Dear Colleague
RE: EHRC CALL FOR EVIDENCE
We drew your attention in the December Policy E-bulletin to the EHRC's call for evidence regarding discrimination in connection with their Triennial Review - which will close on 29 January 2010.
FIS is preparing to make a submission to the EHRC and we are asking for your agency's help in this matter. (See below pp. 2-3)
When we were last in a position to collect data from agencies on forms of harassment experienced by users of the services of Irish agencies, the following was the general trend of complaints over a five year period:
Table 1 Percentages of participating agency users
reporting harassment by year.
Source: S Morgan, Irish
Community Services: Standardised Information Services 5 Year Review
(2003).
 |
As you can see from the following table, Irish users of services of Irish agencies were experiencing forms of harassment relating to at least three of the areas coming within the remit of the EHRC
- gender;
- race (which includes ethnicity);
- sexual orientation.
Table 2 Table showing percentages of specific types of
harassment reported by participating agency users by year.
Source: S Morgan, Irish
Community Services: Standardised Information Services 5 Year Review (2003).
 |
In 1997 when we carried out a small collaborative project relating to anti-Irish racism - published as The Irish Community: Discrimination and the Criminal Justice System - in partnership with AGIY, The Bourne Trust, ICPO and NAPO - the contributing partners were able to collect fifty six case studies to accompany the report, concerning Irish people, including Irish Travellers.
Here are two examples from those case studies:
| Two young men from Belfast were looking for work in London last year. After several days they were involved in a row in a local pub. They were beaten up by their assailants, and later arrested by the police. They were held overnight in police cells and appeared before the Magistrates' the next day and were remanded in custody for three weeks for reports. They finally appeared on drunk and disorderly and criminal damage charges. They had broken a glass. They were fined £100 each. The Magistrate who at the time of the remand was not happy about their housing status said they should go back to Ireland. | A 30 year old Irish defendant was appearing before a court in London on various motoring offences. Inquiries were made about his license and other documentation. After a brief interchange, an official from the Crown Prosecution Service quipped, "you know about these Irish driving licenses." |
How you can help us with the FIS submission:
(1) Please display, in a prominent place, the poster (shown below) previously posted to affiliates and please encourage any interested clients to contact FIS regarding their experience(s) of discrimination, and about the impact of such discrimination on them personally;
(2) please select from your records of casework for 2008 and 2009 at least two illustrative case histories of clients who have experienced any of the relevant forms of discrimination (i.e. age, disability, gender, race, religion and belief, sexual orientation or gender reassignment) for a dossier which we are preparing to submit to the EHRC;
(3) if you keep monitoring records on clients' reported experience of discrimination(s) can you please (a) inform us whether, in your opinion, such reporting has been increasing or decreasing during 2008 and 2009; and (b) if you can support your opinion with tabulated statistics can you please share these statistics with us.
Please let us have any materials towards the dossier by 22 January 2010.
Yours sincerely
Seán
Seán Hutton
Policy Officer
Direct line: 020 7520 3133
Email: shutton@irishsocieties.org
