DELEGATES at the Association of Secondary Teachers, Ireland conference strongly attacked the Employment Equality Bill for legalising discrimination against teachers on the basis of their private lives.
Ms Dolores Mullins from Drogheda said there might not have been any high profile cases of teachers being sacked because of their lifestyle since the Eileen Flynn case in the mid 1980s but the pressure to conform to the religious ethos of schools had been there.
She said the Bill would create "a climate of fear" among many teachers throughout the country and particularly among part time and temporary teachers. She said a trade union was only as good as the protection it offered its most vulnerable members.
Mr Brendan Rooney from Sligo said the legislation would have the effect of "hounding some of our colleagues out of schools and depriving them of the right to practise their profession in Ireland." These were teachers working in schools funded by "taxpayers of all religions and none".
It was not enough that teachers respected a school's ethos - they were now expected "to conform to an official denominational ethos." The various religious bodies did not trust teachers, he went on, despite teachers' contribution to making Irish education the envy of the western world.
Mr Brendan Duggan, also from Sligo, said the Bill would "ride roughshod over our rights as citizens", and would particularly worry teachers in small towns and rural areas.
He worried that it would lead to the "major injustice" of teachers not being promoted because of their beliefs or relationship status. He denounced a system under which highly competent professional teachers could suffer in their careers because of other people's "ill informed and misguided perceptions of them".
Ms Sheila Parsons from Fingal said the "Christian ethos" talked about by church bodies seemed to be "all about power and control, not about humanitarian values". She did not want to live in a moral police state", she wanted an open, generous, democratic civil society".
Mr Gerry Maloney from Wicklow said the Bill would "copper fasten conditions of employment reflective of an insular society of the Dark Ages, rather than those which should prevail in a modern, pluralistic, democratic republic".
Ms Susie Hall from Dublin was surprised that the Minister for Equality, Mr Taylor, "knowing how his co religionists had suffered from discrimination, would try to foist this Bill on us". She was also surprised that the main support for it was coming from the Christian churches, including a Catholic Church which constantly talked about the job discrimination suffered by Catholics in Northern Ireland.