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Time for Equality Authority Board to Resign
Read more about: Comment, Equality, Features, Social Policy 
Niall Crowley’s resignation as the CEO of the Equality over budget cutbacks which would see the authority lose 40% of its budget and enforce a move to Roscrea that would decimate its legal staff raises more questions for Angela Kerins and the others on the Equality Authority board.
Suzy has posted on Maman Poulet
Angela Kerins chairs the board of an organisation that faces a 43% cut and a very disabling move to Roscrea whilst other agencies were not hit in any similar manner.
Some might say if they resign they’ll be replaced by other government appointees but a resignation by several members of the board including union and business appointees might indicate that the commitment mentioned above can’t be bought off/thought of lightly.
The threat of resignation was not used while mergers and cuts were mooted and it took Niall Crowley to move on the matter before any more questions arose. NGOs have praised the decision but a Minister who is not for moving might need more convincing.
People need to focus on individual rights, not group rights. Focussing on equal outcomes invariably leads to individual injustice as groups tend to perform differently. For instance, in Dan Seligman’s book ‘A Question of Intelligence’ he notes that East Asians tend to outperform whites on non-verbal elements in the tests (whether taken in the US, Asia, or the UK & also when adopted by non Asian families). So, expecting whites to be as represented in math/science professions per population seems unrealistic. Likewise, Ashkenazi Jews consistently score above average on psychometric tests. Not every group is going to be represented in the professions to the same extent. There is, however, overlap amongst groups so you can’t imply much about an individual based on a group average.
This is why insisting on equal outcomes rather than equal opportunity is beating up against human nature & evolution.
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/10/james-watson-tells-inconvenient-truth_296.php
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/01/no-scientific-basis-for-race.html
Some nice academic theory there Ben. Would you care to relate it to the Irish environment?
The huge issue is indeed the way that the EA has been completely muzzled, rather than what happened/happens to Niall Crowley. While I wouldn’t agree with everything the EA has done, they were hugely effective in their own field. Liveline yesterday had a series of callers nothing how the authority had supported them in taking Equality cases. In particular, the parent of a dyslexic child who had taken a case against Dept Education noted that the Dept had spent €8m in defending the case, which I guess would cover the entire EA budget for a year. It was also interesting to note the unusual and pointed reference to ‘senior civil servants’ in Crowley’s resignation letter, which would suggest that politicians are being led by the senior execs on this issue. It is also worth nothing that the Chairperson Angela Kerins seems to make something of a habit of losing Directors (http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2005/1029/1130406917325.html). To misquote Oscar Wilde, to lose one Director may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness. The arguement about budget cuts holds zero water, given the single-digit cuts that applied to all other similar agencies in the Justice family. Crowley was got, plain and simple.
Crowley is undoubtedly a man of principle. His depature leaves the rest of the board exposed. If they believed the organisation can do its job with a 43% reduction, they should have come up with this proposal themselves. If they don’t, they should resign.
I laud Minister Ahern on this matter. Quangos are not the answer to the problems this country faces, and I do not accept we are a racist country by Western standards. The only vulnerable people impacted by this decision are the quangos themselves. We still have the Irish Human Rights Commission, and as far as I can see that renders the NCCRI, NAPAR and the others largely surplus to requirements. A ‘human rights industry’ has grown up whereby quangos have been allowed to proliferate on the basis that they are needed but in practice to provide jobs for the boys. Since 1997 851 quangos have been created under the Ahern-Cowen regimes. In the context of the recession many of them constitute expensive luxuries. Why, for example, do north and south Limerick need 2 separate “regeneration councils”?