IF there was no discrimination there would be no need for the sprawling Northern Ireland equality industry that leeches onto every vein of funding it can find and sucks up astonishing quantities of money and resources that could be more usefully used for economic and social development.
The underlying rationale for this industry’s existence goes back to the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the premise that Northern Ireland is an institutionally Protestant state in which there is rampant and structural discrimination against Roman Catholics. This thesis found a home in the liberal-left revolution theology of the time and in the ranks of the “progressive” activists who have pursued Gramsci’s march through the institutions.
Academics, terrorist propagandists, “human rights” lawyers, politicians, community groups, left-wing journalists and foreign politicians have all exploited the oppressed Catholics narrative for their personal gain. These are people with small and blinkered horizons, we know this because none of them were able to see a few miles to the south and notice the truly institutionalised discrimination that all but cleared the Republic of Ireland of its Protestant population.
What would happen if the unthinkable happened and it transpired that things were not so bad in Northern Ireland after all?
Would the equality industry embrace the news, claim success for a job done and promptly close operations and go and find something useful to do instead?
Or would the news be hushed up so that the grant application requests could continue to flow?
We got the answer last week when MLA Jim Allister unearthed a report by the Equality Commission which shows that over the last 20 years Protestants have been disadvantaged in the Northern Ireland job market.
The report, ‘Trends in Community Proportions of Applications and Appointments to the Public and Private Sectors’, has been available since March on the commission’s website, but only if you knew where to look.
Go and have a look at the Equality Commission’s website and see if you can find it amongst the blizzard of politically correct buzzwords such as ‘recommended indicator framework’, ‘cultural awareness’, and ‘solidarity between generations’.
I spent an hour yesterday trying to find the report but failed, but I know it is there, as Mr Allister kindly sent me the direct link to it. This is world class burying of inconvenient news.
That such a serious and expensive piece of work which came to such an important conclusion was not the subject of a greater effort to publicise looks very odd. Does anyone seriously believe that had this report shown on-going Catholic disadvantage it would all have been kept so quiet?
Had that been the case the equality industry would have gone into turbo mode, and conferences would have been called to discuss the report’s findings.
What the report shows is that widespread discrimination is now largely a thing of the past. The discrepancies are probably explainable in terms of educational attainment patterns and the annual exodus of Protestant kids to universities on the mainland, where many of them stay.
It is also the case that this sort of nonsense is exactly the reason that many people from a unionist background are discouraged from applying for positions with organisations in the equality and human rights industries.
Doubtless there are still instances of sectarian discrimination.
What the report really underlines is that Northern Ireland is a society that remains institutionally segregated, and is run on the basis of sectarian headcounts, and that this suits the main political parties just fine.
This was exposed yet again in relation to the redevelopment of the former Girdwood Barracks, which has been delayed for many years as unionist and nationalist parties have sought to gain a share of housing for their respective communities. There has now been agreement on the building of “Protestant” or “Catholic” houses, reinforcing segregation and allowing the politicians to preen in front of their little fiefdoms.
It is half a century since the international civil rights movements got going and the best that is on offer is segregated housing.