The former Lord Mayor of Dublin Hazel Chu says she did not discriminate against the prominent atheism campaigner John Hamill and would not discriminate against any member of his group – the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
“There’s a lot of my friends of a non-religious background, atheists, agnostics – one is even in Mr Hamill’s Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster… it’s not something I would discriminate against,” Councillor Chu told a Workplace Relations Commission equality hearing yesterday.
The row centres on a series of religious services livestreamed from the garden of the Mansion House in Dublin in December 2020 under the banner of the Dublin City Inter-Faith Forum called Rewind 2020, marking major religious festivals which had been disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic that year.
Mr Hamill claims non-religious groups should have had a slot in the event series and that he was discriminated against on the basis of his non-religious beliefs as a representative group styling itself the Dublin City Inter-Non-Faith Forum.
This, he told the tribunal, comprised the Alliance of Former Muslims, The Church of Naturalism and his own group, the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster – whose adherents also refer to themselves as “Pastafarian”.
In response to questioning on whether his group was a religion or not – with Dublin City Council’s lawyers saying he had changed his position down the years – Mr Hamill said he accepted “without challenge or caveat” a previous WRC ruling which found his organisation is not a religion for the purposes of equality legislation.
Mr Hamill’s complaint under the Equal Status Act 2000 against the office of former Lord Mayor of Dublin Hazel Chu is on the grounds of discrimination against him because of his non-religious beliefs, which is denied by the city council and by Ms Chu.
Its barrister today argued that the Dublin City Inter-Faith Forum had organised the Rewind 2020 events in its own right and that if Mr Hamill believed himself to have been the subject of discrimination, he ought to take his complaint up with that group – adding that his claim was “misconceived in law”.
Mr Hamill said that he got no response from the Mansion House to an initial registered letter he sent on 10 December 2020 seeking to be involved – a letter Councillor Chu was not sure she had seen before the Christmas break, with four of her five staff working remotely.
After that Mr Hamill served an Equal Status Act statutory complaint form which was responded to by the city council’s law office in February 2021, the tribunal heard.
Councillor Chu told the tribunal that as Mr Hamill continued to write in 2021 seeking access to the Mansion House garden for his proposed ceremony, the country had gone back into a “harsh” pandemic lockdown up to April that year and no groups were admitted to the Mansion House or its garden before 17 May that year.
Mr Hamill said at a time when the council had been telling him that a non-religious ceremony in the Mansion House garden could not be facilitated, the Lord Mayor had “solicited” other groups to attend events there.
After 17 May, Councillor Chu said, the only groups she invited in were volunteers who had been involved in the response to the Covid-19 pandemic; groups involved in campaigning against racism and homophobia, and support groups for the elderly and for breastfeeding mothers – areas she had sought to prioritise during her term.
“Other organisations had asked to use the spaces and we refused more of those organisations as well,” she said.
“There’s a lot of my friends of a non-religious background, atheists, agnostics – one is even in Mr Hamill’s Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster… It’s not something I would discriminate against,” she said.
In his closing arguments, Mr Hamill said that the “policy position” of the city council any time he had attempted to engage on his issues had shifted, from only wishing to engage with an “umbrella group” to telling him: ‘No it’s all down to the Lord Mayor’ to references to respecting religious groups under Article 44 of Bunreacht na hÉireann.
“I just think the current status [quo] is unacceptable. There needs to be a formal written policy,” he said.
Counsel for the city, Claire Bruton BL, who appeared instructed by Dublin City Council in-house solicitor Edel Bradley, said Mr Hamill’s claim was “misconceived” in law as the Equal Status Act did not recognise discrimination against groups, only individual people.
She said the city management accepted the garden space in question was “not outside the provisions of the act”, however.
Ms Bruton urged the adjudicator to look at the matter in context of the pandemic and that the evidence put forward by the complainant side had not made it clear that the practices of the non-religious had been restricted in the same manner as those of faith.
In closing, the complainant said the city council had “no idea” about what significant events had been missed by the nonreligious during the pandemic – arguing that it was “the purest form of prejudice” that the city council was “making conclusions about people because of the groups they’re involved in”.
Ms Bruton said any question of prejudice on the part of the council was something she “refuted in the strongest of terms”.
“I won’t put it any further than that because I don’t want a further argument with Mr Hamill,” she said.
We were litigating another religious discrimination case today, this time along with @C_of_Naturalism as part of the @DubNoFaithForum. Knackered. Those hearings go on for so many hours. pic.twitter.com/oVcHkHcj31
— CoFSM in Ireland (@CoFSM_Ireland) March 7, 2023
Asked by adjudicating officer Jim Dolan what redress he was looking for, Mr Hamill said he wanted the council to set out a policy on the use of public resources on an “objective basis rather than at the discretion of the Lord Mayor”.
“Certainly nothing financial. I would very much like to have 30 minutes in the garden with Mr [Kareem] Muhssin and Mr [Martin] Boers,” he said.
Mr Boers had earlier given evidence on the practice of “naturalist metaphysics” to the hearing as the representative of the Church of Naturalism, stating that it was disappointing that his organisation was “overlooked” by the Lord Mayor’s office.
Mr Muhssin, who did not attend, represented the Alliance of Former Muslims in the Dublin City Inter-Non-Faith Forum, the tribunal was told.
The case adjourned for Mr Dolan to prepare his written decision, which he said he would deliver to the parties in due course.
Ex-Lord Mayor denies discriminating against campaigner
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