Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this debate. I accept the spirit in which the Bill has been introduced. My understanding is that the basic intent behind it is to ensure that decisions made by the Government and public bodies will, in essence, be proofed in order to assess the impact they might have on certain sections of society. In theory, that is a fair enough concept. However, the problem is that the Bill is simply not practical.

As everyone is aware, the Government is operating within extremely tight and difficult budgetary constraints. Major efforts have been made to reduce the numbers in the public service in order to bring down costs. A number of State bodies have been abolished or merged as we attempt to secure greater efficiencies of service. The Haddington Road agreement, if implemented, will lead to many public servants working additional hours as well as making other major sacrifices. Only last week the Minister for Justice and Equality, Deputy Shatter, announced the redeployment of 54 staff from the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine and other areas of the public service to the Garda central vetting unit. While this is most welcome and will, I hope, help to alleviate the delays relating to the processing of vetting applications, and also the backlog,

it also serves to highlight the severe constraints within which we are working when staff must be moved from one Department to another to alleviate backlogs. This is all because the continued focus of this Government since taking office had to be on trying to do more with less. It is in this regard that this Bill does not stand up to scrutiny. The Bill proposes what could be very resource-intensive obligations on a number of public bodies to prepare and publish equality impact assessments of their work for approval by the Equality Authority. While such a move is likely to create much paperwork, it will not necessarily lead to greater equality.

I welcome the commitment from the Minister of State, Deputy Kathleen Lynch, that the Government will shortly publish the Bill to establish the new Irish human rights and equality commission. As she stated, the Government is focused on imposing a positive duty on public bodies to look at the equality issues they face and address these in their annual reports. The role of the human rights and equality commission will be an active one, which focuses on providing support and facilitation - in other words, less administration and less paperwork and more results.

The Bill proposes to create five new grounds in the Equal Status Acts, including the case of criminal conviction. This is an area in which I have a particular interest as, over the past two and a half years, I have encountered a number of cases where people have experienced major difficulties when applying for jobs due to relatively minor offences on their criminal records. That certainly is an issue of equality. Obviously, if a person breaks the law, regardless of how minor the offence, he or she deserves to be punished. There should be no ambiguity about that. However, the bottom line is that we all can make mistakes, in particular when we are young. It is important these mistakes are not held against a person for the rest of his or her life, thus impinging on future career opportunities. This issue has been dealt with in some detail by the Minister for Justice and Equality, Deputy Shatter, who brought forward the Criminal Justice (Spent Convictions) Bill some time ago and which is currently on Report Stage in the Dáil and, hopefully, will be enacted in the autumn.

That Bill is much more practical in its application than the one before us. Rather than dealing with all convictions as if they were equal, the Criminal Justice (Spent Convictions) Bill differentiated between various convictions. For example, convictions for offences such as murder, manslaughter and sexual offences may never become spent. Likewise, convictions resulting in sentences of more than 12 months may not become spent and not more than two convictions in a person's life may become spent. Essentially, the Bill aims to ensure that those who commit minor one-off offences are not stigmatised when seeking employment in the future. In essence, the Criminal Justice (Spent Convictions) Bill was about giving people a second chance.

This Bill has chosen to extend the discrimination grounds in the Equal Status Acts but not in the Employment Equality Acts. I am confused as to the reason for this but I understand that, as it stands, the Bill will not apply to employment issues.

The Bill also proposes to extend the discrimination grounds in the Equal Status Acts to those living in rural areas, which is an interesting point. I live in a rural area and I recall last year having a conversation with a gentlemen about the household charge. He argued that he did not avail of any of the amenities the charge was supposed to cover. He lived in the countryside and he advised that he did not use the public library, the swimming pool, the park and certainly did not have street lighting. He said all of these amenities were in the town and that he did not use them but eventually he agreed that he used the roads. Obviously, these need to be maintained too. It was ironic this year, when the property tax took effect, that those who lived in the major cities and towns felt they were being discriminated against as their properties were of a higher value. It was a case of the shoe being on the other foot.

I note the Minister of State, Deputy Kathleen Lynch, made a similar point last night in regard to the provision of broadband services. Often people living in the countryside are not able to obtain as good a quality of service as those living in towns. Under the proposed Bill, this could be also seen as discrimination when, in fact, it is sometimes due to logistics and economics. On that note, I was pleased, when I met with Eircom this evening, to hear it is investing €1.5 billion of capital expenditure to deliver the nation's newest fibre network, reaching 1.2 million homes and businesses. I was particularly pleased that fibre broadband will be available in Monaghan Town from July of this year and that by June 2015, Eircom fibre broadband will be extended to the towns of Carrickmacross, Castleblayney and Clones.

I note that under the Bill the Government would be also classed as a public body and as a result, the annual budget would also have to be proofed and approved by the Equality Authority. The Government and all the elected representatives of this House engage with various interest groups and organisations in the lead-up to the budget each year. A number of these organisations hold pre-budget submission meetings which every Deputy has the opportunity to attend and take on board concerns and raise these matters thereafter. This Bill seems to propose that we take budgetary decisions and put them in the hands of an unelected State body.

At the outset I said I accepted the spirit in which the Bill was being brought forward but what it proposes is simply not practical. It is for this reason and the other issues I have outlined that I will not support the Bill.

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