Averil Power (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I also welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Ó Ríordáin, to the House. He is the fourth Minister to deal with legislation in this area in the House. The former Ministers, Deputies Quinn and Shatter, dealt with it when I tabled a Bill in 2012. The Minister of State, Deputy Kathleen Lynch, dealt with Senator Bacik's Bill in 2013 and the Minister of State is taking it. It has been a long time coming. Ending discrimination against lesbian, gay and bisexual teachers, medical staff and other employees is a personal priority of mine. It is for that reason that I brought forward the Bill in 2012 to amend section 37 of the Employment Equality Act and unequivocally outlaw any discrimination against employees solely on the grounds of sexual orientation or on other inherent personal characteristics such as gender or marital status. I was disappointed at the time that the Government did not accept the Bill but I welcome the fact that this issue has stayed on the agenda for the past three years. I appreciate the work other Members of the Oireachtas have since put in, including Senator Bacik on this Bill. Senator Zappone has been pushing it along and other items of legislation have been put forward in the Dáil. I hope the Minister of State is the last Minister who will have to come into this House to discuss this issue with us. I know this is an issue to which he has a personal commitment, both in his current role and as a former teacher. I hope we can work together on a cross-party, cross-group basis to get properly robust and progressive legislation through both Houses as soon as possible. There is one standard that the final legislation will be held against, and that is whether employees can be secure in knowing they are free to be themselves at work, that there is no doubt about that and that they no longer have to hide any aspect of their personalities, including sexual orientation. I know the Minister has heard from teachers about the heartbreak of going into the staff room on a Monday and not being able to speak about their weekends or their partners, or not being able to tell people that they participated in a civil partnership or got married abroad. I hope they will soon be able to say they got married in Ireland when that legislation is passed. People should be able to have the same conversations that everybody else has about their lives, and be open and comfortable in doing that. No employee can be really happy in his or her job in those circumstances. It is particularly cruel that people who are good at their jobs - people whom everybody knows to be good teachers, doctors or other top-class professionals - are still unhappy in their work for that reason, especially in 2015. The standard will be that people do not have any fear, and that requires that the final text give people certainty that there are no circumstances whatsoever in which any employer will have a legal basis for arguing that an inherent personal characteristic of an employee is a threat to the ethos of the workplace or a ground for taking any action against him or her. I am concerned, as I stated in the debates on earlier Stages of this legislation, that the current text of the Bill does not meet that test. That is something that the Gay and Lesbian Equality Network, GLEN, the Irish National Teachers' Organisation, the INTO, and the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, ICCL, have said publicly also. The ICCL stated on the last occasion that the Bill would be a partial thawing of the current chill factor that exists for LGBT staff, but not a full thawing. The Minister has indicated that he will table amendments on Report Stage, and I welcome the fact that he met with myself and Senators Zappone and Bacik yesterday to indicate his intentions. It would be helpful if he could outline those to the House. A particular issue, which I have highlighted previously, is that it can only ever be legitimate to take action against any employee - gay or straight, male or female, religious or non-religious - on the basis of some form of misconduct in the workplace. That is not a requirement in the current Bill and it is essential that it be included.

I have tabled amendments on the separation of public and private institutions, which we can discuss later, including amendment No. 5. It is essential that people in private institutions have some protections.

As Senator Zappone stated, in the current draft of the Bill the Minister is not changing the religion ground. As the legislation stands, an employer can discriminate on the grounds of religion by saying it is reasonably necessary to protect the ethos of the workplace, but it is not a genuine occupational requirement, as mentioned in the European Union directive. None of us would argue that it would be appropriate to insist that the church hire female priests, but it would be utterly inappropriate not to hire somebody as a gardener, youth worker or some other employment that does not have a religious teaching element to it on the basis of a personal characteristic that is not related to the job. It is something the Minister needs to examine.

I have tabled a number of amendments that I would like to discuss with the Minister and on which I would like feedback from him before Report Stage. In the first instance, however, it would be helpful to get his views on the record about the Government's intentions for Report Stage. There is a long way to go and I hope we will go there together.