GiliGold/VAD_KnessetCorpus huggingface dataset:
אוולין קולינס: But I have the happy privilege of about thirty minutes or so to take you through what we are doing in Northern Ireland.
אוולין קולינס: I am very happy then to deal with questions, both formal and informal at the end.
אוולין קולינס: I have a power point.
אוולין קולינס: I don’t know whether it is going to be a distraction for people or not.
אוולין קולינס: This is what I was asked to talk about, The background to our establishment.
אוולין קולינס: A little bit about our development and highway structures and a little bit about our enforcement work and how we engage with the public.
אוולין קולינס: To set the scene: we are a public body created by statute, created by laws in Northern Ireland, with specific agreement to eliminate discrimination, to promote the quality of opportunity, specifically under one area of legislation Tripp promotes affirmative action for Catholics and Protestants and to keep the anti-discrimination legislation under review.
אוולין קולינס: The legislation applies in the area of employment, in the area of the provision of goods, facilities, services and housing; and there are also specific responsibilities on public authorities in Northern Ireland to carry out that function with due regard to the needs to promote equality of opportunity.
אוולין קולינס: The legislation that we have responsibilities for covers these grounds.
אוולין קולינס: The religion and political opinion legislation was introduced in 1976.
אוולין קולינס: Kevin mentioned already the civil rights activism arising from issues and particularly in Northern Ireland and you who … with me will remember seeing it on the TV routinely rioting in the streets.
אוולין קולינס: One of the government’s responses was to bring the army in to address the rioting.
אוולין קולינס: Another of the government’s responses was to look up the question of employment discrimination.
אוולין קולינס: It was clear in the mid 1960s that there was disadvantage against the Catholic community in public sector employment in particular and some of the larger private sector employment areas, particularly the traditional manufacturing industries.
אוולין קולינס: There was also evidence of discrimination in relation to housing, in relation to policing, in relation to voting rights and in relation to public appointments.
אוולין קולינס: So a real sense of disadvantage in the Catholic community.
אוולין קולינס: Focusing on employment only the government set up a committee to look at what could be done and this was at a time when there was the introduction of anti discrimination legislation.
אוולין קולינס: In 1964 there had been the civil rights amendment in the States and discussions in Britain about race discrimination and so on.
אוולין קולינס: The … … Committee recommended to government the establishment of anti discrimination legislation and a regulatory agency to ensure its implementation, to ensure its enforcement.
אוולין קולינס: So that legislation on religion and political opinion is dated from 1976.
אוולין קולינס: On the gender ground there were plans in Britain in the mid nineteen seventies to establish equal opportunities commission for Britain.
אוולין קולינס: The white paper produced by government called equality for women internationally didn’t propose to establish an equal opportunities commission for Northern Ireland.
אוולין קולינס: The government clearly had the view that the religious discrimination was the most important and women didn’t actually need the protection from sex discrimination in Northern Ireland.
אוולין קולינס: So it took quite a bit of lobbying and it happened in a very short space of time, very well organized women’s movement to campaign and lobby for a separate equal opportunities commission dealing with gender to be established in Northern Ireland.
אוולין קולינס: I want to say a little bit more about fair employment, because there we were.
אוולין קולינס: We were a small equal opportunities and I worked from the early nineteen eighties in the body dealing with gender discrimination, coexisting with the body dealing with the religion and political opinion discrimination, say in different powers, but real pressure on government still to address issues of religious discrimination in the work place.
אוולין קולינס: There was some evidence that some employers were not paying attention to the new legislation and certainly clear evidence and the agency that was set up to deliver the fair employment agenda produced a series of reports looking at the impact of this new religion and political opinion legislation.
אוולין קולינס: Very significantly it reported in respect of the Northern Ireland civil service which of course as the main public employer in Northern Ireland, significant in terms of numbers and significant because people expected the government civil service to play a leading role in implementing the legislation.
אוולין קולינס: Significantly, our report came out and it stopped short of a few things the civil service are discriminating but it said that it was clear evidence that they had failed to implement the basics of the 1976 Fair Employment Act.
אוולין קולינס: That, plus international pressure, and we have a lot of interest in what’s going on in Northern Ireland also from the United States.
אוולין קולינס: For many, many of us, people as you know, immigrated over the last century and into this century.
אוולין קולינס: A great deal of interest in American firms in investment in Northern Ireland other means of them, helping the economy there.
אוולין קולינס: A real concern and a concerted campaign by a number of American firms talking about disinvestment in Northern Ireland in American companies if there wasn’t greater progress made towards equality of opportunity on grounds of religion.
אוולין קולינס: That led to stronger legislation in 1989.
אוולין קולינס: Now employers are under obligation to monitor the composition of their work force, both Catholic and Protestant, to register with us, the Equality Commission, to on an annual basis send us the statistics.
אוולין קולינס: On a three yearly basis to analyze how their employment practices are working and where there is evidence of under representation of one or the other community, to engage in affirmative action program to address that under representation this huge, huge change to the machinery that was in place at that time.
אוולין קולינס: We can talk a little bit, if you are interested, of the benefits of that approach.
אוולין קולינס: There have been clear documented evidence that that strengthened legislation has created a change in the work place in Northern Ireland.
אוולין קולינס: More Catholics participated in more areas and in fact we have such good data knowledge about employment, we can also quickly ascertain for example at the moment, that there seems to be growing under representation of Protestants in some areas of the public sector particularly helped on education.
אוולין קולינס: We are looking now what are the underlying causes of that, so that we can see if there are any remedial actions that we need to take in relation to that.
אוולין קולינס: Disability then came on the stream in 1995.
אוולין קולינס: Kevin mentioned the activism of disabled people, particularly to get protection against discrimination.
אוולין קולינס: Initially the Disability Discrimination Act didn’t have attached to it an enforcement agency and people had to have another round of campaigning and lobbying to get a strong disability rights commission established in Britain.
אוולין קולינס: By the time that was happening we were already on a single equality commission in Northern Ireland.
אוולין קולינס: We were given response … for the enforcement of the disability legislation.
אוולין קולינס: Race came onto the scene in 1997 in Northern Ireland, thirty years after it came onto the scene of legislation in Britain.
אוולין קולינס: Very small through the eighties and nineties population wise that people from … minority from the communities.
אוולין קולינס: My own view always have been that it didn’t matter how many there were.
אוולין קולינס: If you were Chinese and you were discriminated against in Northern Ireland because you were Chinese it was still very much a problem of discrimination.
אוולין קולינס: But nevertheless the legislation did not come onto the books until 1997.
אוולין קולינס: Finally, by consequence of our membership of the European Union, which has an important array of directives in the field of equality, we now have protection against discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation.
אוולין קולינס: We were established then, that was kind of the panoply of legislation and you know from your interest in this area of equality that in addition to the anti discrimination legislation that was being introduced in many countries, there was also a growing interest, particularly on the gender dimension, particularly in favor of women, of looking at high to mainstream equality.
אוולין קולינס: This is a concept that came partly from the UN, partly from the European Union.
אוולין קולינס: As a complementary approach to the more traditional method of tackling discrimination like anti discrimination legislation.
אוולין קולינס: So in Northern Ireland, we, in the pre-existing equality bodies, particularly the Equal Opportunities Commission, along with a number of very active NGOs in Northern Ireland, begun to say, we need to have an equality … in Northern Ireland.
אוולין קולינס: We need to have a mechanism whereby public … in particular are obliged to take equality into account.
אוולין קולינס: I know from my background that all those discussions I had with government officials in the 1980s and early 1990s about taking gender equality issues seriously, it was actually about mainstreaming, but we didn’t use this label until the 1990s.
אוולין קולינס: Then it really gathered steam in the Northern Ireland context certainly.
אוולין קולינס: We had an official government report, the Standing Advisory Commission recommending that an equality duty would be put on … footing.
אוולין קולינס: In March 1998 didn’t the government respond positively and say they would introduce such an equality duty on … footing.
אוולין קולינס: Now that was at the time when in the lead up to the Belfast Agreement, the Good Friday Agreement, the agreement which involved the British and Irish government and the various political parties in Northern Ireland and leading to the establishment of new constitutional arrangements in North Ireland and a clear and central theme of those discussions related to equality and human rights.
אוולין קולינס: So the whole idea about creating some additional mechanisms, some additional complementary mechanisms to the anti discrimination legislation gathered force toward the end of the ninety eighties, got carried into the Belfast agreement and very quickly got carried into the Northern Ireland … Part of the reason for that kind of acceptance of the equality duty were part of the rationale and part of the arrangements that were put in place was to bring together the various commissions that had been in existence up to then to be one single commission, which was not a universally accepted good idea.
אוולין קולינס: A number of those working on single strand issues, women, black minority ethnic people, disabled people, were really concerned that the fact that the religion and political opinion legislation was so strong in terms of anti discrimination and the fact that there was still the art of working out the troubles as we call it euphemistically in Northern Ireland.
אוולין קולינס: That was going to be a problem in terms of the development of some sort of hierarchy of inequalities in the new body.
אוולין קולינס: Although having said that everybody felt that the price of this new equality duty on the public sector was perhaps what the price of merging the pre-existing commission.
אוולין קולינס: So that’s how we really came into being.
אוולין קולינס: I want to say just to complete the kind of institutional framework that the Northern Ireland Act also established a Northern Ireland human rights committee, commission.
אוולין קולינס: Its role is to promote and protect human rights in Northern Ireland, a rather broader mandate than the mandate that we have.
אוולין קולינס: It does that through, for example, reviewing law and practice, advising government and the Northern Ireland Assembly when it’s in place on human rights issues through research and education and taking proceedings in court and legal action.
אוולין קולינס: We agreed early on that there was clearly the potential for overlap between what a human rights commission would do and what we would do.
אוולין קולינס: So we agreed a memorandum of understanding very early on in our existence, clarifying how we would deal with those potential areas of overlap.
אוולין קולינס: In practice we coexist quite well, coexist very well.
אוולין קולינס: The fact as far as I have been here, I have a strong sense of how many people are connected in different ways to each other and it is exactly the same in Northern Ireland, so we know them quite well.
אוולין קולינס: They know us quite well.
אוולין קולינס: It works well for us in the Northern Ireland context for now.
אוולין קולינס: Some people clearly believe there should be a joint equality and human rights commission.
אוולין קולינס: Not so much in Northern Ireland, but certainly in the broader and international platform.
אוולין קולינס: There are many human rights commissions with similar functions that we have on employment equality and for example, in Britain at the moment, they are reaching the conclusions of rather lengthy discussions about establishing in Great Britain a commission for equality and human rights.
אוולין קולינס: I am happy to have maybe that as a base as well.
אוולין קולינס: My personal view and the view of my Commission at the moment is while we are in favor of our functions being augmented by a kind of general human rights mandate where quality issues are coming into play that adding human rights to our agenda at the moment would perhaps create complications about overextending our functions beyond equality with the potential loss of focus on the equality issues.
אוולין קולינס: That’s the background on developments.
אוולין קולינס: I should also mention that the European level, because of this and growing body of European Union law on equality and provisions in two directors from two authorities … member states should initiate mechanism, institutions to help people have access to the rights established by these new directors.
אוולין קולינס: There is a growing interest and a growing development of equality bodies and similar institutions across the European Union.
אוולין קולינס: I want to go on and talk a little bit about – I mentioned that we were established as an independent body.
אוולין קולינס: Again, in the thirty six hours that I have been here and kind of getting the sense that we are a pretty unusual animal because we are not government, although we are established by government and we are governed by laws which are created by government and we get all our money from government and we are actually quite independent of government and have an important sometimes challenge function to government.
אוולין קולינס: But we are equally, we are not an NGO.
אוולין קולינס: We clearly have our … defined by legislation and occasionally we have to say to some staff and some of our board members, that would be ultra-… for us to do that.
אוולין קולינס: We have a very clear mandate coming from the legislation.
אוולין קולינס: So we very much, as a public body, operate at arms length from government, but we clearly have a relationship with government and we have processes in place, for example, where the minister of the department which gives us our money, our sponsor department, agrees our three year corporate plan on a regular basis.
אוולין קולינס: I am the chief executive, as you know.
אוולין קולינס: We also have then a board and it is appointed by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, following public advertisement.
אוולין קולינס: So when ads are put in the paper from the Northern Ireland office and people make applications like they might for a job and the department makes the selection.
אוולין קולינס: By legislation there have to be between fourteen and twenty members of the Commission and they have to, by legislation, also be representatives of the community they serve.
אוולין קולינס: So no 15 middle aged men being appointed to the Equality Commission in Northern Ireland.
אוולין קולינס: They serve on a two days a month basis as commissioners.
אוולין קולינס: Our chief commissioner currently is a full time one and they are just about to come to their end of the term of office and there is some discussion whether that should be full time or part time in the Northern Ireland context.
אוולין קולינס: I put up there the budget in American dollars.
אוולין קולינס: We work in pounds of course, but I thought I would translate it into American dollars.
אוולין קולינס: That’s fifty seven million shekels, I’ve worked out since I have come here, which isn’t insignificant.
אוולין קולינס: I could tell you I could spend twice as much as that on addressing inequality in Northern Ireland, but I have to accept.
אוולין קולינס: In comparative terms I couldn’t say we’re not at least be well resourced organization.
אוולין קולינס: We have a complement of 140 odd staff.
אוולין קולינס: The legislation then allows to do a number of different things.
אוולין קולינס: It allows us to do advisory work and we do extensively work with employers, trade unions, service providers in particular, trying to encourage and get them to do the right thing to do and to be in compliance with the legislation.
אוולין קולינס: We have a really important promotional role.
אוולין קולינס: So we, for example, run major public awareness campaigns, have TV campaigns, have radio campaigns, a lot of publications running conferences and seminars.
אוולין קולינס: We have a research program so that our work is evidence based so we can ascertain where the most significant inequalities are and make sure that we target resources effectively to deal with that.
אוולין קולינס: We clearly have a role in respect of policy development and are now in discussions with government routinely around that.
אוולין קולינס: We have a role in enforcement which I’ll say a little bit more about in a minute.
אוולין קולינס: I think I want to stress the very important that we work to use the combination of our powers to make changes to policies, practices and procedures.
אוולין קולינס: On the one hand we are really encouraging to employers and service providers to do the right thing and will support them when they want to do so.
אוולין קולינס: On the other hand, we have this big stick of the legislation which we will sometimes use to try and encourage compliance.
אוולין קולינס: I’ll talk about the structure and I’ll just say a little word about that.
אוולין קולינס: When we came into being, it all happened very quickly.
אוולין קולינס: So staff were transferred from the pre-existing organizations and we began to recruit people into some of the new areas.
אוולין קולינס: We started up with very much that – a lot of people working on religion and political opinion in one directorate and some people working on gender and another – very quickly we knew that it was going to be much more effective for us to put all the lawyers together and put all the promotional people together and so on.
אוולין קולינס: So we have a structure that reflects broadly our corporate priorities at the moment.
אוולין קולינס: The organizers asked me to say a little bit about thinking back over the … experience of the pre-existing bodies before I move into the work we are doing now.
אוולין קולינס: It seems that, it is clear to me that strong legislation has been absolutely vital.
אוולין קולינס: I shared with you the story about how initially the fair employment legislation while introducing an obligation not to discriminate wasn’t really meeting, wasn’t really targeted effectively enough up to scale and the impact of the problem of religious discrimination and discrimination in … of religion in the workplace.
אוולין קולינס: It is also interesting and important that there was some international pressure around that time that came to bear.
אוולין קולינס: Resources.
אוולין קולינס: I also want to mention, I have mentioned what resources we have.
אוולין קולינס: The government, in the context of the fair employment agenda effectively increased the resources it had at its disposal significantly through the nineteen nineties following the strengthening of the legislation.
אוולין קולינס: So by the time we were being merged, the Fair Employment Commission had about eighty staff and about three and a half million pounds, which was much bigger in comparison to those in the … organizations.
אוולין קולינס: That clearly makes the difference to what you can do.
אוולין קולינס: It’s self evident.
אוולין קולינס: In terms of scope, I want to say, the Equal Opportunities Commission didn’t have to confine itself only to employment.
אוולין קולינס: It could also take cases relating to the provision of goods and services.
אוולין קולינס: So very early on we had a whole series of cases that run things like – we had cases about accessed women to leisure facilities like pubs.
אוולין קולינס: There were pubs in Belfast where women weren’t served.
אוולין קולינס: I think it is extraordinary – well actually some women who wanted to be served, and that was equally extraordinary.
אוולין קולינס: We won cases for women who said it was unacceptable that there were public places where the services were provided to men only.
אוולין קולינס: We had issues around golf clubs that have residences still.
אוולין קולינס: Our counterpart agency in Dublin has challenged and the wealthiest golf clubs in Ireland have won a case, an equal status case.
אוולין קולינס: The golf clubs are appealing it because they are so cross that they might have to treat women with equal status to men.
אוולין קולינס: We had cases where women were told when they set up a businesses that they had to bring their husbands in to get a bank loan.
אוולין קולינס: So we knocked that on the head fairly quickly.
אוולין קולינס: So that the scope for the legislation covering more than just employment was also very important.
אוולין קולינס: The other thing that was very important that we were able to benefit from in the Equal Opportunities Commission – I have mentioned the European framework.
אוולין קולינס: There were a number of … in 2000 which covered then religion, …, but from the very first treaty of Rome in 1959 establishing the European Union, there was the right for women to receive equal pay for equal work.
אוולין קולינס: A series directed through the 1970s which expanded on equal opportunities for women.
אוולין קולינס: So there was this body of law at European level and when we in the EUC felt that the national legislation wasn’t in compliance with the European legislation, we went to the European Court of Justice.
אוולין קולינס: On a number of occasions there were really important string to our vote.
אוולין קולינס: We took the police to the European Court of Justice at the end of the 1980s.
אוולין קולינס: It ended up being the most expensive sex discrimination case in the UK at the time.
אוולין קולינס: It cost the police a million pounds for discriminating, in compensation for discriminating against.
אוולין קולינס: There were women police officers.
אוולין קולינס: We went to Europe on maternity pay issues for women in Northern Ireland.
אוולין קולינס: Then we went to the European Court of Justice on access to pensions for part time work.
אוולין קולינס: For some of the really important – goes back to the importance of strong legislation.
אוולין קולינס: The other two issues I wanted to mention – I mentioned the theory that the Commission for Relations of Equality was established only in 1997.
אוולין קולינס: It spent its first few years before it joined with the rest of us in an equality body really having an affect engagement with what I call stake holders, which is a very kind of business oriented term, I know.