Human Rights in Ireland

We are delighted to welcome this guest post on worker occupations by Dr. Niall Cullinane. Dr. Cullinane is a lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast and has published in the areas of employee representation, redundancy and worker occupation

After a minor ‘wave’ of high-profile disputes in 2009 (Visteon Belfast, Waterford Crystal and Thomas Cook Dublin), workplace sit-ins have once again remerged into the public spotlight in Ireland as the dispute at Vita Cortex drags on into its fourth month. This occurred in a context punctuated by two other short-lived sit-ins at a La Senza retail outlet and Galway Airport. The issue at the heart of the ongoing Vita Cortex dispute has centred on the issue of redundancy pay. This is a fairly representative factor in explaining other known instances where workplace sit-ins have occurred in recent times, both nationally and internationally. Typically the sit-in emerges around a set of fairly idiosyncratic social processes: workers are presented with total redundancy and closure; there is a short time scale with little or no notice or consultation; there is no, or substantially diminished, severance pay and/or the loss of pension rights. Throw into the mix particularist legacies of a well-organised, unionised workforce, alongside high profile examples of worker sit-ins in recent times (which have a ‘demonstrative effect’) and one may well find the tactic being adopted.

Read Full Post »

We are delighted to host this guest post by Alan Desmond. Alan is writing a PhD at University College Cork, under the supervision of Professor Siobhán Mullally, on the regularisation of undocumented migrants in international and European Human Rights Law. Alan is a Government of Ireland Research Scholar in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

The immigration to Poland from the east which followed the collapse of communism in 1989 and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, coupled with EU accession negotiations in the 1990s, forced Poland to try to put in place a framework to deal with immigration. One of the methods employed in the field of irregular immigration was to implement regularisation or legalisation programmes, a process whereby unlawfully present non-EU citizens can apply for a legal status.

Read Full Post »

Supergrass. A word forever associated with Northern Ireland in the 1980s. A bit like crispy pancakes and Dallas, it was difficult to grow up in the province in the 1980s and escape exposure to the stream of supergrass trials (not that I’m claiming the exposure had as much immediate impact on my three-year-old self as, well, crispy pancakes). Read Full Post »

A Fianna Fáil senator, Averil Power, has published a bill which would prohibit discrimination against teachers on grounds of sexual orientation. Having enacted and maintained the current provisions in force during its years in office, the party seems to have performed an about-turn on this issue: leader Micheál Martin said: “As a republican party, a commitment to fighting discrimination in all forms is a core value for Fianna Fáil.”

The bill is conceived of as a partial corrective to the controversial, broad exemption currently provided for denominational schools in employment equality law.  Section 37 of the Employment Equality Act 1998 exempts denominational schools from the scope of the prohibition on employment discrimination where such discrimination is “reasonable” in relation to the need to “maintain the religious ethos of the institution. This is a vague formulation, to say the least, and its scope is unclear. The exemption is not explicitly confined to discrimination on religious grounds. At minimum, it is considered to allow schools to discriminate in favour of coreligionists. This is not, however, confined to teachers with a role in religious instruction, as there is no explicit requirement that the relevant form of discrimination should be necessary to an  “occupational” function, specifically. This may derive from the idea that a religious ethos is meant to pervade the whole of a school environment, and so can legitimately command deference from all school employees. It appeals to teachers’ role in in communicating, promoting and even personifying a school’s peculiar set of values: in John McGahern’s terms, teachers in Ireland were traditionally conceived of as the “second priesthood”.[i]

Read Full Post »

Judges in England and Wales have long been sensitive of the boundaries of their authority under the Judicial Review jurisdiction. Lord Hope recently sought to highlight the limits of the judicial role in the Axa Insurance (2011) case, by contrasting it with the focus of Parliament (at [49]):

While the judges, who are not elected, are best placed to protect the rights of the individual, including those who are ignored or despised by the majority, the elected members of a legislature of this kind are best placed to judge what is in the country’s best interests as a whole.

Today the High Court provided a nuanced judgment in a judicial review action brought over the raise in university tuition fees to a maximum of £9000 which will be introduced in September 2012. Although the claimant teenagers (Katy Moore and Callum Hurley, pictured above left) were unsuccessful in their bid to have the Court quash the Higher Education (Higher Amount) Regulations 2010 which introduced the fees, the judges did recognise that ministers had failed to fully carry out some of their Public Sector Equality Duties (PSEDs), which require that consideration be given to whether the decision to increase tuition fees had a disproportionate (and hence, potentially indirectly discriminatory) impact on protected groups within society. Read Full Post »

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) has developed and launched www.counterextremism.org, an online resource for policy makers working on radicalisation and polarisation. It includes an easily searchable up-to-date repository of government policies and programmes, both current and historical, and contains a log of case studies and evaluated best practices. This library of resources acts as a one-stop-shop for those working to tackle radicalisation and polarisation, contains a diary of forthcoming events and meetings, and has an ‘expert finder’. The website also has the capability to support online practitioner network forums, ‘hot topic’ and crisis response chat rooms, and expert facilitated discussions. Funded by the European Commission, it is intended to help policy makers, decision makers, practitioners and academics to exchange information and examples of good practice, stay in touch, and remain up-to-date with latest developments.

Last Sunday Adrian Weckler had a piece in the Sunday Business Post reporting a conversation with Minister for State, Séan Sherlock (left), about his intention to introduce legislation that would provide for extensive ISP blocking in Ireland (summary on TJ McIntyre’s blog). Detail is somewhat light, although unsurprisingly so really as the provisions are to be contained in a Statutory Instrument and therefore will not be susceptible to open parliamentary debate and contestation. Minister Sherlock is engaging extensively on this matter on his twitter page, and argues that the SI simply clarifies the law in light of the decision in EMI v UPC, the difficulty seems to be in terms of clarity and scope. In essence, the idea is to allow for websites that carry copyrighted material to be blocked, which on the face of it seems to be a laudable enough objective. After all, the holder of intellectual property does require protection from piracy, and it is quite legitimate for the state to undertake steps to prevent illegal copyright infringement. The core difficulty from a human rights perspective is the potential scope of this power. Read Full Post »

We are delighted to welcome this guest post from Verona Ní Dhrisceoil. Verona is currently completing a PhD in the area of law and language rights in University College Cork, under the supervision of Professor Siobhan Mullally. Her PhD has been funded by the Higher Education Authority.  Verona has worked as a legal researcher for the Law Reform Commission of Ireland and the Irish Penal Reform Trust, and in 2010, was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship.

Recent government announcements proposing a Review of the Official Languages Act 2003 and a merging of the Office of the Language Commissioner with the Office of the Ombudsman have brought Irish language rights issues to the forefront of public and academic debate. The two separate but related proposals arise as part of the government’s National Plan for Recovery.

In March 2011, the government published an economic recovery plan titled Towards Recovery: Programme for National Government 2011-2016. In it, seven pledges were made to the Irish language under the An Ghaeilge agus An Ghaeltacht section. With specific reference to legislative protection, the Programme stated that a review of the Official Languages Act 2003 (OLA) will be carried out “to ensure expenditure on the language is best targeted towards the development of the language and that obligations are imposed appropriately in response to demand from citizens.” On this basis, the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, launched A Review of the Official Languages Act, in November 2011. As part of the review process, the Department has invited submissions evaluating the implementation of the Act, from interested parties. Submissions are to be made to the Department on or before the 31 January 2012. As part of the consultative process, the Department has also published a bilingual survey on its website to afford respondents the opportunity to indicate their views on the provision of public services in the Irish language.

Read Full Post »

The thorny issue of secularism and religious diversity has entered the (nascent) French presidential race. Eva Joly, a popular Franco-Norwegian public figure who became famous for tackling corruption and environmental abuse as an investigating magistrate, entered the fray this week with a suggestion that the feast days of Yom Kippour and Aïd-el-kebir should be recognised by the State. The candidate for the Europe Écologie-Les Verts party, decried how Sarkozy’s presidency had set back the cause of equality, citing educational “apartheid” and the “undignified” treatment of those living in the disadvantaged banlieues. She  advocated measures which would ensure “equal treatment for religions in the public sphere”, including the addition of the Muslim and Jewish public holidays. She argued that in treating religions equally, this would advance rather than offend the distinct French tradition of state secularism or laïcité, in ensuring that public holidays were not attuned exclusively to the Christian calendar.

Read Full Post »

Ireland lost two great citizens yesterday: Mary Raftery and John McCarthy. Both fought bravely to expose injustice in Irish society, through journalism and through activism. Their work has given voice to many who have long been ignored by society – people who were institutionalised, and whose freedom and dignity were denied by the treatment they received.

Read Full Post »