Bishop McKeown said there is no need to say someone is appointed just because of their perceived religious affiliation.
PA/Alamy
The Bishop of Derry has said that the exemption of Northern Ireland’s schools from employment laws on religious discrimination is “no longer appropriate or required”.
Bishop Donal McKeown told members of Stormont’s executive committee that the exemption made in 1998 assumed that everybody in Northern Ireland was Catholic or Protestant, but that was “a bizarre assumption for any political decisions in 2022”. He was supported by Gerry Campbell, the chief executive of the Council for Catholic Maintained Schools, who said: “It’s a different world we live in now”.
A private member’s bill from the Alliance Party’s Chris Lyttle would remove the exemption of teachers from the 1976 Fair Employment (Northern Ireland) Act, which said that “the essential nature of the job requires it be done by a person holding, or not holding, a particular religious belief”. The Fair Employment and Treatment (Northern Ireland) Order maintained the exemption in 1998.
Members of the committee supported its removal, Sinn Féin’s Pat Sheehan calling it “an anachronism that should be done away with” while the Democratic Unionist Diane Dodds claimed that “most people believe the exemption does not sit easily with a modern Northern Ireland”.
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