THE Church of Ireland has said the wording of new anti discrimination legislation aimed at finding a balance between teachers rights and the rights of religious run schools to protect their ethos is still unsatisfactory.
The church's board of education said in a statement that it regretted the attempts to remove entirely a clause in the original Employment Equality Bill, now amended, which made an exception for religious run schools if job discrimination was "essential" for the maintenance of their ethos or was "reasonable to avoid offending the religious sensitivities" of their members or clients.
However, the board of education assured its teachers that the "traditional ethos" of Church of Ireland schools, "in which teachers and management have had a sympathetic and fruitful relationship, remains unchanged".
The board's secretary, Mr David Meredith, said last night there had been a lot of concern among teachers in Church of Ireland schools that "in some way the legislation could be seen as heralding a change in attitude on the part of management towards teachers, that there might be carte blanche for some kind of witchhunt. We are assuring teachers that the church's attitudes to teachers have not changed." He said there was no question of school managements investigating teachers' private lives".
Mr Meredith emphasised that there would be no attempt to put down any amendments to the draft legislation in the Seanad.
However, he warned about the difficulties of drafting legislation in which the rights of religious minorities were fully protected. It is understood the Church of Ireland was concerned, for example, at the total omission of the Church of Ireland teacher training college from an earlier draft of the Bill.
Mr Meredith said the Bill was still open to misinterpretation. It is hard to understand what it means sometimes. For example, it is very difficult to interpret what the word `undermining' means in the clause allowing action to be taken against an employee who is `undermining' a school's religious ethos."
"Nobody will know exactly what it means until someone takes a case to court. That's not the best way to legislate," he said.