offers a potent antidote.

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