Deep-rooted prejudice persists in Northern Ireland, with Roman Catholics remaining disadvantaged, particularly in employment, reports Susan McKay
Danny Kennedy, deputy leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, stood up in Stormont last week and said the North's Police Ombudsman, the formidable Nuala O'Loan, was compromised by her relationship with the SDLP.
He said the unionist community felt a "chill factor" in relation to her and saw her as "anti-police". This was a "significant problem", he concluded. He is wrong on all counts. For a start, O'Loan is not in the SDLP and has always shown her independence. What Kennedy was referring to is the fact that she is married to the Ballymena councillor Declan O'Loan. Kennedy's sexism, though, isn't the only issue. There is no evidence O'Loan is anti-police. She is also strikingly popular. A recent survey showed 74 per cent of Protestants believed she would deal impartially with complaints against the police, and 77 per cent said her office would help the police do a good job. The "significant problem" is Kennedy's. He assumes O'Loan can't have views which are not her husband's. He disregards evidence of her impartiality. He ignores proof that Protestants respect her. It is hard not to see his attitude as sectarian.
The persistence of such prejudice, against all the evidence, was also exposed last week with the publication of a report from the Belfast-based human rights group, the Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ). The report, Equality in Northern Ireland: the Rhetoric and the Reality, was launched by William C Thompson jnr, the New York City comptroller.
Thompson is, as he said himself, a man in a position with "considerable clout", the custodian of billions of dollars worth of pension funds, including $9 billion invested in 260 companies in Northern Ireland. He pointed out that the report shows equality has not been fully achieved. Catholics are still disadvantaged. Growing prosperity has not reached the poorest communities, Protestant or Catholic.
The CAJ report is a disquieting read. The Good Friday agreement and the 1998 Northern Ireland Act laid down a strong framework for equality, based on 30 years of experience of what works and what doesn't. Good progress has been made. However, the CAJ shows that the law has not been vigorously enforced, that hard statistical evidence has been ignored or distorted, and that key policies which have been pursued over recent years have undermined the framework.
Several of the North's largest private employers have workforces in which Catholics are under-represented by 20 per cent or more. The North's public sector is notoriously over-inflated, accounting for 63 per cent of the economy. At the top four grades of the civil service, a third of the whole, Catholics are under-represented by 7 per cent. Catholics have lower levels of employment and more of them live in households in which no one has a job, though the number of Protestants in such households is rising. The British government's Targeting Social Need programme, set up 15 years ago, had the capacity to reduce both Protestant and Catholic poverty. It was sidelined, along with other initiatives.
The recent "Taskforce on Protestant Working Class Communities" was, says the CAJ, "totally misconceived" and also served to sectarianise the issue of poverty. The taskforce blatantly promotes the "myth" that Catholics are better able to cope with poverty than Protestants. It has also delivered remarkably little to those it was meant to help - it was £33 million of smoke and mirrors.
This week's report on the performance of the British government's Invest Northern Ireland programme shows a similar failure to address the equality issue, with very little investment going to the most deprived areas.
Thompson is determined this situation must be addressed, and urgently. "The government of NI must set goals and timetables to end discrimination in all its forms," he said last week. Unemployment must be reduced, and economic opportunity must be created for those most in need. He promised to be a "willing and aggressive partner in the struggle to bring full equality".
Anyone inclined to think this was an idle piece of rhetoric should be advised that the comptroller's office has form. Its clout has already ensured compliance with the McBride principles of fair employment in many of the big US companies.
Thompson also believes in direct, local action. A couple of years ago he learned that a mural showing masked gunmen and declaring that this was the "UFF heartland" had been painted on the gable wall of a Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) franchise on Belfast's Shankill Road. Thompson pointed out to executives at the company that his office owned a million KFC shares. Perhaps they'd like to remove the mural, he suggested. It was gone the next day.