The Equality Authority will have to engage in social engineering and persuasion to achieve its eccentric ideal of equality, writes Desmond Fennell.
I read with attention the article "A strong appetite for equality" by Equality Authority chief executive Niall Crowley ( The Irish Times, Monday, February 5th, 2007), in which he outlined the authority's programme for the coming year. However, the ways in which the agency plans to change our society has raised several questions that were not answered in his article.
As I read the examples of alleged "inequality" that the authority plans to end, I asked myself, what does "equality" mean for Crowley and his colleagues? "Equality before the law" is an excellent principle, but Crowley's aim goes far beyond that. What definition of a "good society" does the authority operate under? Is it the following:
"In a good society, all the licit activities in which some persons engage - eg remaining at school until 18, going to university, having employment, taking part in the Irish Olympics team, receiving adequate health treatment, parenting children, performing top management jobs, earning x payment for y work - will be engaged in by members of every imaginable social group, in numbers proportionate to the size of the group." Is that a correct description of the kind of society the authority is trying to bring about? If not, it would be useful if Crowley told us in one sentence what an "equal" society means.
Assuming that I have got the authority's understanding of "equality" more or less right, one difficulty arises. What if the members of a certain social group don't want to fill their quota? Every day, for example, we see differences in activity between males and females, arising from differences in what they want. Males fish in canals. Females, not wanting to, don't. Many boys skateboard. Few girls do.
What if many people with disabilities don't want paid jobs? Or what if hardly any African Irish people want to go to university?
What does the agency plan to do about differences in what people want? Engage in social engineering and persuasion to make people want to fill their group quota? If so, it sounds pretty 1984-ish.
Crowley writes: "Young people report their institutional relationships with adults as being for the most part unequal." What does "institutional relationships" mean? What age group is he referring to? Is he suggesting that it is right to treat 10-year-olds or 16-year-olds as if they were adults? Given that "unequal" in the agency's jargon means "immoral", is the suggestion here that the relationship of docile young person to teaching adult is immoral?
Crowley continues: "Few of the rights, responsibilities and benefits assigned to married heterosexual couples are available to gay and lesbian couples."
Is he suggesting that the authority believes the latter sort of couples should have all the rights, responsibilities and benefits of married couples, and that the agency will work to bring this about? On what grounds should this occur, given that marriage was instituted mainly as a secure social setting for the generation and rearing of children?
Crowley is aware that, since the beginning of history, there has been no human society organised as he and his agency wish to organise Irish society. Is he sure that Irish people have given him the authority to engage in the social engineering that will be necessary to bring about his eccentric ideal?
It is possible that all those other societies avoided pursuing Crowley's social goal because they sensed that it would damage their societies, materially or morally. If the agency's engineering appeared to be causing material or moral damage to Irish society, would Crowley call off his operation, or press ahead?
Desmond Fennell's next book, About Behaving Normally in Abnormal Circumstances , will be published this year