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Education – Report Card

by Joe O’Hara 23 February, 2016

Result: B- Significant achievements eclipsed somewhat by failures in high-profile areas The Programme for Government 2011-2016 set out a range of quite challenging targets in Education. In essence it sought to re-shape provision in a number of key areas while at the same time ensuring continuity with the core strengths of the system. This was always going to be a difficult balance and, as was to be expected, the record is a mixed one. At the most basic level – that of investment in education – the record is quite good. Promises made to maintain funding for the core system, to prioritise building and to keep key metrics such as staffing, pupil teacher ratios and other key areas such as ICT infrastructure were for the most part kept. Another exception to this has been the Higher Education sector which has seen budgets reduced across all areas and a failure to meaningfully address the thorny issue of student contributions. This latter point has been particularly contentious. While the Programme for Government and its annual reviews are silent on fees the failure to address the issue of who pays for Higher Education has been marked. Current students face a controversial ‘Registration’ fee which stands at €3,000 (around half the cost to the state of providing a college place), after being increased by €250 in successive Budgets despite pre- election commitments to freeze it at 2011 levels. The recent ‘Cassells Report’ proposes loan repayments for college tuition, which would be paid back over 15 years at €25/week, once a student is earning a certain level of income. Irrespective of the final balance between student contributions and State funding arrived at there is an urgent need to find a resourcing model that works for a sector that is under increasing pressure. At a broader systems level, the Programme recognised the need for significant change. The ‘PISA shock’ resulting from our precipitous decline in the 2009 tracking surveys in key areas such as literacy and numeracy was an ideal opportunity to radically to reform how we teach these core competencies. As a result the significantly improved performance in the PISA 2012 would seem to suggest that the national strategy for literacy and numeracy has had a significant impact. School accountability structures were also quietly revolutionised, and a robust data-gathering process at school and national levels developed, something that will have a long-term impact far beyond the life of this government. Teacher education also underwent a radical reform in this period. Course content was changed, programme lengths were increased and the number of providers reduced through processes such as the DCU ‘Incorporation’ programme. There were a number of areas of policy overreach that have resulted in significant setbacks. Two of these – reform of the junior cycle and reform of school patronage structures – have followed a remarkably similar trajectory. Both witnessed confident assertions by Ministers about the need for policy reform followed by processes that saw the ‘great and the good’ support change. Significant resistance was met in both cases and despite pressure applied a combination of strong local knowledge and skillful national campaigns have resulted in the original proposals being significantly watered down. At the time of writing, junior cycle reform is stuck in a limbo, supported by one Teacher Union and rejected by a second. Reform of school patronage has been glacially slow but there are signs of alternative approaches emerging that will perhaps address issues of ethos and culture from an equality and procedural perspective. Issues also remain concerning the casualisation of education careers across all levels of the system and the significant hollowing out of middle-management structures in schools. This latter point has resulted in increased pressure on school principals and a perception of initiative overload. At the other end of the scale differential pay scales for new teachers is a cause of real resentment and pressure on Unions to demonstrate relevance has increased. In a general sense the Programme for Education Government was quite successful in Education, meeting most of its targets and putting in place structures that have the potential to have a significant medium-term impact. This is no mean feat given the popular attitude to education in Ireland – while many might complain in the abstract, most are happy enough with their particular encounters with the system. This combination makes it difficult for any set of policy proposals to address both the abstract desire for change and the innate conservatism of end-users. This policy programme probably did as well as could be expected given the straitened economic circumstances. Report Card – Education

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No one cares about Garda retaining phonecall data

by Gerard Cunningham 23 February, 2016

Twenty years ago, Letterkenny gardai sent a request to Garda HQ looking for selected phone records in the county. The request was part of the Donegal Garda inquiry into the death of cattle dealer Ritchie Barron, which was botched and complaints about which, from an extended family, the McBreartys, led to the Morris tribunal. Morris called for wide-ranging reforms in Garda management. These have mostly not materialised. In 1995 Telecom Eireann was busy preparing for privatisation as Eircom, and part of that process included major upgrades to the computer systems involved in recording and billing for telephone calls. Unfortunately for the Donegal gardaí, that meant their requests for phone records were taking forever. The law on Garda access to phone records was written in 1993, following repeated scandals over the bugging of journalists’ phones by Charlie Haughey and his slippery justice minister, Sean Doherty. In its first year, Telecom Éireann received 234 Garda requests for phone records. By 1997 the number of requests annually had grown to 1300. Michael Diffley, the Crime and Security chief superintendent assigned to phone traces, wrote to the company on 30 January 1997 to complain that 503 non-Dublin phone requests were still outstanding from the previous year. An internal Eircom memorandum on 10 February 1997 showed only 45 of 358 Garda requests had been processed between June and September 1996. Things looked better between September and December 1996, with only nine of 224 requests outstanding. However, from December to February 1997, 62 of 117 requests were not completed. The system was erratic at best. In Donegal, as everywhere else, the delays hampered investigations. After a senior officer at a conference on the Barron case complained about the delays, one garda spoke up. His brother-in-law worked at Garda HQ – maybe he could pull a few strings. “I contacted my brother in law, Detective Inspector Patrick Nyhan, who is based in Crime and Security”, garda John O’Toole later told the Morris tribunal. “I explained the situation to him, that we had applied for these through the normal channels, and that we had experienced delays, and that there was frustration, and asked him if he could help us get the phone calls, about the information that we had sought”. O’Toole read off a series of telephone numbers and times to Nyhan, and “asked him if he could speed it up or if he could get the calls”. “And he said he would get back to me. And I think about a week later or a number of days, a week later, he contacted me by phone at the Garda station, and he asked me for the fax number, and he faxed me down information in relation to some of the phone calls. He did say that he was unable to get incoming calls, and was only able to get outgoing calls from some of the numbers”. The fax from Nyhan to O’Toole no longer exists. Since O’Toole did not intend to use it in evidence, and he “wasn’t that happy about the manner in which I obtained it and I didn’t want to hold on to it’ he and another officer ‘decided it be destroyed, and I destroyed that information”. Detective Inspector Patrick Nyhan was not called to give evidence at the tribunal, but he was interviewed by tribunal investigator Michael Finn on 5 October 2004, four days after O’Toole gave his evidence. Nyhan said he asked O’Toole if an official application had been made, and was assured it had. He took down the details, and went to see his chief superintendent Michael Dif ey to “give it a push”, but Diffley was not in his office when he called in. The 1993 Act required that any request for telephone data should come from a chief superintendent, and Diffley was the designated liaison with Telecom Éireann at the time. Nyhan called the GPO Investigation Branch. He spoke to “a fellow who was very helpful”, though he could not recall his name. A week or so later, he received an envelope with a compliment slip through the internal mail system and inside it was “a number of sheets with details of telephone calls”. Nyhan then faxed the sheets to Letterkenny. He said this was the only time he had ever contacted the Investigation Unit looking for telephone records. The word “illegal” is never used in the Morris report to refer to the O’Toole/Nyhan search for phone records. Neither is “unofficial” or “irregular”, both words used at tribunal hearings by barristers as they danced around what O’Toole and Nyhan had done. O’Toole’s own barrister merely referred to “procuring telephone records…through a fast track channel”. The strongest criticism of the operation came from Donegal solicitor Paudge Dorrian who, while questioning O’Toole on behalf of Sergeant John White, said the records were “illegally and improperly obtained”. In his report Justice Morris described the incident as an “informal enquiry”. The “fellow who was very helpful” in the GPO was never identified. Arising out of the incident, the Morris tribunal made two recommendations. Neither has anything to do with protecting customers’ data, as demanded by the Data Protection Act 1988, and safeguarded by the requirements of the Interception of Postal Packets and Telecommunications Messages Act 1993. Instead, the recommendations call on the Communications Regulator to ensure that telephone operators respond quickly to Garda requests, and for the Department of Justice to look into storing phone records data from multiple telecoms providers in “an independent databank”. In other words, the lesson the tribunal gleaned from the bypassing of surveillance safeguards was that An Garda Síochána needed more surveillance powers. Whether those recommendations were needed is a moot point. In 2001, Karlin Lillington had revealed that telecom operators were storing phone records for up to six years, and chief superintendent Diffley had told the Morris tribunal that An Garda Síochána could often access call records within “minutes” of a call being made. The Morris report was published in May 2005, just as the Garda Síochána

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Are you content, or angry?

by Eoin O’Malley 23 February, 2016

Will the 2016 election bury the idea that the left-right divide is the key one in politics? For most of the 20th century choices facing voters in Europe were to go for parties that said they’d tax more and spend the fruits on public services (the left) or those who would provide fewer public services and aim to take less in tax (the right). What we might consider the centre has shifted about a bit. From the 1950s to the 1970s most, even the right, agreed to tax and spend more. From the 1980s the centre shifted right. All this time most parties were identifiable on this left-right dimension. Voters too could usually identify themselves on this scale. If you were working class you tended to vote left, if you were middle class you tended to vote right. Sometimes the middle classes who worked in the public sector would vote left, and sometimes the left was too left or the right too right for their ‘natural’ group to support it fully. Then there was a convergence on the right, and so in the UK the Labour Party became New Labour, and essentially became a right-wing party. In Ireland wily Fianna Fáil’s shifting policies offer a good barometer of which direction the ‘centre’ is going. In the last decade, particularly since the Great Recession in 2008, left and right have become less meaningful as an explanation of what divides the parties. While Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump appear to have little in common, they are both appealing to voters concerned about the same crisis. Those voters are demographically very similar (white and working class). While Trump and Sanders interpret the crisis in different ways – one a crisis of capitalism, the other a crisis of border control among other things – they agree in many ways. They both rail against a corrupt political and business elite, they both claim to represent the ordinary worker, they agree on protectionism in trade. More than anything they are both angry. They represent the frustrated in life. It is this emotion that may be the main denominator in elections. Rather than left-right, parties can be distinguished by whether they are angry at the establishment or are part of it. If we look at the rise of UKIP we can see that the party’s support comes at the expense of what Labour might have thought its core supporters – the working class. Labour was (and perhaps still is) seen as a part of the metropolitan elite. The party divide in Ireland was always hard to understand. There wasn’t a strong left-right divide, but it was Fianna Fáil’s genius that it could simultaneously portray itself as a party of the ordinary man AND be the main party of government. Bertie Ahern used to talk about the government as if it were some third party, not the organisation he was leading. In this election Fianna Fáil still likes to portray itself as the party of the worker, painting Fine Gael as a party of the rich. But it’s not angry. It’s a part of the establishment. Labour is trying to sound as if it represents the frustrated. Its ‘Standing up for Ireland’ slogan is designed to pit it on the side of the ordinary against some elite, but it is not plausible, having campaigned to deliver Labour’s way not Frankfurt’s way in 2011. It has for some time been a party that gets much of it support from the middle classes. And Fine Gael is happily appealing to those in Irish society who are content. The other side are the frustrated: people who feel unfulfilled and unable to do anything about it. It’s a toss-up whether the parties representing them will be on the left or right, but in Ireland they tend to be on the left. Shane Ross and his alliance of independents position themselves as anti-establishment rather than obviously left or right. Renua will attract some of the angry on the right, who perhaps see Ireland as being ruled by a liberal elite. Sinn Féin pitches based on the premise that there is a cartel of bankers and politicians who rule Ireland for their own interests, a proposition shared by the alphabet soup parties on the left. This is made more plausible by the banking crisis. Sinn Féin talks of a two-tier recovery “that benefits [the government] and their friends at the top, not the majority of hard-working, fair-minded Irish citizens”. These are sentiments that one could hear a Le Pen, a Trump or UKIP venting as readily as an Alexis Tsipras or Pablo Iglesias. The main difference distinguishing left and right internationally, which no Irish parties have focussed on, is immigration. It’s to Sinn Féin’s credit that it never used immigration, especially given it is a populist nationalist party. Many young working class men hold views that make them ripe for anti-immigrant politics but Sinn Féin’s nationalism (and Ireland’s history of emigration) makes it dif cult to be an anti-immigrant party. But parties can’t be anti-establishment forever. What happens when the parties representing the frustrated get into power? They usually disappoint. Eoin O’Malley Eoin O’Malley is the director of the MSc. in Public Policy at Dublin City University

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Let’s despatch the Eighth

by Ailbhe Smyth 23 February, 2016

One morning recently I woke up to abusive tweets. “What is it with lesbians hating unborn babies?? Please explain!”. “Why so many lesbians pushing abortion when they should never really need one??!!!”. As a long-time feminist campaigner and Convenor of the Coalition to Repeal the Eighth Amendment, vulgar interactions from anti-choice supporters are inescapable. I’m too long in the activist tooth to let them bother me (much), but this latest batch does make me wonder. Why is “lesbian” used as a term of abuse, and what has it got to do with “hating” babies, or women, or men, or indeed anything else? I’d like to tweet back (but I don’t): “Look here, you with the vituperative tweet finger, I’m a feminist, lesbian, radical Irish grannie (of two, so far), and I’m pro-choice because I believe in equality, in human rights, in justice, and in a world where all women, everywhere, including my daughter and my granddaughter, have the right to make decisions for ourselves about our bodies and our reproductive lives. It’s a national issue, it’s global and it’s also very personal. So there!”. The Coalition to Repeal the Eighth Amendment was set up in recognition of evident and popular demand for change. Our members include trade unions, pro-choice and feminist groups, human-rights organisations and many other NGOs and groups. The next year or so will be vitally important in advancing this issue. It has become a real election issue. If political soundings are to be believed, we can expect a “national conversation” after the election in the form of a Citizens’ Convention, followed by a referendum. It is hard to exaggerate the ‘chilling’ impact of the Eighth Amendment on women, on doctors in preventing them from working in the best interests of their patients, and on our society as a whole. What does it say about respect for women and our capacity to make our own decisions about our lives? What does it say about respect for human rights principles? Successive Governments have ignored robust criticism of the Eight Amendment from UN and other international human rights bodies. Even as I write, there’s a woman setting off from Sligo or Kerry or Wexford or Dublin on that dismal journey to the UK for an abortion she can’t obtain here with the support of her partner, her family, her friends, her GP. There’s another woman getting off the plane on her lonely trek back, and another desperately trying to find the money or the vital travel documents, or whatever else she needs to go abroad for an abortion. Every day, at least ten women are forced to go through this exhausting and demeaning process because the law and the health services fail to provide for women’s full reproductive needs and rights. We have no idea how many more women are in tears and desperate because they don’t have the resources of money, travel papers, childcare, time off work, good enough health and capacity, or whatever it is they would need to be able to make the journey. We predicted the direct and dangerous implications of the Eighth Amendment for women when it was introduced into the Constitution in 1983. We have learned with terrible sadness and anger of women dying. We have had to bear unwilling witness to innumerable personal tragedies dragged through the Courts and exposed in the media. As women, the Eighth Amendment ensures that our human rights are consistently breached during pregnancy by making a dangerous, unworkable distinction between our lives and our health. It denies us life-saving treatment such as chemotherapy. It forces us to remain pregnant against our will, even in cases of rape, incest and where a fatal foetal abnormality has been diagnosed. The Eighth Amendment puts our health at risk, denying us options even when the outcomes are clearly long-term and debilitating. It discriminates against poor and marginalised women and all those who cannot travel abroad for an abortion. Disgracefully, it criminalises women for the ‘procurement’ of an abortion, including women who obtain the abortion pill, the safest and most straightforward means of abortion. It criminalises medical professionals who assist women to do so. It places punitively strict parameters around the crucial information that reproductive health services can provide. It’s clear that the Eighth Amendment no longer reflects public opinion, with poll after poll showing strong support for its repeal. While we certainly don’t underestimate the amount of work to be done, our members are committed to the battle ahead. With public support we will campaign vigorously for repeal of the Eighth Amendment. In 2016, we don’t think that’s too much to ask. Do you? Ailbhe Smyth Ailbhe Smyth is Convenor of the Coalition to Repeal the Eighth Amendment

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UN scrutinises Children’s rights

by Ursula Kilkelly 23 February, 2016

For the first time in a decade, the Irish government defended its record on children’s rights before the United Nations in Geneva, on 14th January 2016. Poverty and homelessness, the rights of children in direct provision, the rights of Traveller and Roma Children and education issues were dominant themes, raised from different perspectives. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child also asked about the incorporation of children’s rights into Irish law, the duty to hear children in legal proceedings, complaints and monitoring mechanisms, and the child’s right to identity in the context of surrogacy. Child protection was an important focal point throughout the discussions and the UN Committee members asked a range of questions about the extent of services and supports available to protect children from harm and to support families. Children’s rights in healthcare – obesity, smoking, alcohol and mental health – were queried. The rights of children with disabilities and in alternative care, in detention and in the immigration system were all scrutinised. The hearing was part of the process of monitoring implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, a treaty binding on Ireland since 1992. The government delegation was led by Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Dr James Reilly, TD. It was a measure of the political importance of the process that the Minister was accompanied by a large delegation of civil servants and officials from all major government departments. The hearing is an important opportunity to put pressure on Government in a public, international forum. For many of the non-governmental organisations present like the Children’s Rights Alliance, – and for the Ombudsman for Children – this is the culmination of a decade of advocacy. The Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission participates in all UN treaty-monitoring hearings. The Convention on the Rights of the Child is a particularly wide-ranging treaty, making both its implementation and its monitoring challenging. Mainstream issues of education and health sit alongside the concerns of children who are especially vulnerable or whose rights are breached by their particular circumstances. Guidelines ensure that all matters of importance are covered in the six-hour dialogue with the Government delegation. The hearing is a probing, constructive dialogue, rather than an adversarial process. The Government delegation is obliged to provide information in almost immediate response to detailed questioning from the Committee members. Answers demonstrated that the Government delegation was well prepared and few questions threw them off guard. Responses were generally succinct and direct although the Committee regularly interrupted if answers were too long-winded or off-point, creating genuine accountability. Civil society representatives were able to clarify any issues with the responses given by Government. They were able to point out that the status of the School Admissions Bill 2015, presented by Government, was at best uncertain, for example. When the Committee asked about the legislative amendments required to address the issue of school discrimination to protect school ethos, the Government’s commitment to change the Equal Status Act was welcomed, if with some surprise. The Committee’s rapporteurs were clearly well informed and able to convey with authority their understanding of the Irish context. Their probing questions sought clarity about the true state of child poverty, questioned why children in direct provision could complain to the Committee on the Rights of the Child but not to the Ombudsman for Children and wondered why many of the Government’s policies in this area remained on the shelf, and why law reform takes so long. A contrasting style emerged between some civil servants and the Minister, who on occasion brought humility and humanity to issues like child poverty and homelessness. Overall, with the many advances made on constitutional reform, the cabinet-level Ministry, family-law reform and the removal of children from adult prison, the Government can be satisfied that it avoided the worst criticism. At the same time, there is little doubt that the impact of austerity on children and the particular suffering of very vulnerable children will loom large when the Committee completes its analysis of Ireland’s children’s rights record. For those who work with and for children, the Committee’s Concluding Observations will provide a blueprint for children’s rights advocacy and activism in the years to come. Given the impact that such Concluding Observations have had on Ireland’s children’s rights record to date, this is clearly where children’s rights advocacy can make a difference. Ursula Kilkelly Ursula Kilkelly is Professor of Law in the School of Law, University College Cork.

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Revive Sex Offences Bill

by Ivana Bacik 23 February, 2016

The Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Bill 2015 had passed through the Seanad and was before the Dáil. However, unfortunately the Bill will not be passed through the Dáil before the 2016 General Election. It is now vital to ensure that it is restored to the Dáil at the same stage it had reached very early in the term of the incoming government. The Bill represented groundbreaking reform of sexual-offences law. The Bill contains welcome changes to criminal-evidence rules in sex-offence cases, for example by setting out precise criteria restricting disclosure of victims’ counselling records to the defence, a practice which currently causes great distress for victims. Other important changes protect child witnesses from being cross-examined in person by defendants in sex offence trials; and prevent judges and barristers from wearing wigs and gowns when a child witness is giving evidence in such trials. The sections that have received most attention are those dealing with prostitution law. These sections would criminalise the purchaser of sexual services (the client), while decriminalising the seller (the person engaged in prostitution). This change is based on a law introduced in Sweden in 1999. It would radically reform our deeply awed prostitution law, under which both prostitutes and clients are criminalised. By criminalising buyers of sex, it will pave the way for an approach to regulating prostitution that recognises the lived reality of those in prostitution, and that genuinely seeks to tackle sexual exploitation of women. Current Irish law focuses on prohibiting the visible manifestation of prostitution through criminalising offences of ‘loitering’ and ‘soliciting’. While these offences are gender-neutral, most prosecutions in practice are brought against women, who will typically be convicted of ‘soliciting’ and ordered to pay a ne (which many will go back to prostitution to pay). This model clearly has not succeeded in reducing the numbers of those engaged in prostitution; or in addressing the real exploitation experienced by many of these women. The Oireachtas Joint Committee on Justice, Defence and Equality recently conducted a review of prostitution law in recognition of the problems with our current law. We received 800 written submissions, 80% of which favoured the Swedish approach. These submissions were drawn from a broad cross-section of civil society, including trade unions, frontline medical workers, service providers and those working with migrant women. We heard evidence from Sweden that their law has been effective in reducing prostitution levels, and has had a positive normative effect on social attitudes to sexuality. The Committee also held a series of public hearings, with input from those both for and against the Swedish approach, and from those directly engaged in prostitution. We heard that women enter prostitution in Ireland at a young age, many under 18. Many people are trafficked into prostitution and the vast majority are subject to control by a third party, or pimped. The report of the Committee, published in 2013, concluded that prostitution is widely available across Ireland. It is highly organised, highly profitable, highly exploitative and largely controlled by organised crime interests. That is the actual reality of prostitution. Current Irish law has failed to tackle this. We unanimously recommended a radical change with the adoption of the Swedish approach to criminalise only the client, the purchaser of sex. This Swedish law is based on a view of prostitution as inherently exploitative, amounting to gender-based exploitation. Laws based on this approach have already been introduced in other countries, including Canada, Norway, Iceland and most recently Northern Ireland. The changes we recommended were supported by a wide range of organisations, including the Immigrant Council of Ireland, the National Women’s Council and the Turn Off the Red Light campaign. Ultimately, they were adopted by the Government and included in the 2015 Bill. The Bill was debated at length in the Seanad over December and January. The campaign for this Bill must now continue into the next Dáil. Its offer of important changes to sex-offences law generally, its provisions to decriminalise those engaged in selling sex and to criminalise those purchasing sex, and its promise to tackle sexual exploitation, particularly of children and those engaged in prostitution must be defended and realised without delay. Ivana Bacik

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Rape Disgrace

by Lorraine Courtney 23 February, 2016

We’re living in a “rape culture”, even though the term seems to annoy some people. So let’s just say we’re living in a culture in which rape is routinely trivialised, where victims are frequently blamed for its occurrence and their testimony is denied and ridiculed, and where the onus is placed on them to prevent rape from happening. Just under a third of female respondents to a recent survey among Trinity College Dublin students said they had experienced unwanted physical contact while at Trinity. A quarter of female students had been sexually assaulted, or had a “non-consensual sexual experience”. The Dublin Rape Crisis Centre (DRCC) has recorded a shocking increase of 36% in the number of victims of rape and sexual assault to the Sexual Assault Treatment Unit in the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin in 2015. Ellen O’Malley-Dunlop, CEO of DRCC, said: “The 36% increase in the number of victims accompanied to the Sexual Assault Treatment Unit in Dublin, for 2015 in comparison with 2014, is very concerning. We have yet to analyse these figures as to why there has been such an increase”. Surprisingly, 24% of callers were male and there has been a steady year-on-year increase in males using the Helpline since 2008 when the gure was 14%. There was an increase of 30% in first-time callers to the National 24-Hour Helpline in 2014 (the latest year for which statistics are available), compared with 2013 figures. Calls relating to adult rape showed an increase of 14% compared with 2013 figures. There was an increase of 71% in crisis appointments for recent rape and sexual assault delivered by therapists in 2014, compared with 2013 figures. Our statistics on sexual crime are shocking. It is now thirteen years since publication of the Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland Report (SAVI) detailing the prevalence of sexual violence in relation to age and gender for over 3,000 adults, it remains a very distressing document. So with a general election looming what’s to be done? Ratification of the Istanbul Convention would generate change. The convention deals with prevention, requiring us to put in place measures to challenge the gender stereotypes, roles and attitudes that promote this culture of violence against women. It obliges us to ensure that the Garda respond immediately to calls for assistance and that all victims have access to special protection measures during investigation and judicial proceedings. The convention crucially deals with protection, ensuring that the needs and safety of survivors are placed at the heart of all measures. It demands the setting up of specialised support services that provide medical assistance as well as psychological and legal counselling to survivors and their children. The convention also stipulates the number of refuges that are needed to adequately respond to women, that of one refuge place per 10,000 of population – we’re well behind this target right now. The Istanbul Convention provides the framework for structural and personal reforms and provides a mechanism to hold the Government to account. We need stronger legislation. Domestic violence should be a crime of itself, accompanied by appropriate sanctions that match the seriousness of the act. Within the proposed sexual-offences legislation, a definition of consent should be included. Consent should be freely given – an enthusiastic, clearly communicated and ongoing Yes. Right now one in ten victims of sexual crime in Ireland reports that crime. Of that one in ten, only 7% lead to a conviction. We urgently need sanctions that are effective, consistent, proportionate and dissuasive. The appallingly high attrition rates within our criminal justice system and send out a message to women that if they report a crime justice will be done. We must provide a supportive environment for women to continue through the system and seek justice. Setting up the new Garda unit – The Human Protective Services Bureau – was a great move but it requires increased personnel and financial resources to target domestic and sexual violence. Specialist units in each Garda Division should now be established to address domestic and sexual violence ,and ongoing training is required at all levels to develop an expertise within the force that both supports the victim and pursues perpetrators to arrest and conviction. We will only seriously address this issue when we shift the focus from women, from asking what did she do, why was she there at that time, why did she stay, and place the focus on men who perpetrate these crimes. We must break the malicious disbelief, victim-blaming and perpetrator-excusal that surrounds rape. We must restore funding to the organisations that help victims. We must shatter this culture of rape. Lorraine Courtney

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Maybe Equality

by Niall Crowley 23 February, 2016

The Government would be happy to go to the polls wrapped in the mantle of a ‘Yes Equality’ Government. The Government delivered on the marriage equality referendum. We had the referendum to beat all referendums and same sex couples can now get married, their relationships affirmed as equal. This was a remarkable achievement. Eamon Gilmore called it “the civil rights issue of this generation”. However, is it enough for Fine Gael and Labour to don the mantle of a ‘Yes Equality’ Government in search of a vote? Aodhán O’Riordáin, Minister of State at the Department of Justice and Equality, tried to keep the feeling warm. A month after the referendum he declared the report of the working group on direct provision for asylum-seekers, set up by his Department, as another “Yes Equality moment”. This sorely diminished the mantle and, indeed, any correlative right to don the mantle. The recommendations of this report were far from any ideal for equality and human rights. The report essentially permitted continuation of this inhumane direct provision system for receiving and accommodating asylum-seekers. Only those asylum-seekers serving five years or more in the system were to be released. The mantle has since been further sullied as even the limited recommendations have not been implemented. Direct Provision is not the only serious human rights violation that this Government has countenanced. RTE’s Prime Time exposed the gross abuse of people with disabilities living in Áras Attracta. Political disapproval owed yet action was absent. The Government ignored the 2011 Congregated Settings Report that recommended that “people with disabilities living in congregated settings move to community settings within seven years”. It ignored the costed submission of the HSE, made in 2015, seeking some €250m to implement the report. Whenever it came to money, this Government evinced little interest in donning the ‘Yes Equality’ mantle. The treatment of the Traveller community reflected a rejection of equality and human rights by the Government. There was an extraordinary disinvestment in the Traveller community. The education budget specifically allocated to Travellers was reduced by 87% and the accommodation budget by 85%. This happened despite significant educational inequality for Travellers and the scandalous, often dangerous, living conditions they continue to endure. The tragedy of ten lives lost in the fire on the temporary Traveller halting site in Carrick-mines was not unpredictable. Even tragedy, however, failed to secure any reinvestment in the Traveller community. People with disability fared badly. Their prospects for independent living receded. The Mobility Allowance and the Motorised Transport Grant for people with disabilities were cut. The Minister for Health and Children axed these schemes in 2013 because criteria governing the schemes were found to be in breach of the Equal Status Act in a case heard by the Equality Tribunal in 2008. The Minister did not have to axe the scheme. He promised the issues would be resolved quickly but some people with disabilities remain on the schemes found to be discriminatory and no new scheme has been provided for the many others now precluded from access to these vital supports. The schemes were central to participation in society and to ensuring people do not become trapped in their own homes. Lone parents didn’t fine it was a ‘Yes Equality’ Government. Changes to the One Parent Family Payment caused stress and hardship for many families, that are much more likely to experience poverty and social exclusion than others. 63% of them experienced enforced deprivation in 2013. The Government effectively ended access to the One Parent Family Payment in 2015 for lone parents whose youngest child is seven or over. The financial losses for working lone parents are so significant that they are likely to give up part-time employment. Trans people, on the other hand, did get some of the ‘Yes Equality’ treatment. Legislation secured legal recognition for them in the gender with which they identified. This was on foot of legal action taken by Lydia Foy to assert her rights. The legislation, despite its failure to respond adequately to young Trans people, compares well with the most progressive approaches to the rights of Trans people at a European level. The legislation to ensure 30% of all candidates of each party in national elections are women is progressive. There was a touch of the ‘Yes Equality’ about this. It did not cost money but it is clear that it is causing some significant pain in male bastions. The same commitment did not extend to private-sector boardrooms, despite proposals from the European Commission for a 40% quota of the under-represented gender on corporate boards. And that ‘Yes Equality’ feeling drained away with the failure so far to address women’s reproductive rights by repealing the iniquitous Eight Amendment to the Constitution that has put women’s lives and health at risk. This Government did inject some of the resources cut by the previous Government from the budgets of the Equality Authority and the Irish Human Rights Commission back into the equality and human rights infrastructure. Nothing, however, is ever straightforward when it comes to this Government and equality and human rights. The additional resources were only made available to a new, merged body, the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission. It seems this potential ‘Yes Equality’ moment was actually more about sweeping equality under the human rights rug. Equality and human rights re ect two very different traditions. Equality is focused on achieving outcomes of equality for the different groups that make up society. Human rights are about minimum standards to be enjoyed by all individuals in society. In merging the two traditions there is much talk of the logic of equality being a human right. When equality is limited to being a human right it is confined to formal equality. Formal equality is only about equal treatment and non-discrimination. Not about outcomes. A merger of the Equality Authority and the Irish Human Rights Commission, based on such an understanding of the relationship between human rights and equality, diminishes any capacity for or drive towards the more substantive forms of equality that so many groups in our society aspire to and