A male teacher has been awarded €5,000 for discrimination on gender grounds, after his failure to be appointed as special deputy principal. He claimed there was a climate in the school in favour of the appointment of a woman.
The case was taken to ODEI, the equality tribunal, by Mr Eamonn Lynskey against Coolmine Community School in Dublin, where he had taught English and Italian to examination level for 25 years.
The post came up, for the second time, in 1999. The previous incumbent had been a woman, while the principal and deputy principal were men. Mr Lynskey claimed there was a climate in favour of the appointment of a woman, irrespective of qualifications, but he applied nonetheless. There were seven other applicants.
A woman candidate was again appointed, and Mr Lynskey claimed she did not have his qualifications or experience. Specifically, she had 16 years' teaching experience and four years' experience as an administrator, while he had 25 years' teaching experience, 16 of them as an administrator. He also had more academic qualifications.
In its response, the school said the successful applicant had an honours degree, while the complainant had only a pass degree. It also said her computer qualifications, necessary for the job, were superior to his, and she had shown greater commitment to the general development of the school.
It denied any "climate" in favour of a female appointment, and said this issue was never raised either directly with the school or through the claimant's trade union.
However, three other teachers in the school gave evidence of this climate, and the equality officer said she was unwilling to discount their evidence as irrelevant.
The equality officer was also critical of the interview process. She found that the criteria for the post listed by the school in response to the complaint differed from those listed in the newspaper advertisement. Therefore, the selection committee "approached the interviews without any clear standards for the post being filled and without any specific, objective criteria against which to measure candidates for the post.
"In the circumstances," she said, "I cannot see how the committee could have confidence in its ability to make a decision on the best candidate to fill a school position as vital as that of deputy principal."