Job discrimination worked in N. Ireland - part 2

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 29, 1993 by Gary MacEoin

McBride principles can be effective way to create level playing field for Catholics

BELFAST, Northern Ireland - Job discrimination based on religious affiliation has been official policy in Northern Ireland since the British parliament created the state in 1920. This, government ministers repeatedly promised their Unionist/Protestant followers, would prevent employment of Catholics, curtail their economic influence, and ensure high emigration of prolific Catholics.

The policy was developed by the Masonic and Orange Orders and managed by the civil service and private employers. Catholic professionals were limited to serving their own community in areas of religion, education, medicine and law. Catholic business was ghettoed into betting shops, taverns, small farming and construction.

As prime minister in 1934, Lord Craigavon declared in the Stormont Parliament with disarming frankness: "I am an Orangeman first and a politician and member of this parliament after-wards. All I boast is that we are a Protestant parliament and a Protestant state."

Such a policy contains a built-in contradiction. That the poor produce more offspring than the rich is a sociological fact affected only marginally, if at all, by religion. The main causal factor is economic. Children cost the poor little to raise and they quickly become productive.

Thus, keeping Catholics poor guaranteed they would increase their proportion of the total population, thereby threatening the very existence of the "Protestant" state. To keep Catholics poor, Catholics had to be and were systematically excluded from all but the lowest paying jobs in both private and public sectors. They were thus forced to emigrate in sufficient numbers to offset their higher reproduction rates.

Despite recurring protests from civil-rights and other groups, the British government refused from 1920 to 1972 to exercise its right to intervene. Only when the violent Protestant reaction to the Catholic civil rights movement of the 1960s shocked world opinion did London finally suspend the subordinate Stormont parliament and reintroduce direct rule.

Catholics hailed the 1973 Northern Ireland Constitution Act, which outlawed discrimination on religious or political grounds. In the British legal system, however, calling an act "constitutional" adds nothing to its weight or permanence. What the Mother of Parliaments does today, it can undo tomorrow.

Within three years, implementing legislation - ironically entitled the Fair Employment Act (FEA) - effectively gutted the Constitution Act.

The FEA'S most outrageous change was to repeal any legal responsibility of the government for discrimination in the public sector. In all countries the government is the biggest employer of labor. In Northern Ireland it controls directly or indirectly, far more labor than all other employers combined.

Discriminatory government always needs high proportions of military, police, prison and other "correctional" personnel, and this was the situation in Northern Ireland from its creation. The breakdown of the social consensus in the late 1960s resulted in a shrinking in industrial employment and a massive increase in military, police and prison personnel.

Today, 40 percent of all those gainfully employed in Northern Ireland work for some branch of government. They include 19, 100 military and 12,900 uniformed members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. next year, it was recently projected, there will be an army/RUC member for every 3.7 Catholic males between ages 16 and 44.

Firms whose principal business consists of supplying goods or services to government agencies constitute another major segment, variously estimated at 20 to 40 percent of all employment. The government has it in its hands to end discrimination almost overnight by monitoring its own employment practices and those of firms that depend directly on it for survival.

In addition, the 1976 Act defined affirmative action so narrowly as to exclude most training and recruitment programs. The Fair Employment Agency set up by the act as a monitoring mechanism even ruled that a local government body was guilty of "benign discrimination" by looking for qualified Catholics to lessen the imbalance of its work force.

The act did retain the principle of damages against private employers. But the onus of proof was placed on the victim. And if bias was proved, employers were exonerated by claiming - without proof! - that they believed that the per. son held violent political beliefs.

If all else failed, the government could exempt a company from investigation or prosecution on grounds of national security or public order. After four years of litigation by a Catholic contractor against the Northern Ireland Electricity Board, Tom King, the top British official in Northern Ireland, quashed the proceedings by issuing a Public Interest Immunity Certificate.

In its first 12 years of existence, the agency investigated 605 complaints. It found in favor of Catholics charging discrimination in 52 cases, 8.6 percent. Fourteen of these cases were subsequently overturned in court. The final figure is 6.3 percent.