Northern Ireland

Your recent editorial “How to Hurt Northern Ireland” (June 15) must have been written by the British government’s propaganda service.

You were clearly missing some essential information when you concluded that the MacBride Principles increase economic hardships and tensions in the North of Ireland. In fact, all evidence indicates that the MacBride campaign has done neither. In point of fact, since the MacBride campaign started in the early 1980s the dollar value of U.S. investments in the North of Ireland has increased as opposed to decreased. That’s not to say that the MacBride campaign was responsible for increasing investment, but it is an indication that it has not deterred investment.

It is the historical, century-old religious discrimination against Catholics in the North of Ireland that has led to violence. The hunger strikes during the early 1980s and the violence that accompanied those strikes were the reasons that companies did not want to invest in that part of the world.

Your editorial also claims that the new British Fair Employment Act is one of the toughest anti-discrimination laws in the United Kingdom, and therefore the MacBride Principles are not needed. But the British law itself prohibits the disclosure of the religious affiliations of individual employees, thereby preventing the investigation of complaints of religious discrimination. Without the ability to investigate, there is no ability to impose penalties, and therefore, companies have little motivation to comply with the law. There has been no action taken to date against a single corporation regarding implementation of the Fair Employment Act.

Your editorial further claims that London has pledged to make the new law work. They’ve been mucking around with fair employment legislation for years without any noticeable decrease in the differential between unemployment of the majority Protestants and the minority Catholics. The chances of a Catholic being unemployed are 2 1/2 times that of a Protestant.

Without the ongoing pressure exerted by the MacBride campaign there will be no meaningful solution to religious discrimination in employment in the North of Ireland.

Our MacBride legislation, AB 1330, at this point calls upon our two retirement systems to monitor companies’ compliance with the MacBride Principles and to support shareholder resolutions urging the adoption of the MacBride Principles. It also should be pointed out that the MacBride Principles only call for good-faith efforts toward correcting these longtime abuses.

AB 1330 is not an divestment bill. It is merely a bill consistent with the tenets of our great country, i.e., freedom of religion, and is directed towards helping end religious discrimination in employment in the North of Ireland.

JOHN L. BURTON

Assembly, D-San Francisco

PAT NOLAN

Assembly, R-Glendale