Giving a voice to inequality

PR0FILE: KATHLEEN LYNCH, PROFESSOR OF EQUALITY STUDIES, UCD: Driven by unfairness and determined to make equality studies a discipline in it's own right, UCD's Kathleen Lynch is a doughty fighter, an influential voice and an Irish academic with an international reputation

‘KATHLEEN LYNCH has done more service to this country than the whole political establishment put together.”

So says one community activist in North Dublin who rang the UCD professor of equality studies in desperation one day. She was struggling to decode government policy on the rights of the people she was trying to help.

“She insisted that we meet and invited me to her home. We have been talking ever since.”

Kathleen Lynch is a former social worker who took her experience of housing and poverty to the highest levels of academia. Her expertise has taken her into the policy machinery of the state, to consultation in Europe and most recently to China, where she was invited by the Chinese government to contribute to their new framework for equality.

The public will know her from her occasional appearances on panel shows such as Tonight with Vincent Browneon TV3, and her more regular contributions to this paper's letters page. Her view of equality in Ireland has reset the discourse, according to her admirers. "Much of what you hear Vincent Browne and others saying about equality now is just Kathleen Lynch-lite," says an observer. "She has changed how we talk about fairness."

When Lynch speaks in the media she lays on a thick layer of statistics and research that has been known to frustrate interviewers looking for a soundbyte.

However, Lynch’s erudition is underpinned by years of painstaking, ground-level enquiry and a genuine desire to make a difference at all levels – from community welfare to policymaking, say colleagues.

“She’s well respected internationally and addresses conferences all over the world,” says a senior figure in academia. “At the same time, she works at community level, using her research to help local groups and community leaders.”

One of those community leaders describes late-night sessions with Lynch over a few drinks as the two wrangled with the finer points of policy. ‘“Hospitality first.’ They were Kathleen’s first words to me when I went to her home looking for help to develop a community programme,” says a former student. “I ended up studying for a masters in UCD, and she buddied me all the way, even giving me lifts to and from Blackrock to do my exams. I’m a northsider – I was lost on the UCD side of the city.”

Lynch is an outspoken critic of many university policies and is never shy of lambasting her paymasters. Despite this, a senior figure in UCD administration speaks of her with admiration. “Kathleen Lynch is one of the outstanding figures in the UCD landscape. She was one of the first to attract private funding to the university and she pioneered the development of the Centre for Equality Studies against considerable resistance from some quarters.”

According to insiders, there are reactionary forces within academia who have been dismissive of her efforts to develop equality studies into a discipline in its own right.

“Kathleen’s a doughty fighter who will not stand for the silencing of dissent,” says a colleague. “There are many outspoken academics out there who would change the world as long as they can do it between breakfast and lunch. Kathleen is tireless. She really wants to make a difference.”

“I’ve asked her to slow down, I’m afraid she’ll burn out, but she’s driven by unfairness,” says a friend. “She gets it from her mother.She’s determined to do the downstream work as well as the upstream.”

Lynch was born to a farming family in Co Clare. She is married to John Lynch, Ireland’s national delegate for research infrastructures at the Higher Education Authority. She started her career as a social worker in the area of poverty and housing. What she witnessed on the ground lit a fire under her, says a friend.

She focused her early studies on education and, along with Dr Anne Lodge of NUI Maynooth, produced Equality and Power in Schools, a seminal work on the subject of education access and attainment.

Following two years of classroom observation in 12 Irish schools, Lynch and Lodge painstakingly deconstructed the dynamics of inequality in Irish education, from school choice to streaming to sexual orientation. Students of educational sociology, and many teachers, use and reuse the book in research and practice.

Her next move was to push for the demarcation of equality studies as a discipline at UCD, eventually establishing the UCD Equality Studies Centre in 1990 and the UCD School of Social Justice in 2005.

The centres have issued two major works on equality since: From Theory to Action(2004, 2009) and Affective Equality: Love Care and Injustice(2009). The latter was one of Ireland's 100 best books in 2009, as chosen by readers of The Irish Times.

At policy level, she was consulted by the Commission on the Status of People With Disabilities in the 1990s. “The commission’s report and her research redefined policy thinking on disability,” says a senior academic. “She has had a significant impact at the upper reaches of Government.”

More importantly in Lynch’s eyes, perhaps, is the manner in which her work has helped to create a theoretical framework that people on the ground can use in practical ways.

“Without Kathleen I couldn’t do what I do for people in the margins,” says one community worker. “She has resourced me to be an advocate for working class people like me. I measure everything I do against her standards. She’s an inspiration. She’s also a very fine set dancer.”

LYNCH LESSONS

UCD’s Kathleen Lynch makes regular TV and radio contributions, providing a unique but increasingly influential perspective on equality issues in Ireland. Her most regular public outings, however, are in editorials, letters to the editor, and public meetings, where she consistently challenges the status quo from an equality perspective.

On bonus points for maths:

“No matter how well-intentioned are those who wish to enhance interest in higher level mathematics, the increased social divisiveness of the bonus points entry criterion is a very good reason not to implement it. It will further advantage the already advantaged, which expressly contradicts Government policy.”

On the introduction of aptitude tests for medicine (HPAT):

“Not alone are the tests of doubtful value, they are also a new barrier for lower-income students to higher educational entry. Proficiency on the tests requires practice and insider knowledge that is only available to those who can buy it.”

On streaming in schools:

Lynch told a Combat Poverty Agency conference of a growing “normalisation” of poverty and inequality in the education system. She called for funding sanctions to be imposed on schools that “cherry-picked” students, for an end to “streaming” in schools.

On women in academia:

“Women academics in Ireland are heavily concentrated in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Significant numbers are working at senior level and women are world leaders in several areas. Yet there is a major conference being held this week on the place of the humanities and social sciences in 21st-Century Ireland in which only two of the 17 invited speakers are women. The low profile of women at this conference indicates how far Ireland has to go to recognise excellence when it comes from women.”