There are many ways you can be relegated to second-class status

WE’RE in the process of introducing a diversity policy in our organisation. The first time the idea was suggested to me, I balked.

My immediate reaction was to wonder why we needed a diversity policy. We’re an open organisation; we don’t, if I may put it this way, tolerate intolerance. Why do we need to bring rules and regulations to bear on a situation that works well already? I was actually thinking about it in a shop the other day, while I waited in a queue. There was a young woman with an intellectual disability at the top of the queue, standing waiting to be served.

The shop assistant simply ignored her. Seemingly unaware that she was even standing there, she offered to help the next person. It wasn’t until he said “this woman is before me” that she paid the slightest attention to the girl at the head of the queue.

If you watch out, you can see it happen a lot. It’s not particularly deliberate or discriminatory, it’s just one of the consequences of second-class citizenship. If you’ve never experienced second-class citizenship in your life, you’re one of the lucky ones.

I used to tell a story about a time when I worked in politics, and was very heavily involved in the Anglo-Irish end of the peace process. I went one day from a meeting about the drafting of the Downing Street Declaration to a meeting with two professionals about a stage in my daughter’s development (my daughter has Down Syndrome).

The professionals were a psychologist and a social worker, and as they explained some of the issues that had arisen I realised they were speaking slowly, and in words of one syllable.

It was an experience repeated more than once in my life, and shared, I subsequently discovered, by nearly every parent of a person with an intellectual disability. There is something in the training (or something lacking in the training) of many of these expert and well-meaning people that makes them think, subconsciously, that if your child has an intellectual disability, you’re probably not very bright either. That’s how a great many families affected by disability of one kind or another experience their first taste of second-class citizenship. They’re patronised and condescended to by people who aren’t even aware they’re doing it.

And lately I’ve come to discover that the same thing happens to you if you’re poor. Only it’s not just training or lack of it that causes it in the case of poverty, it’s structural. Being poor means having to queue for a lot of the things you need. It means having to ask, having to depend on the fact that the guy at the other side of the hatch isn’t having a bad day. I know very few people who have had to depend on the system for any of life’s basic necessities, and come away from the experience feeling they have been treated as valued and equal citizens of Ireland. That’s true whether they are looking for financial support for themselves or applying, let’s say, for some assistance to get their kids back to school. In that sense, second-class citizenship will always be with us, and it’s never something that can be taken for granted. In an awful lot of cases, the unconscious thing of patronising other citizens is compounded by the truly pernicious phenomenon of ‘we know best.’

Systems that are supposed to be there to help become corrupted into dominating and sometimes vindictive machines when ‘we know best’ takes over. I have written here many times about individuals and families whose lives have been damaged and sometimes destroyed by the notion that someone else is better equipped to make your decisions than you are.

A diversity policy, in that sense, is a genuinely important policy for every organisation that deals with people. Diversity is sometimes understood as a willingness to protect and promote respect for different colours, genders, sexual orientations, and so on, and to prevent discrimination on any of those grounds.

It is all of those things, of course. But at a certain level, that is the mechanics of diversity. An organisation that builds its policies and approaches on respect for the equality of people, while respecting and enjoying their differences, will be one that ought never to be accused of discrimination, bigotry, or intolerance.

OF course, we live in an era when one Government minister has declared that inequality is good for us, and no other Government minister has ever contradicted him. And we live in an era when some large and profitable organisations seem increasingly tempted to adopt that philosophy and put it into practice. I imagine, for example, that Eamonn Rothwell of Irish Ferries would rather wrap his chips in this article than read it.

Mr Rothwell and his company are proposing to import as many non-national citizens as they can into Ireland for the single and specific purpose of treating them as second-class citizens. His purpose is to maximise profit by paying the lowest possible wages he can get away with, and by implementing the worst possible working conditions the law will allow. It is a form of classic Victorian exploitation, of a sort that all of us genuinely thought had more or less disappeared in Ireland. What Mr Rothwell, and Gama before him, is seeking to exploit is the difference in living conditions between Ireland and parts of Europe that are much less well-off.

And if Mr Rothwell is allowed to get away with it, a lot of the social progress of which we can boast in Ireland will be turned on its head. If others follow Mr Rothwell’s example, as he has followed that of Gama, Ireland will quickly gather a reputation as a place that is prepared to build its wealth by exploiting those who have nothing. We’ll get cheaper fares on our ferries, so we can take our newer, bigger cars with us on continental holidays, while turning a blind eye to the working conditions of the people who are making it possible.

I don’t think Ireland is like that. And I congratulate Jack O’Connor and SIPTU for taking a stand against it. Mr O’Connor is absolutely right to threaten that the entire fabric of social partnership could collapse if the partners in the process aren’t prepared to draw a line under the introduction of this crude and greedy exploitation. If social partnership is to mean anything in the future, it must not tolerate the introduction of this unacceptable face of modern capitalism.

Although we’re not perfect, we have shown that we are well capable of building a strong economy in Ireland without systematic exploitation. If we want to be able to look ourselves in the mirror, we need to keep it that way. So, if Jack O’Connor wants to lead a passenger boycott of Irish Ferries, to demonstrate that decency and economic growth are still entirely compatible with each other, I’ll follow him. And so, I suspect, would many more.