THE CHALLENGE TO DISCRIMINATION A LONG ROAD TO MARCH By Oliver Kearney Published by Labour Committee on Ireland in association with '68 Civil Rights Committee. Published in the USA by the American Protestants for Truth on Ireland. The road from the County Tyrone village of Coalisland to the market town of Dungannon is a little over four-and-a-half miles long and mostly uphill. It is a long road to march. On 4 September 1988, one thousand nationalist people set out from Coalisland to march to Dungannon. They included toddlers of five and six years of age, septuagenarians, and a very high proportion of young people in their teens and twenties, In their midst walked a middle aged woman, slightly stooped from the effects of the nine bullets which had ploughed into her body seven years earlier. Bernadette (Devlin) McAliskey was once more leading a civil rights march on the road from Coalisland to Dungannon. As a twenty one year old university student she had previously walked the same route twenty years earlier on 24 August 1968. She returned to lead her people in a commemoration of that first ever non-violent demonstration for civil rights in the partitioned six county state of Northern Ireland. In the years between, the student who joined in that first march had suffered a term of imprisonment for helping to defend her community against the armed forces of the state; had physically assaulted a British Minister on the floor of the House of Commons after fourteen of her countrymen had been shot dead on their own streets of Derry on Bloody Sunday; and had narrowly survived as attempted assassination of herself and her family by loyalist death squads, which had been trained by the British intelligence services. The people she represented at Westminster as an elected MP have suffered twenty years of warfare, bloodshed and military repression in the towns and villages of the Six Counties. Ten thousand regular combat troops of the British Army supplemented by 20,000 armed police and locally recruited Loyalist militia, police the community with heavy armour and helicopters. Thousands of civilians have been interned without trial. The jails and graveyard have been filled with a steady stream of young men and women--victims of a perverted of a perverted judicial system which has no parallel outside South Africa. The two partitioned states of Ireland, north and south, have become militarized social machined, devoting vast resources to protecting an artificial border which has divided Ireland geographically. That border has, since its imposition by the British parliament sixty years earlier strangled the IRish economy. It has prompted every conceivable abuse of human rights in Ireland and Britain in the name of maintaining law and order. The girl student who walked to Dungannon twenty years ago, and those who joined her on the streets to demand the most elementary civil rights have been credited with responsibility for inducing bloody warfare which has continued for twenty years. In a sense, they were, and are responsible. For to demand social justice and civil rights for nationalist people in the six county state of Northern Ireland was to challenge the very existence of a state which had been created by the British parliament to guarantee perpetual domination of the Protestant loyalist community over their nationalist fellow countrymen-- trapped as a permanent minority in an artificially created laager in Northern Ireland. THREATEN** To mount such a challenge was to threaten the foundations of sectarianism and domination upon which the state was built, and to inspire a ferocious reaction by the troops of the state, which in 1969, obliged the British parliament to order its troops onto the street as its control over the six counties disintegrated in widespread civil disorder. Twenty years later, young British soldiers from Birmingham, Devon and Glasgow still die brutal deaths on the streets of north east Ireland; while the British people have been sucked into acquiescing in every possible perversion of law and human rights in support of their Government's attempts to maintain the status quo of Irish partition. If the sum total of suffering endured as a consequence of this bloody conflict by the people of Britain and Ireland, could somehow be quantified and set alongside the achievement of full civil rights and social justice for all sections of the community in north east Ireland, Britain might perhaps feel vindicated in having debased her reputation as a protector of human rights in the eyes of the world. She might argue that the cost in the lives and disabilities suffered by her young servicemen and civilian population were worthy of the goals which had been achieved. The girls student who walked to Dungannon twenty years ago, and the scores of thousands of nationalists who joined her in peaceful street demonstrations might possibly say: "It was a terrible price to pay to achieve social justice--but the achievement was worth the suffering endured!" DREADFUL** The dreadful reality is that today, twenty years after those modest demands for full equality of citizenship in the six county state of Northern Ireland were made by non-violent civil rights demonstrators, the position of working class nationalists has worsened immeasurably. In his book, "Northern Ireland Between Civil Rights and Civil War" (CSE Books, London, 1981) Liam O'Dowd describes the six county state created by the British parliament's Government of Ireland Act (1920): "Political power was concentrated on the hands of a small clique of civil servants and ministers...but it was a function of the Unionist state itself...which was largely responsible for the (siege) mentality." "By openly demonstrating its distrust of Catholics, by excluding them with rare exceptions from all but the most menial types of government employment...it demonstrated to the Protestant population just now seriously it took the threat of Catholic subversion." The British parliament had decided to finally solve "the Irish Problem" by creating a laager in north east Ireland which would guarantee in perpetuity the dominance of a select clique of Protestant loyalist businessmen and landowners who would protect their dowry with Special Powers Acts, a Protestant paramilitary police force, and pervasive structures of economic inequality and discrimination. GHOST** Almost seventy years later, the ghost of those long-dead parliamentarians must gaze with horror upon the blood morass into which their cynical pragmatism of 1920 has dragged the peoples of Britain and Ireland in 1988. The British parliament established, financed and armed the new six county state, and then abandoned all responsibility for the behaviors of the 'Broederbond' of Orange-Unionist politicians and civil servants who were left in control. It retrospect the consequences were predictable. To protect the new statelet against subversion, a system of policing and legal controls was established which earned the public admiration of Dr. Henrik Voerword of South Africa. To protect the state against the growth in numbers and political and economic strength by the nationalist minority, an economic system was devised which has been described as akin to 'economic apartheid.' EXTENDED** Bew and Patterson in 'The British State and the Ulster Crisis' (Verso, London, 1985) show how the Orange order, already influential in the pre-partition local authority system was, after 1920 extended into the new state apparatus: "It concentrated...on the prevention of 'peaceful infiltration' by Catholics into public positions. In this it was highly successful. By 1943, only 37 of the 634 civil servants in administrative and technical grades were Catholics and there was no Catholic in the top 55 posts." Twenty years later, the chief economic planner for the Northern Ireland civil service, and the strategist who devised the 1965 'Wilson ' plan for future economic development wrote: "They {the Catholics} have less to complain about than the U.S. negroes and their lot is a very pleasant one compared with the nationalists in, say, the Ukraine...they were made to feel inferior and to make matters worse, they often were inferior, if only in those personal qualities that make for competitive economic life." ('Ulster Under Home Rule', ed T. Wilson, Oxford University Press, London 1955). MENTALITY** Given such a mentality at the highest levels of the civil service, it was hardly surprising that sustained economic engineering produced a decrease in the Catholic population of the province. In the Fair Employment Trust's document: "Westminster's Apartheid Economy" (Belfast, 1986), the authors show that the proportion of 10-30 year old Catholics in the province declined from 37.7 percent to 35.4 percent in the period from 1951 to 1961. With a birth rate approximately double that of the Protestant population, official census figures show that between 1937 and 1961, the Catholic population of the province remained virtually static--33.5 percent in 1937, 34.9 percent in 1961. During this period, Catholic emigration represented 21 percent of the Catholic population, whilst Protestant emigration represented only 8 percent of the Protestant population. The emigration figures were directly in inverse proportion to population. In 'The Northern Ireland Problem' (1962), Barritt and Carter concluded that "...difference in economic opportunity is a regulator maintaining the status quo." It might have been expected that the Post War economic boom of the late 1950's and early 1960's would create conditions in which some leveling out of economic equality between the two communities might occur. This might have been seen as a strategy for reconciling the nationalist minority to accept their permanent imprisonment within the six county state. When the civil rights movement of 1968 and 1969 began to gather momentum, some modest suggestions were made in this respect by one of the state's latter Prime Ministers, Terence O'Neill. BELATEDLY** O'Neill belatedly read the signals and timidly attempted to warn the Broederbond who controlled the political and economic system. He lost his office as a result and disappeared into the oblivion of the House of Lords. The state he abandoned was moving rapidly towards conflagration. The nationalist minority (supported by a small number of Protestant human rights activists), took to the streets in protest against a system of economic apartheid to which they had been subjected for fifty years. By 1972, official census figures showed that unemployment levels of Catholic males were double or treble those of their Protestant counterparts in Newry/Mourne, Strabane and Dungannon district council areas. THe proportions (though at lower percentages of the economically active population) were repeated throughout each of the 26 council areas in the province. The Census also showed that in most key areas of the public sector there was a heavy concentration of Protestants with Catholics accounting for only 13 percent of senior civil servants. Ratios of Catholics to Protestants in the power industries, insurance and business services were 1:5 (Fair Employment Trust op cit) One single generous gesture, even at this stage might have convinced the civil rights movement that non-violent protest could achieve its aims and that the six county state was an institution open to civilised reform and restructuring. The conflict might have been avoided. But the gesture was not forthcoming. Those controlling the state recognized much more clearly than the idealistic demonstrators just how much of a threat that demand for civil rights presented to the Orange state. And they reacted accordingly--with brute force and the repeated invasion of nationalist housing areas with heavy armour and machine guns. DRIVEN** Non-violent protest was driven off the streets and the nationalist community organized their defence. Thus began the present phase of the continual re-cycling of violence and counter-violence which is the historical legacy of Britain's involvement in Ireland. On this occasion however, the violence had become so endemic, so widespread and so destablising, that the British parliament was drawn back onto the centre of the Irish stage. After large scale curfew, mass internment without trial, and the massacre of unarmed demonstrators on the streets by British combat troops had failed to quell nationalist resistance, Britain was compelled to abandon the subterfuge of a local parliament and take direct control into the hands of Westminster. IMPOSING** After fifty years of imposing the 'final solution' of partition on Ireland and distancing the Westminster parliament through the machinery of a surrogate colonial government, Britain was forced by a simple demand for basic civil rights to acknowledge that the experiment has been a miserable failure. Britain once again governed a section of Irish national territory and her parliament was internationally identified as being responsible for the system of anti-Catholic discrimination and economic apartheid. 'Reforms' were instituted to demonstrate to the outside world that the British parliament was intent on cleaning up the sectarian sewer which its policies had produced. Housing was re-organized and a points system of allocation instituted. The property qualification for voting in district council elections was abandoned, and universal suffrage introduced. A Fair Employment Act was enacted to eliminate anti-Catholic discrimination in employment. Under this remarkable piece of legislation, a Fair Employment Agency was created, only to be chaired by a former Unionist politician. MASSIVE** With massive evidence available of the scale of inequity and structured discrimination built into every facet of economic life; with world-wide experience of civil rights legislation to draw upon, the British parliament chose to establish an anti- discrimination agency which had no powers to order affirmative action programmes to redress discrimination. The new Agency, which was flaunted to the outside world by British diplomats as the response to anti-Catholic discrimination, was empowered to conduct investigations into the composition of workplaces; issue certificates of equal opportunity to employers who declare that they had the intention of providing equal opportunity; and investigate and make findings upon individual complaints of discrimination. It was starved of skilled human resources, denied adequate finance, and was structured as an extension of the civil service departments which had engineered the structures of economic inequality within the state. Most significantly, the legislation denied the Fair Employment Agency effective legal powers of enforcement, and defined affirmative action as 'reverse discrimination', and therefore illegal. After twelve years of activity, the Agency has still not succeeded in persuading 17 if the province's 26 district councils to sign a declaration of intent to practice fair employment. GROSS** Its investigations have identified gross religious imbalances at almost every level, (most notably at senior and middle management levels) in the civil service departments which control the Agency and govern the province under British Ministers. It has recorded gross imbalances in the banks, building societies and insurance companies; in the engineering and manufacturing sectors; in the district councils, the Health and Social Services Boards, the Education and Library Boards, in Belfast's International Airport, and in the Northern Ireland Railways. Even within the construction industry, which has represented the core of skilled employment opportunity for the nationalist community; the Agency's research demonstrates disproportionate representation at senior and middle management levels. The Agency's inadequacy is best demonstrated by two example: In March 1988, it produced a report of its investigation into Northern Ireland Railways, reflecting major imbalances in favour of Protestants at virtually every level inside the company, and in every geographical area of the province. With major turnover predicted within the company over the next two years, due to impending retirements on grounds of age, it presented a near-classical opportunity for insisting on a vigorous programme of positive action to redress imbalances. The Agency agreed upon an 'Equal Opportunity Charter' with the company. CLAIMS** This Charter claims to eliminate the historic practice of 'word of mouth' recruitment of friends and relatives to the company, instead providing for the advertisement of all job vacancies. However, the first step in this process turns out to be internal advertisement of vacancies. Thus in March 1988, twelve years after its institution, the Agency has agreed to a Charter which is guaranteed to perpetuate the existing imbalances in one of the most basic community services well into the next century. Its approach has been similar in addressing the gross inequities in community representation which it recorded in the Ambulance and Fire Services. The second example was presented by the FEA's recent report on the largest Education and Library Board in the Six Counties-- the North Eastern Board. According to the Agency's September 1988 report, the Board has major imbalances at middle and senior management and administrative levels. It maintains a system of structured segregation in the appointment of schools ancillary staff and has refused to sign the Agency's declaration of intent to practice fair employment for twelve years. Having now signed the declaration, it has quite simply rejected the validity of the Agency's report and has produced its own. INTERESTING** It will be interesting to see how the Agency will respond to this outright rejection of its credibility. The reality of this 'reforming' measure, institute by the British parliament in 1876 was described in an editorial in a nationalist morning newspaper, the Irish Times on 23 April, 1986: 'Catholics believed at the (FEA's) inception, and many still believe, that it was a cosmetic exercise designed to hide the unacceptable features of the old Unionist hegemony and specifically to cover from world view the grossness of job discrimination practices against them for two generations.' It would seem that the North Eastern Education and Library Board also views the Fair Employment Agency as a mere cosmetic to be treated with contempt. REPEATED** Measured against the repeated international protestations of British commitment to equality and the elimination of discrimination, the official statistics declare successive British government spokespersons to be abject liars. They demonstrate the comprehensive failure of the Fair Employment Act (Northern Ireland) 1976, and the flaccid Agency created by it. It could scarcely have been otherwise. The twenty one year old student and her friends and neighbors who set out to walk from Coalisland to Dungannon on an August afternoon in 1968, and the thousands of others who followed them onto the streets to demand civil rights were, quite unconsciously, challenging the very basis on which the six county state existed. For discrimination and inequality is merely the outward manifestation of the very ethos which prompted the partition of Ireland and the creation of the Orange State. 'From its inception, the Northern Ireland which was set up when Ireland was partitioned...consisted entirely of Orangemen and Unionists determined on terrorizing the Catholics and reducing them to the level of second class citizens.' 'Soon the Prime Minister, Sir James Craig, was boasting that he and his colleagues had established a 'Protestant parliament for a Protestant people'." ('Holy War in Belfast'. Andrew Boyd, Anvil Books, Ireland, 1969) If therefore, the British parliament were ever to decide to institute effective action to promote full equality in the six counties, it would be undermining the very raison d'etre for the existence of the state; and explicitly abandoning the partition solution. Britain cannot create equality and social justice in Northern Ireland without consciously deciding that the six county state can no longer exist in its present form. Thus, her young servicemen continue to give up their lives to protect a state of economic apartheid which Britain protests to the outside world she wishes to 'reform'. DILEMMA** The dilemma was neatly analyzed by Robert McCartney QC, a prominent Unionist politician and barrister, writing in the Belfast Newsletter on 9 September 1988. 'The British government is slowly beginning to realize that, while the issues of civil rights, alleged and real discrimination, job opportunity, justice and peace are important, the British government will never achieve their solution.' ('Lessons for Unionists in the Hume/Adams dialogue'). McCartney was of course arguing that the solution could only be achieved by establishing British political parties in Northern Ireland, and integrating the province fully with Westminster--a prospect viewed with horror by the Labour and Conservative parties. Nevertheless, the rationale of his analysis cannot entirely be dismissed--that Britain cannot solve the civil rights issues within the existing political framework, precisely because the political framework is inconsistent with the granting of full equality of citizenship and economic rights to both nationalists and unionist communities. REASON** It was for that very reason that the forces of the state reacted with such ferocity to the civil rights campaign of 1968, and plunged the people of these islands into twenty years of warfare. The British parliament's charade of presenting its ineffectual cosmetics to the international community as an answer to the civil rights campaign, while simultaneously fighting a brutal war in defense of the status quo, would undoubtedly continued unchallenged had it not been for the emergence of the Mac Bride Principles in November 1984. AFFIRMATIVE** This affirmative action program for job equality enshrined in nine principles was formulated in the United States following unsuccessful efforts to block a US Dept. of Defense contract to Shorts PLC. The multi-million dollar contract was opposed by the Irish National Caucus and US legislators because of the Belfast plane maker's appalling record of anti-Catholic employment practices, documented in detail by Brian Brady. Had efforts to block the contract succeeded, it is possible that the matter might have ended there, and the MacBride principles might never have seen the light of day. In the event, Shorts were awarded the contract, principly because of the influence of John Hume, the leader of the Social and Democratic Labour Party (SDLP), who argued that even if discrimination was occurring, jobs had to preserved at all costs. He assured US legislators that the company would adopt an affirmative action program to recruit more Catholics. It is a matter of official record that the program adopted by the company and monitored by the Fair Employment Agency actually resulted in a reduction in the proportion of Catholics employed. Neither the company nor the FEA could explain this phenomenon. ANGERED** U.S. activists were angered by the duplicity which had accompanied the granting the contract and began research into methods of combatting anti-Catholic discrimination in the six counties, ultimately producing the MacBride principles for Northern Ireland. The programme which is extrodinarily perceptive and comprehensive in addressing the roots of job discrimination in the province, was sponsored by four leading human rights activists: Dr. Sean MacBride, who gave his name to the principles, was Ireland's leading international statesman of the twentieth century. He was the founder and first chair of Amnesty International, author of the UN declaration of Human Rights, holder of the Nobel Peace Prize, Lenin Peace Prize, and American Medal of Justice. Father Brian Brady, a Roman Catholic priest, human rights activist and leading researcher in job discrimination. Dr. John Robb, Presbyterian surgeon, humanitarian and prominent political commentator and analyst. Inez McCormack, a Protestant by birth, is a trade union organizer and noted campaigner in the field of civil rights and equal opportunity. She was also a former trade union nominee to the board of the Fair Employment Agency. MODEST** The significance of this modest programme of positive action measures is that it addresses in remarkably simple and uncomplicated language, the fundamental bases of job discrimination within the work places of the six counties. It identifies specifically the responsibilities which must be fulfilled by management to achieve balanced community representation. It recognizes the significance of sectarian intimidation within the workplace, manifested by the offensive and frequently threatening displays of loyalist triumphalism. It obliges managers to take positive action to promote the security and safety of employees who may be at risk in the workplace or in travelling to work. And it requires managers to break down the heavily structured systems securing sectarian succession from one generation to another, and which are largely colluded un by Northern Ireland trade unionists. EXPECTED** It could have been expected that a British government, concerned with its image abroad, and vehemently protesting its commitment to equality and social justice in the six counties, would have welcomed this modest initiative, coming from the United States--its most important source of external investment. Devoting huge resources to defending its policies toward Ireland, and constantly protesting its role to be that of 'honest broker' between sectarian enemies, the Government could have gained enormous cudos in the U.S. by adopting the MacBride principles without argument, and quickly writing them into law. BENEFIT** This would have had the dual benefit of enhancing Britain's sought after reputation and strengthening her case for promoting US investment in the six counties. Britain was urged to adopt precisely this course of action by the Foreign Minister of the Irish Republic, Mr. Brian Lenihan. The principles were commended by such expert observers as Rt. Hon. Peter Archer QC MP (A former Labour Solicitor General), and Dr, Christopher McCrudden, a fellow and tutor in law at Lincoln College, Oxford, Government appointee to the Standing Advisory Commission on Human Rights and one of Britain's leading authorities on anti-discrimination law. However, the British government's response has been disturbing and revealing. the MacBride principles were enthusiastically embraced by American Irish, and other groups campaigning for social justice in the six counties, and a nation- wide crusade began to have the MacBride principles adopted by US corporations with subsidiaries in the six counties, where they employ 10 percent of the province's manufacturing workforce. DESPAIR** US citizens, who have watched in despair the continuing agony in Northern Ireland, identified in the MacBride principles an effective non-violent and moral response to seemingly irreconcilable conflict, and in one state after another, sought legislation to link the principles to state pension funds invested in corporations doing business in the six counties. Their state legislators with long experience in applying tough anti-discrimination laws, viewed the principles as a sensible and modest package of positive action measures. One state after another passed the MacBride Principles into law. But this non-violent and reasonable approach by US citizens, concerned about the manner in which their taxes were underpinning pervasive structures of religious discrimination, infuriated the British government. A massive diplomatic offensive was mounted. Teams of hand- picked political puppets (most of them salaried by the Northern Ireland administration) were flown all across the US to back up the diplomatic offensive spearheaded by British consular staff. They were briefed by the Northern Ireland Office, and hosted by Embassy watchdogs in five star accommodation. They have vainly pleaded before state legislatures that the MacBride principles are unlawful--because affirmative action is unlawful in Northern Ireland. They have argued that discrimination is a thing of the past; that the FEA is to be reformed and strengthened; that progress is being made, but must wait an improvement in the economy; that Catholics do not have the skills and academic attainments to achieve advancement; that 'reverse discrimination' is unlawful and divisive; that the MacBride principles programme ia an IRA inspired and very devious exercise aimed at undermining the six county economy; that there is a 'hidden agenda' which is the political re-unification of Ireland, to be achieved be securing employment for Catholics. HUGE** The huge counter-offensive against US tax payers in their own state legislatures has been under-pinned by the large-scale contracting of professional lobbyists in the US; sustained 'cocktail briefings' of media personnel; and the organization of all-expenses paid tours of Britain and Ireland for state legislators who are identified by British Embassy staff as being open to enticement. MacBride campaigners in the US have tried to work out the costs of Britain's counter-offensive. A conservative estimate puts the expenditure over the last three years close to 10 million dollars--more that the total expenditure by the FEA since it was formed twelve years ago. At the same time, British government ministers, serving their rotational appointments in the six counties have devoted a high proportion of their personal time to tours of the US. They have been equipped with freshly printed glossy publications written by the Northern Ireland civil service, each more voluminous that its predecessor proclaiming their intentions to write new and better anti-discrimination laws 'next year'. LATEST** The latest proclamation, a White Paper on proposed legislation, was analyzed by Dr. McCrudden in the Irish Times of Wednesday 9 March, 1988. Dr. McCrudden wrote scathingly: "The fair employment proposals outlined last week by the British government...show signs of progress but they still fall disturbingly short of what is necessary to tackle the problem." The White Paper envisages the creation of a new Fair Employment Commission, the staff and members of which will be drawn from the existing FEA. It proposes a legal requirement that all employers in Northern Ireland will be required by law to refrain from discriminating directly or indirectly, and will be permitted to undertake affirmative action programmes to give better access to employment and training opportunities. Monitoring the religious composition of the workforces will also be a legal obligation. Crucially however, the proposed legislation explicitly sets its face against the adoption of goals or timetables. It relegates 'affirmative action' from the primary legislation, to a code of practice which will initially be the existing guide to employment practice written by the Northern Ireland Department of Economic Development which controls the FEA. With a tongue-in- cheek adherence to morality, the White Paper firmly declares that 'reverse discrimination' is unlawful. CAUSTIC** McCrudden makes a caustic assessment of this latest public relations hype flown by the Government across the US. He says 'the past three years have seen equality of employment opportunity between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland emerge from he shadows and into the limelight. Fair Employment has become a key political issue largely due to pressure from outside Northern Ireland." "The inadequacies of previous Government initiatives, the uncertainties and blind alleys of the present proposals, and the adverse reaction to them of employers and Unionist politicians, all serve to demonstrate the need for this external pressure to continue and for vigilance to be maintained both before and after legislation is passed." If British Ministers were legislating in a vacuum, without the benefit of the extensively documented evidence of the scale of inequality, without benefit of worldwide experience in effective anti-discrimination measures, and without benefit of British government commitments to fair employment repeated as nauseam since 1972, one might view such proposals as tentative, but well meaning efforts to begin tackling a problem for which the government was not directly responsible. HARD** The hard fact is that these 'disturbingly short' proposals have been developed by the British government in direct response to external pressures and bear no relationship to the bloody agony endured by the peoples of Britain and Ireland since the civil rights movement began to march the long road to social justice, and young Irish people, Catholic and Protestant, began to die on the streets, side by side with young British servicemen. The conclusion is inescapable that the British government lacks both the will and the commitment to adopt stern and effective measures to eradicate economic apartheid in the six counties, and to create full economic equality between nationalist and loyalist communities. It is prepared instead to tolerate indefinitely the continuing communal violence, much of which springs directly from the lack of economic justice, and to order its bewildered young soldiers to kill or be killed on the street of Belfast in defence of the ghoulish pragmatism of the parliamentarians of 1920. SADDEST** One of the saddest features of this continuing tragedy is that the British government has succeeded in recruiting to support its diplomatic offensive a motley crew of spokespersons from the six counties. That most of them are of Northern Ireland Catholic origin should come as no surprise, given the well paid nature of their governmental appointments. That some of them claim to represent the spirit of trade union brotherhood and to act on behalf of the Amalgamated Transport and General Workers Union (The Irish wing of the British-based Transport Union), is an indictment of the whole trade union movement, and a direct reflexion of the vested interests, secured by sectarian succession for generations in the engineering, manufacturing and power industries of the six counties. It is no coincidence that a legal action is currently pending in the Northern Ireland High Court by a Newry construction company, deprived of a one million pound sterling contract with the Northern Ireland Electricity Service as a result of allegations that its workforce contained 'IRA sympathizers.' The allegations were made by the Protestant dominated unions in the NIES, whose record in anti-Catholic employment practices rivals that of Shorts aircraft company and Harland and Wolfe shipbuilders. At the same time, the FEA is 'investigating' in its customary and lethargic manner a complaint by the Dublin-based Irish Transport and General Workers Union that its Catholic members are being systematically squeezed out of the Belfast deep sea docks by the Amalgamated Transport Union, to be replaced by Protestant dockers. When the 'investigation' is completed, the report will be placed before the board of the FEA, whose membership includes a senior member of the ATGWU. It is this pervasive system of structural discrimination, infecting every sector of the Northern Ireland economy and colluded in by local trade union interests, which the sons and daughters of British trade unionists are defending with their lives on the streets of Belfast. ********** It has been a long, and agonizing road to march towards the ending of discrimination from the time the young Bernadette Devlin set out to walk from Coalisland to Dungannon on 24 August 1968. The marching has not ended yet and further agony awaits the people of Britain and the people of Ireland. It is time for the British government to end its hypocrisy: it is time to cease defending with the lives of British teenagers a system of economic domination and apartheid which has poisoned the lives and happiness of generations of Catholic and Protestant Irish people and British justice. If the state which emerged from the partitioning of IReland in 1920 is incapable of surviving a modest programme of affirmative action to redress generations of structured inequality, if the British government is compelled to recruit compliant Catholics and sectarian trade unionists to oppose US citizens before their own state legislatures because the MacBride principles would destablize the state in which young British soldiers are daily killing and being killed to maintain the status quo--there is something fundamentally corrupt and unstable within the very foundations of the state. It is time for the British government to face squarely the contradiction of fighting a bloody war in Northern Ireland is support of a system of discrimination which it declares it wishes to reform while simultaneously fighting a propaganda war in the United States to oppose external pressure for reform. It is time to end the agony of the people of Ireland and the people of Britain. It is time to go! TABLES OF INEQUALITY 1981 District Council * Religious composition of* Percentage Area * working population * of Catholic * * and Prot. * * unemployment ***************************************************************** * Catholics Prot. * * num per num per * C P ***************************************************************** Antrim * 8,313 29.7 19,654 70.3 * 19.8 10.2 Ards * 3,928 10.9 32,191 89.1 * 17.8 9.8 Armagh *12,939 43.4 16,891 56.6 * 24.2 10.0 Ballymena * 5,927 17.5 27,886 82.5 * 19.1 10.3 Ballymoney * 3,782 26.6 10,435 73.4 * 24.6 13.9 Banbridge * 5,128 27.6 13,456 72.4 * 21.6 10.6 Belfast *69,421 36.3 121,997 63.7 * 26.0 15.1 Carrickfergus * 997 5.4 17,178 94.6 * 15.7 14.7 Castlereagh * 2,581 6.4 37,947 93.6 * 7.8 10.8 Coleraine * 6,365 22.1 22,473 77.9 * 22.6 14.1 Cookstown * 8,054 49.6 8,197 50.4 * 38.0 13.8 Craigavon *18,045 39.6 27,483 60.4 * 26.2 10.4 Derry *33,889 65.2 18,059 34.8 * 29.1 12.9 Down *18,309 56.9 13,865 43.1 * 16.8 8.9 Dungannon *12,867 50.3 12,736 49.7 * 32.6 12.4 Fermanagh *16,074 52.3 14,682 47.7 * 26.2 10.6 Larne * 4,136 22.8 14,048 77.2 * 25.2 12.4 Limavady * 8,302 51.9 7,696 48.1 * 27.3 13.5 Lisburn * 4,922 9.3 48,101 90.7 * 19.8 9.1 Magherafelt * 9,934 53.1 8,765 46.9 * 27.1 14.7 Moyle * 4,185 49.4 4,279 50.6 * 26.4 19.1 Newry/Mourne *32,167 72.5 12,191 27.5 * 30.3 13.8 Newtownabbey * 5,590 12.0 41,190 88.0 * 15.4 10.7 North Down * 3,473 8.4 37,665 91.6 * 10.3 7.0 Omagh *15,455 61.1 9,844 38.9 * 23.4 10.8 Strabane *12,064 58.0 8,749 42.0 * 32.8 19.4 *************************************************************** The above statistics reflect only a global view of the reality of the Catholic nationalist situation in the six counties, twenty years after the beginning of the civil rights campaign; and sixteen years after the British parliament re-assumed direct responsibility for governing this area of Ireland. SOURCES: 1. 'Guide to Effective Practice': Department of Economic Development, 1988. 2.1981 Census Date from 'Religion, Occupation and Employment', R.Osbourne and R. Cormack, Fair Employment Agency, 1987 NOTE: As the official statistics show, the proportion of Catholic employment is maintained with near mathematical precision in virtually every district council area of the six counties, with the proportion rising from 2:1 to 2 1/2:1 in areas where the working age Catholic population approximates to within 30-50 percent of working age Protestant population. ********* THE MACBRIDE PRINCIPLES FOR NORTHERN IRELAND In light of decreasing employment opportunities in Northern Ireland and on a global scale, and ir order to guarantee equal access to regional employment the undersigned (ie. the sponsors) propose the following equal opportunity/affirmative action principles. 1) Increasing the representation of individuals from under- represented religious groups in the workforce including managerial, supervisory, administrative, clerical and technical jobs. (note: A workforce that is severely unbalanced may indicate prima facie that full equality of opportunity is not being afforded for segments of the community in Northern Ireland. Each signatory of the MacBride principles must make every reasonable, lawful effort to increase the representation of under-represented religious groups at all levels of its operation in Northern Ireland.) 2) Adequate security for the protection of minority employees both at the workplace and while travelling to and from work. (note: While total security can be guaranteed nowhere today in Northern Ireland, each signatory to the MacBride Principles must make reasonable good faith efforts to protect workers against intimidation and physical abuse at the workplace. Signatories must also make reasonable good faith efforts to ensure that applicants are not deterred from seeking employment because of fear for their personal safety at the workplace or while travelling to and from work.) 3) The banning of provocative religious or political emblems at the workplace. (note: Each signatory must make reasonable good faith efforts to prevent the display of provocative sectarian emblems at their plants in Northern Ireland.) 4) All job opening should be publically advertised and special recruitment efforts should be made to attract applicants from under-represented religious groups. (note: Signatories must make special efforts to attract employment applications form the section of the community that is substantially under-represented in the workplace. This should not be construed to imply a diminution of opportunity for others.) 5) Lay-off, re-call, and termination procedures should not in practice favor particular religious groupings. (note: Each signatory to the MacBride principles must make reasonably good faith efforts to ensure that lay-off, re-call and termination procedures do not penalize a particular religious group disproportionatley. Lay-off and termination procedures that involve seniority solely can result in discrimination against a particular religious group if the bulk of employees with greatest seniority are disproportionately from another religious group. 6) The abolition of job reservations, apprenticeship restrictions and differential employment criteria which discriminate on the basis of religious or ethnic origin. (note: Signatories must make reasonable good faith efforts to abolish all differential employment criteria whose effect is discrimination on the basis of religion. 7) The development of training programmes that will prepare substantial numbers of current minority employees for skilled jobs, including the expansion of existing programmes and the creation of new programmes to train, upgrade, and improve the skills of minority employees. (note: This does not imply that such programmes should not be open to all members of the workforce equally) 8) The establishment of procedures to access, identify and actively recruit minority employees with the potential for further advancement. (note: This section does not imply that such procedures should not apply equally to all employees.) 9) The appointment of a senior management staff member to oversee the company's affirmative action efforts and the setting up of timetables to carry out affirmative action principles. (In addition to the above, signatories are required to report annually to an independent monitoring agency on its progress in the implementation of these principles.) emcelroy.