• Ministers address inaugural meeting and announce Membership
• 16-member Committee to be chaired by Caroline Fennell, Professor of Law at UCC
• Committee is tasked with drafting an Action Plan Against Racism for Ireland within one year
• Committee intends to focus on concrete actions
19 June 2020
The Minister for Justice and Equality, Charlie Flanagan TD and David Stanton TD, Minister of State with responsibility for Equality, Immigration and Integration, have announced the membership of the new independent Anti-Racism Committee. The Committee is being established to draw up a new Action Plan Against Racism for Ireland.
Chaired by Caroline Fennell, Professor of Law at University College Cork, and Commissioner with the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, the new Committee will consult broadly in developing new ideas for fighting racism in Ireland. It will recommend an action plan to Government at the end of its work, which is expected to take approximately one year.
The Committee comprises people from diverse backgrounds, including those with lived experience of racism. The intention is that its work will be grounded in the lived reality of people’s lives and that the recommended Action Plan will be action-oriented and practical. Its members come from a wide range of sectors and backgrounds, recognising that racism can occur in many aspects of life and that broad experience and expertise need to be harnessed to develop an effective action plan address it. The Committee includes people from the business, education, local government, academic and advocacy sectors. (A full list of the members is supplied below).
Work to develop terms of reference and a representative membership has been ongoing since December 2019 when the Ministers appointed an independent chairperson. The Committee held its inaugural meeting, via Zoom, on Thursday 18th June 2020. Both Minister Flanagan and Minister Stanton addressed the Committee at the beginning of the meeting, highlighting the importance of their work and promising the strong support of the Department of Justice and Equality and the wider Government.
Minister Flanagan welcomed the first meeting of the committee, saying,
I wish the Committee every success in this critically important work. We need to acknowledge that racism does occur in Ireland; to understand better how prevalent it is and what its impacts are; and to generate effective strategies for tackling it. I am very pleased that we will have access to the expertise on this Committee to guide us in this and I look forward to the outcomes of this really important work. In particular, the mandate of the Committee to engage very widely across society is of crucial importance in informing the proposals it will ultimately make.
Minister Stanton commented on the importance of the Action Plan Against Racism for a fully inclusive Ireland, saying,
The Government recognises the need for further action to combat racism. In giving this new Committee a mandate to develop a new Action Plan Against Racism for recommendation to the Government, we are building on the work we have done over the past three years under both the Migrant Integration Strategy and the National Traveller and Roma Inclusion Strategy. Both these Strategies set out a vision for an inclusive Ireland, where everyone has the opportunity to participate fully, and diversity is valued.
The Committee Chair Caroline Fennell welcomed the appointment of the other members, saying:
I very much look forward to working with my fellow Committee members on this important task. There is a broad and deep range of knowledge and expertise on the Committee, including lived experience of racism in Ireland, which will be so very important to our work.
The Committee is specifically tasked with reviewing the current evidence on racial discrimination in Ireland and looking to best international practice on measures to combat racism. To inform its work it will hold a series of stakeholder dialogues to gain from the views of civil society, members of the public, members of the Oireachtas, the business sector, media and other relevant parties.
The Committee is required to produce an interim report to Government not more than three months after its first meeting identifying priority issues and a programme of work for the Committee. At the end of one year, the Committee has been asked to provide a draft anti-racism strategy, containing a clear action plan and recommendations for the Government to consider.