Tribunal signals that discrimination against English people is no joke

HEARD THE one about the English man who claimed he was discriminated against by the Irish? The case was no joke for "Mr C", who won €20,000 from the Equality Tribunal having complained of non-stop discrimination in his place of work.

Anti-Irish discrimination, stretching back to the 19th century, is so well documented it will come as a surprise to some people that anti-English discrimination also exists. The tribunal decision will send out a signal that you do not have to be black, Asian or eastern European to take a race-discrimination case and that there is a fine line between good-natured slagging and racist abuse.

In other circumstances slagging an Englishman off about the English football team, Sellafield or singing notorious rebel songs like The Devil is Dead would be passed off as workplace banter.

Equality Tribunal director Melanie Pine says such banter could be construed as racism if the recipient is uncomfortable with it. "I remember the first case in England where an Irish person received an award for being the butt of all the 'Paddy' jokes and there were those who were asking as to why he could not take a joke, but it is the way it is done and the impact it has," she said.

She was only aware of one other case that had been dealt with by the Equality Tribunal of a person claiming discrimination because they were English. The claim by a driving instructor that unwelcome attention had been drawn to his nationality and his previous work for the RAF, during an interview with the Department of the Environment, was rejected by the tribunal in 2003.

Official census figures state 112,000 people in Ireland are UK citizens, but the British government's Institute for Public Policy Research in Britain calculates that almost 300,000 people who were born in the UK live in Ireland, though that includes those who were born in Northern Ireland.

Union official Paul Hardy from Birmingham, who lives in Galway, said the discrimination against Mr C was "fairly isolated" but not unique. "I have come across prejudice where frankly racist statements have been expressed, but I've come across it much more in Irish bars in the US where there is genuine antipathy towards the British," he said.