The Minister for Education, Ruairi Quinn has been making his inaugural speeches to the Teachers Union conferences this week. Yesterday he spoke at the TUI conference and raised the issue of lesbian and gay teachers and the possible impact of equality legislation protections regarding religious ethos.
Before concluding I want to consider one further issue that I know is of concern to your members.
It has no material cost implications and does not impact on the public finances but it does matter hugely to those concerned.
I am referring to the anxieties of those members of the teaching profession who are concerned that the fact that they may be gay or lesbian could be held against them, either in an explicit or a more subtle manner, by the management of some schools.
While the concern may in part derive from one possible interpretation of certain legal provisions I believe that the real challenge is to change attitudes.
Therefore I am more than happy to have my Department work with your officials and the relevant education partners on developing codes of practice to address this issue.
The President of the TUI in her reply referred to the concerns of TUI members.
TUI is requesting you here today Minister to do something else for equality. It is time now for the government to repeal the draconian Section t37(1) of the Employment Equality Act 1998 which relates to religious schools and institutions
It allows them to discriminate against employees/potential employees on religious grounds to maintain their ethos or to prevent an individual from undermining that ethos TUI is of the view that aspects of a person’s private life might be interpreted as undermining the ethos of a particular institution. In particular, lesbian ,gay and transgender teachers are concerned that in religious run schools including Community & Comprehensive schools that being open about their sexual orientation may be prejudicial to their chances of employment and promotion and may lead to discrimination against them. This type of legislation has no place in a new Ireland please repeal this draconian section of the act.
Today’s Irish Times further reports that the Minister recognised that people may be prevented from entering into civil partnerships becuase of fear of losing their job or being discriminated against.
Mr Quinn said the programme for government agreed between Fine Gael and Labour did “talk about moving in this area”. While he could not anticipate what final action the Government would take on legislation, he did believe it was important to recognise that Ireland was now “more tolerant and inclusive”.
“There is an understandable concern that many people who might contemplate a civil partnership feel that perhaps they can’t do that because of the action that might be taken by patrons of some schools. But I would hope that as we move to complete the Republic and make it pluralist and open and inclusive, that those fears can be allayed.”
“Asked if it would be repealed, he said he could not anticipate what final action the Government will take.
“It’s not necessarily part of my remit at this point in time,” he added.”
No sooner does his arse land on the seat of a Mercedes, than the backtracking and equivocating begins…
”While the concern may in part derive from one possible interpretation of certain legal provisions I believe that the real challenge is to change attitudes”. and ”I am more than happy to have my Department work with your officials and the relevant education partners on developing codes of practice to address this issue”.
the above statements on the issue by Minister Quinn appear very weak. How can ‘codes of practice’ be effective remedies to a section of the Employment Equality Act which essentially legislates for discrimination. The only remedy is abolition or amendment of Sce 37. changing attitudes is much more difficult than simply changing legislation so that regardless of ones attitude one cannot discriminate.. change the law and the attitude may well follow.
Quinn is in an interesting dilemma on his political strategy on this issue.
He had set himself the target of the Roman Catholic church handing over half of its primary schools to the State or secular bodies, and it would look bad to strip the churches of a say within the remaining schools they control while at the same taking large chunks of their schools from them.
And he has found that although most people think dealing with church ownership of schools means Roman Catholic ownership, it is the Protestant churches who put up a vigorous fight, and as they are minorities, doing damage to them is presented as failing to accommodate diversity. (The TUI genuflected to that subtlety when their motion this week calling for the removal of state state-funding for fee-charging schools when they said this was not directed at minority-faith schools. If the issues is probed — which the journalists reporting on it have not yet done — squaring that circle will take some theological limbo dancing by the TUI: filthy rich Protestants benefit just as much as filty rich Roman Catholics from the support the State provides for their children’s schooling in fee-charging schools.)
And while I have the floor, did anybody notice the less than enthusiastic answer Quinn gave to a written parliamentary question a short while ago on what the inspectors will do about homophobic (and racist) bullying? You wouldn’t think from the answer that combating homophobic bullying in schools is named as a priority issue in the Programme for Government: http://debates.oireachtas.ie/dail/2011/04/13/00080.asp
The issue goes back to the High Court when it ruled about the dismissal of Eileen Flynn and later the Supreme Court found that the first Equal Status Bill and Employment Equality Bill was unconstitutional on similar grounds. The Oireachtas cannot introduce legislation which it would be reasonable to believe might be unconstitutional. Procedurally, this legislation belongs in the area of Dept of Justice or Employment at very best, so he is correct to say it is not his call. Do not underestimate the power of codes of practice, they were first used to up hold LGBT rights in the public service. They are not ideal, but at least they are a holder and need to be applied in the health services too.
No, Nick not quite. The Supreme Court decision on the unconstitutionality of the 1997 version of the Employment Equality Bill was primarily about the cost implications of accommodating the needs of people with disabilities, particularly in private employment.
Tipster- why does it ‘look bad to strip the churches of a say within the remaining schools they control while at the same taking large chunks of their schools from them.’
these schools are State funded by we the tax payer- they are not fiefdoms for the Catholic church to play out discrimination against minority groups.
@ Rachel Mullen – The answer to the question lies in what I didn’t say: to whom would it “look bad”? The approach that is being pursued, and which has been promoted by players in the system is a model of ‘diversity’ that expands the existing model we have had since the 1800s: separate schools for the Roman Catholics and the Protestants (expanded in the 1930s with a Jewish school, in the 1970s with multi-denominational schools, and more recently with Muslim schools, and also taking an additional dimension with the Gaelscoileanna, some of which are nulti-denominational and some Roman Catholic).
(Historcially we have had only one significant State-run sector, at second level the VEC schools, and they were for the poorer classes. Even then, the Roman Catholic church had a significant input, through membership of the Vocational Education Committees and, in recent years, State funding for a chaplain.)
I am not aware of anybody within the education system who has challenged that model.
The approach to the changes in Irish society, and continued by Ruairí Quinn with more enthusiasm than his predecessors Mary Hanafin and Mary Coughlan, has been to seek to expand the number of patrons, and now because we cannot increase the numbers of schools everywhere to seek to remove some primary schools from RC church patronage.
Missing from this is any discussion of what should be the boundaries of church (or other patron) control of what schools do (although an occasional skirmish is to be seen in a few of the Inspectors’ school evaluation reports).
Last year, at an Equality Authority conference, the academic lawyer Colm Ó Cinneide drew attention to the underlying problem, although he was not speaking about the education system. We treat equality and non-discrimination on the religion ground as being on a par with discrimination on other grounds.
Religious-run schools mean different things to different players. It is discussed as being a valuable mechanism for protecting and perpetuating an important part of a community’s identity: “here, our religion can be passed on”.
That is fine for some of the elements of what that means. It is not a serious concern (to me) that a school teaches, say, that Jesus died and rose from the dead three days later, or that he was born to a virgin. Many Roman Catholic schools do that, successfully respecting the fact that this is not a belief held by many in the classroom.
The failure of the education system – the Department, the patrons, and the unions – is that it has pretended that all that a religious education amounts to is that kind of theology or a ‘soft’ ethics – concern for the poverty, future employment rights and possible exploitation of those in the recent Trocaire advertisements, for example.
Nobody in a significant position in the education system has been prepared to deal honestly with the clash that Ó Cinneide drew attention to. And it is when it comes to sexual orientation (and gender) that the incompatibility is starkest. It is simply not possible to tell a class of thirteen-year-olds that same-sex sexual activity is a serious sin (worse, even, than sex outside marriage, which has the virtue of being a ‘natural’ urge) without breaching one or other of two rights set out in our laws:
- the right of religious bodies to teach their beliefs in a state-funded school or
- the right of a lesbian (or bi or gay) student not to be harassed in school.
And, in my opinion, when it is analysed properly, the source of the funding of the school has nothing to do with the rights and wrongs of the issue: young gay people in a school, including a Sunday school, that receives nothing from the State have a right to be free of harassment.
However, while Ruairí Quinn pursues a model of diversity that leaves protections around some religious spaces and practices, but just reduces the number of those spaces, and believes and pretends that this is a good approach, then it will be difficult for him to tackle the problem of what happens inside those islands, precisely because his approach has been to accept the rationale for their existence in the first place.
Spotted at Dublin Pride // Jun 25, 2011 at 23:57
[...] that work is going well regarding Section 37 [...]