Sir, - The Fair Employment Commission's final report shows that from 1990 to 1998 the number of Protestants in the Northern Ireland workforce increased by 5,031, while the number of Catholics employed increased by 25,698. In other words, more than five times as many Catholics were hired than Protestants during the eight-year period (The Irish Times, April 1st). The Belfast Telegraph's headline for this piece of news was: "FEC winds up on an upbeat note". The FEC's director, Sir Robert Cooper, said the figures showed that Northern Ireland was moving towards "a fairer society" and that the "Catholic Community's share of jobs is closer to a figure which reflects their numbers in the economically active population."
Far from helping Northern Ireland move towards a fairer society, the FEC has been the cause of an increase in tribalism and sectarianism and the elevation of so-called "group rights" at the expense of individual rights.
The FEC has long argued that Catholics are "under-represented" in the Northern Ireland workforce. The very word "underrepresented" implies that proportional representation of groups, not individual merit, should be the determinant of who gets jobs.
Northern Ireland, thanks to British mis-government and the efforts of the FEC, is now an officially tribal and sectarian society. Every job applicant and every applicant for promotion has to give details of his or her private religious beliefs. Whereas in the past discrimination on religious grounds was a private and shameful matter, now it is official State policy. In the same way that individuals were victims of private discrimination, now they are victims of official and State-mandated religious discrimination.
While I am pleased for those Catholics who have entered the workforce, my sympathies go to those job applicants, Catholics and Protestants, who are the invisible victims of this sectarian head-counting, who were turned down for jobs because, at the businesses they applied to, their religious quota was full. Nobody monitors them; they do not show up in anybody's statistics. - Yours, etc., Paul Rowlandson,
Hillview Avenue, Derry.