The Irish Times hosted a series of talks earlier this week exploring equality, diversity and inclusion in an ever-evolving workplace.
Hosted by Jennifer O’Connell, discussions included the challenges of creating an equal, diverse and inclusive workplace in a hybrid world and exploring the impact of a more flexible workplace.
Held at Fallon & Byrne, Exchequer Street, Dublin 2, The Irish Times event featured a panel of guest speakers, Dr Tatiana Andreeva, Maynooth University; Dr Théophile Munyangeyo, Trinity College Dublin; Tina Raleigh, Statkraft and Adam Harris, As I Am.
Also on the panel was head of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) at the Public Appointments Service (publicjobs.ie), Dubliner Siobhán McKenna, who shared her experiences and insights into the challenges and successes of making public sector recruitment more inclusive, leading to a more diverse workforce. ‘With that diversity of experience and skills” she says, “comes the innovation, creativity and productivity our public services need”.
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For McKenna driving equality for the Public Appointments Service is personal. She is on a mission to ensure equitable access for all those applying for a job in the public sector.
Born in 1975, she spent the first six months of her life in St Patrick’s Mother and Baby Home. More than that, she spent it in what she understands was referred to as “the rejects room” with “all the other black, brown or disabled babies” the babies the nuns expected no one would want.
She was indeed adopted, and by a fantastic family. The day her parents collected her from St Patrick’s, the nun told her mother she had “kept me in the shade so I wouldn’t get too dark,” she adds.
Her lived experience has left McKenna always rooting for “the underdog, the one who needs more help”.
By and large she enjoyed her school days, in Dublin’s Mount Anville, but will never forget the “horrific abuse” she regularly received from visiting schools at hockey matches.
“Every single adult who heard that abuse had a duty of care and they failed. Coaches would just say ignore it and carry on with the game. We should have walked off the pitch.” We would now she thinks, and that gives her hope.
Growing up with supportive and empathetic parents helped. “If bad things happened, they’d put their arms around me and tell me it was someone else’s problem. I also had a class barrier to protect me. My father was a dentist, and you don’t get more middle class than that. But obviously I was aware I wasn’t your standard looking Irish person. I used to look overseas for positive black and mixed-race role models; often fantasising that somehow, Nelson Mandela was my grandfather.”
Levelling the playing field
She did her Leaving Cert in 1993 and studied international social science in UCD. She followed it up with a Masters in ethnic and racial studies in Trinity, where she was “the only person of colour in the class”. Which is not to say she’s knocking it, by any means. “Ten years previously that course wouldn’t even have existed,” she says.
All through her formative years she had to internalise her lived experience, “because I couldn’t articulate what it felt like to be mixed race; I didn’t have the words and no one around me had them either. But I developed an interest in how society is organised and structured, who the winners and losers are, and how to close the gap between the two,” she explains.
After college she spent 20 years in London, in a career devoted to public service that included stints in the UK’s Department of Education and in London’s City Hall, under both Boris Johnson and Sadiq Khan.
Much of her work focused on disadvantaged young people, which in London she quickly realised “largely meant black and brown kids,” she says.
She spent two years as education programme manager of Khan’s Violence Reduction Unit, taking a public health approach to a surge in youth knife crime. “It was definitely the most depressing work I have done,” she says.
Keen to move home after Brexit she applied to the Public Appointments Service and secured her current role.
“I didn’t quite know what the conversation around EDI would be like when I came back to this country. Was it going to be a room full of white men saying, ‘this is what equality is’ she wondered?
It wasn’t. The Public Appointments Service had spent two years developing an EDI strategy and her role was to lead the team to deliver on it.
“The Civil Service knows it needs to better reflect all the people, all the skills and all the experiences of the entire country, in order to develop better public services for everyone,” she explains.
Crunching the numbers
One of the first steps was to establish baseline data in relation to recruitment. “We needed to know who was applying to the Civil Service, who was getting through and who was not, and if our recruitment processes were fit for purpose. If, for example, a person with a disability or who is transitioning applies, will they get an equitable chance?” she explains.
The Public Appointments Service, who through its website publicjobs.ie undertake about a third of public sector recruitment, commissioned the ESRI to crunch its applications and assignments data between 2019 and 2021. It found 94 per cent who applied were either white Irish or white other and 97 per cent did not have a disability. “There were not enough people from diverse backgrounds and experiences applying but when they did apply, they got in, so there was some good news in the bad news,” she says.
Outside consultants were commissioned to undertake an audit, helping the Public Appointments Service find ways to improve the recruitment process, ensuring it takes the right approach to attracting and recruiting the talent required.
“If you’ve been managing three stores with a staff of 20 people but can’t get into the Civil Service because you didn’t get a passing Leaving Cert – it doesn’t make any sense. Or, in relation to disability, it’s about seeing what people can do, rather than what they can’t,” she explains.
A new placement programme is already proving to be a fair and effective way of recruiting and retaining people with a disability, a model she, policymakers and employers across the Civil Service are keen to develop.
The Public Appointments Service is also ensuring its recruitment processes are more accessible. “If you can apply for a job with one click on a platform like LinkedIn, why do you need to fill out a pdf form?” she asks.
A large part of her role is influencing the public, including working with secondary schools. “Our next generation of civil servants are in school now and the natural diversity of Irish society is very evident there. Through our innovative Schools Resource Kit we are trying to plant the seed about careers in the Civil Service and show them what a career path here can look like,” says McKenna.
Opening doors
She is also helping to drive EDI within the public sector and she and her team work very closely with, decision makers, people managers, and clients across the civil and public service. “Our job typically ends when we deliver new recruits to our Civil Service and public service clients, but we know we need to support our clients to ensure that new employees will thrive, and so we share new learning, resources and collaborate on best practices regularly with them,” she explains. All of them are willing partners, and “you can see the momentum start to build across the sector. This is a collective effort”.
Working with policymakers she and her colleagues have been breaking down structural barriers to entry too, recently broadening the eligibility criteria to include Stamp 4 visa holders, “the step below citizenship”, and opening up jobs to thousands of people who were otherwise ineligible.
“We can talk about inclusion all we want but if people can’t even get in the door, it is meaningless,” she points out.
“We are in a war for talent right now. We need different mindsets around the table to drive the productivity agenda. If everyone is from the same background and lived experience, we’ll just get the same ideas, which will only take us so far in the 21st century,” she adds.
“I want the public service to reflect the public it serves, and for Ireland to be a better country than the one I grew up in. This is going to take a whole-society effort. Everybody has a role to play.”
Whether in relation to racism, misogyny or bias of any kind, it’s not enough to be ‘non’, which is passive, we have to be ‘anti’, which is proactive, she explains.
And while she didn’t quite know what to expect when she joined the Public Appointments Service, she is delighted with how it has worked out. “I absolutely love the people I work with,” says McKenna. “I’ve been at pushing open doors since I got here.”