35 Niall Crowley

A few years ago, one Philip Tobin, Managing Director of DotCom Directories, a Dublin-based e-commerce business, advertised some positions in his company with the proviso ‘no smokers need apply’. After the ad first appeared in a freesheet newspaper, Mr Tobin received a call from someone at the Equality Authority who told him that his advert was against the law because it discriminated against smokers and he would have to withdraw it. Mr Tobin said that the ad had fulfilled its function and so the question of withdrawing it did not arise. It soon turned out that the Equality Authority was wrong – there was nothing in the legislation governing its operation to say that smokers cannot be discriminated against.

Nor, any sensible person would say, should there be. The Equality Authority was, after all, a state body. A couple of years before this, to the most tremendous fanfare, the government had introduced a ban on smoking in the workplace because smoking is bad for people’s health. Yet, another branch of government saw fit to ring up a businessman who has come to the same conclusion to accuse him of breaking the law.

The Equality Authority sat down with itself and had a rethink. It then issued a statement explaining that, in fact, there had been ‘no question of discrimination’.

In fact, there had been a distinct question of discrimination. Mr Tobin had been on every radio programme in the state for the previous week telling the nation how much he disliked smoking and what he thought of smokers. He said they were smelly, stupid, unhealthy time-wasters, and he did not want them working for him.

We are nowadays so accustomed to certain types of people complaining they’ve been discriminated against that we think there’s something wrong with discrimination per se. But we discriminate all the time, between shops or places we like to go to and those we don’t, between radio stations and newspapers we like or don’t like to read and listen to, between columnists we read and those we don’t. We also discriminate between people we like to mix with and people we don’t, people we trust and people we don’t, people we like the look of and people we don’t.

The idea that the Equality Authority exists to eliminate discrimination is a myth. In fact, it exists to enforce certain forms of discrimination. In this case, the Equality Authority representative who initially contacted Mr Tobin was seeking to compel him to discriminate in favour of smokers, even though he dislikes smoking and thinks smokers would be bad for his business. If the logic of this contact had held sway, we would be but a hairsbreadth away from affirmative action in favour of smokers, and legal requirements that employers hire minimum numbers of nicotine addicts. This sounds daft, but it is no more so than most of what the Equality Authority spends its time doing.

‘Equality’ in this sense, of course, does not mean what it says in the dictionary. ‘Equality’, as bandied about in latter-day public conversation, is really a concept concerned with acquiring for certain listed categories the rights, entitlements and privileges deemed, by definition, to have been unjustly acquired by others. It is, in other words, a rebalancing process, in an equation deemed by the guiding ideology to have an unjust and immoral configuration as it stands. Thus, there must be a rebalancing between men and women in favour of women, blacks and whites in favour of blacks, homosexuals and heterosexuals in favour of homosexuals, and so forth. There is not, however, any requirement that the exchange work both ways. Men must yield to women on whatever grounds are ordained by the relevant authorities, but there is no question of women ceding anything to men, even where a case is made that the status quo is inequitable and unjust in a way that favours women.

Since its foundation in 2001, the CEO of the Equality Authority had been Niall Crowley. His tenure ensured that, right through the Noughties, the word ‘equality’, as politically defined in the public realm, became a construct that excluded men. Crowley’s job was to target harmful discrimination, but instead he chose to impose a highly selective definition of the word ‘equality’ and, in effect, to conduct a war against one half of the population, allegedly on behalf of the other half.

Here is a direct quote from a speech Crowley made while CEO of the Equality Authority: ‘The primary objective for work on men in gender equality must be to strengthen the role and contribution of men in challenging and changing the structures, institutional policies and practices, and culture (including stereotypical attitudes), that generate and sustain the inequalities experienced by women.’ Translation: everyone is entitled to equality, but men are entitled only to ‘share’ in the ‘equality’ of women. Crowley emerged from an ideological heartland in which the word ‘equality’ to been redefined to make it the exclusive preserve of certain listed groups. In his role in the Equality Authority, he went to court to have women made full members of elite golf clubs, and lost significant amounts of taxpayers’ money when the authority’s case was shot down. Under his stewardship the authority was enthusiastically supportive of a demand for adoption rights for gay couples, the right of travellers to become an officially recognized ethnic group, and the right of women to demand a share in everything men were presumed to have without giving up anything. But it seemed to regard itself as having no role in relation to men as men, or to have nothing to say about the injustices men might be suffering by virtue of not belonging to a named victim group.

The attitude of the ‘equality’ lobby to gay adoption rights is especially instructive. For here is a context in which there exists a clear conflict between what are self-evidently the natural rights of two groups – fathers and children – and another, gays. The ‘equality’ lobby rushed to support not those whose natural rights were being trampled into the dust of history but those who claimed an entitlement not on the basis of reason or nature, but on their status as a favoured ‘listed category’.

Crowley claimed to have addressed himself to changing structures and systems so as to create ‘a better society for women and men’. This would have been laudable, but he did not do it. Instead, he addressed only those structures and systems that corresponded to his ideological prejudices. The rest he ignored, which means that many, many men, and many of these men’s children, were infinitely unhappier at the end of his term of office than might otherwise have been the case. Like a piano tuner who tuned only the white keys and refused to touch or listen to the black notes, he left the instrument as out of tune as it ever was, only in a different way.