Yesterday, my colleague Matt Treacy broke a story about a presentation made, last week, to revenue employees by a representative of the LGBT NGO BeLongTo. You can read that story here, where it records all of the claims that were made, behind closed doors, to Revenue staff.
A series of false claims were made at that event, including the scurrilous accusation that an Irish Judge had once said it was okay to kill gay people – something which simply has never happened – and a potentially defamatory claim about the reasons why Enoch Burke lost his job. Other false claims included the lie that the reason no cure exists for AIDS is because it is primarily a disease of gay men, and the claim that accurate reporting of BeLongTo’s promotional materials amounts to “far right groups spreading misinformation”.
These claims were all made, behind closed doors, to Irish civil servants, and they were all made without challenge. This, evidently, is not the kind of misinformation that the Government is concerned about when it talks about challenging that so-called problem.
But more concerning than the claims made at the event is the fact of the event at all. This was, after all, just one of many.
It is now entirely routine, under Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion (DEI) policies in many government departments and large private sector organisations, for state-funded NGOs like BeLongTo (and many others) to be invited in to give “presentations” to employees about how they can become better citizens. In academic institutions, Gript has reported extensively on the adoption of Athena Swan charters which are explicitly designed, in many cases, to force conformity with a particular worldview on employees. This is the reason that Waterford lecturer Colette Colfer is objecting to her university’s new equality policy, which falsely purports to make it a crime to “misgender” somebody.
The extent of this propagandising does not simply extend to meetings and charters. In many companies and Government departments, employees quietly grumble about being compelled, in effect, to wear rainbow badges during the various pride weeks or other events. Many of them dare not complain openly. Misinformation, and imposed ideological conformity, is not only tolerated but encouraged.
To say that this should not be happening is obvious: Equality policies need never go beyond the basics: Treat people with respect, do not bully them, and do not sexually harass. But instead, employees across the land are being subjected to lengthy and unending lectures about their alleged privilege, their duty to be “allies”, and are constantly at risk of running afoul of new and ever-expanding customs designed to limit so-called “microaggressions”, which can be defined as something as simple as wearing your hair in the style of another culture.
The bigger question really is why this is all happening: Most of it can be explained by the same explanation for why it is that Irish county councils seem to go on a road-repairing bender every November and December. If you don’t spend the money in this year’s budget, you don’t get it in next year’s budget.
The same principle applies to DEI departments: These relatively new institutions must justify their existence, and, by a happy coincidence, ideological NGOs need to do the same, so that they can justify the state funding they receive. Running “workshops” for state employees, or employees in the private sector, on things like equality, is the kind of thing that justifies your funding, if you are an NGO. And bringing in “experts” to talk about equality issues does the same for DEI departments. Even though only 80 of Revenue’s 4,000 employees sat through the BelongTo seminar last week, it all still counts towards the good work of making Ireland more equal.
But the toxic effects of this culture are yet to be fully felt, or understood. In effect, it amounts to the state giving radical activists a licence to indoctrinate and misinform the state’s own employees. One objective of this, you suspect, is to make state employees and civil servants more sympathetic to particular policy agendas. Given what we know about the caliber of some Ministers, that also amounts to a state subsidy to lobby quietly for particular policies.
The whole thing is rotten, from the ground up. It has very little, if anything, to do with the national interest. Revenue should stick to training its employees in accountancy, and not in LGBT theory.