While protests for democracy and social justice rage throughout the world, in Ireland there has been a subdued debate about equality. A good thing, you might think, but not when the discussants are John Waters – an Irish Times columnist with an anti-gay and anti-feminist agenda – and the departing chairperson of the Equality Authority, Dr Angela Kerins.
Both have written about their take on equality in The Irish Times. Kerins makes a strong case for a robust equality agenda, in the wake of the emasculation of the Equality Authority in 2009. Her equality agenda, however, is called ‘diversity’ – not exactly the same, since the politics of diversity, just like interculturalism, assume equality rather than making clear demands for equality of opportunity and outcome.
Unsurprisingly, Kerins supports Government plans to amalgamate the Equality Authority with the Irish Human Rights Commission, and advocates the amalgamation of the various statutory and NGO bodies working on equality issues to prevent what she calls ‘duplication’.
In doing so, she does not mention the closure of Combat Poverty and the demise of the National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism (NCCRI): both part of the cuts in the equality sector as early as January 2009.
Nor does Kerins – the chair of the authority specifically established to safeguard equality – mention the claims of former Minister for Justice Michael McDowell, who in 2004 said in an interview with The Irish Catholic that it is not equality but rather inequality that “is an incentive in the Irish economy”.
I have little doubt that if Kerins had her way, most migrant-led and migrant-supported associations would be disbanded, or at least not given any funding, in the name of preventing duplication and fragmentation. But luckily it is not up to her, and migrant-led associations are stronger than ever, even in the current economic climate.
Not surprisingly for an EA chair who has made no major intervention since her appointment, Kerins’s main point is economic. “Human capital,” she writes, “diverse skills, talents and experience are essential components of economic recovery.” But not equality, mind you.
Furthermore, she argues that diversity – again, not equality – is “a significant component to attracting inward investment”. According to her, Ireland is emerging from the worst of the recession (try telling that to the thousands of people in debt and on the live register) and this seems to justify her support for amalgamation and for an economically driven ‘diversity’ agenda.
Like Kerins, John Waters’ ideas about equality are also anchored in economics and rationality. However, Waters is altogether opposed to the very notion of equality, which to him is a root cause of the recent riots in Britain and of all other social ills. While Kerins advocates equality as an engine for economic growth, Waters – like McDowell before him – advocates inequality as the main force of wealth generation.
And interestingly, underneath Waters’ carefully crafted argument that the pursuit of equality leads to a greedy search for wealth, lies naked racism and Islamophobia. When describing the British riots he writes: “We observed looting of a kind of shopping without money, a defiant act of participation followed, inevitably, by a destructive one. Having stripped the Mosque of Mammon, the looters burned it down.”
How interesting that for him it is Muslims, rather than Jews, who are now seen as the conspiratory controllers of the world’s wealth. And all this in the name of what Waters considers the mistaken idea that “all human beings should be equal”.
Dr Ronit Lentin is head of the MPhil in Race, Ethnicity, Conflict at the Department of Sociology at Trinity College Dublin. Her column appears fortnightly in Metro Éireann.
