By George Fergusson

THE new awareness and concern about racism is good. But what can we do practically to make life fairer for racial minorities?

One answer may lie in Northern Ireland. (They’ve already, this last weekend, offered a lesson to the rest of us on how to demonstrate while socially distancing, with two-metre squares marked out in front of Belfast City Hall – and largely complied with. I like the idea that, with its tricky history of marches, Belfast is now giving us useful lessons on how to do it).

More substantively, Northern Ireland has long-standing employment legislation which has successfully tackled “indirect discrimination” – always more awkward to deal with than the “direct” discrimination on race, religious or other grounds that everyone of reasonable goodwill would oppose. But people of goodwill can and do operate systems with unfair effects on under-represented groups, often without realising why.

The Fair Employment Act of 1989 required detailed monitoring of the religious make-up of workforces, recruitments and promotions. It guaranteed the “merit principle” – decisions had to be made on individual merit. But monitoring revealed whether the results could be justified against the make-up of the population in the relevant “travel-to-work” area – maybe a mile for a cleaner, or a 45-minute BMW drive for a CEO. If it couldn’t, employers had to explore why not, and what to do. A public agency could help – but if nothing was done and agency advice ignored, ultimately a company could lose grants or public contracts.

There were unexpectedly easy wins. Apparently respectable traditions like “situations vacant” signs in windows, clearly added to existing imbalances if put where only one community saw them. But advertising where the under-represented group was disproportionately the audience could help.

The only area where reverse discrimination was allowed was that an employer could offer single group training to an under-represented group to ensure a more balanced pool for recruitments and, especially, promotions. Final decisions still had to be on merit.

The Act, and its successors, worked. There were early objections to monitoring: some employers said they didn’t care about the make-up of their workforce – they just wanted good workers. (Often those objecting loudest turned out to have particularly skewed numbers). Today, most major employers do this kind of monitoring anyway, at least for ethnicity and gender.

Other options, like quotas, can be unfair. They often help individuals who don’t especially need help, leaving the genuinely disadvantaged unhelped. But we need something tougher than exhortation to address the serious blocks to the economic and social progress still faced by some ethnic minorities.

Glasgow’s ethnic composition differs from, say, London’s – the Northern Ireland model of “travel-to-work areas” accommodates regional variations. Some employers are national: they should have to explain if their figures are out of line with national figures. The armed forces, for example, can take little comfort in the fact that BAME personnel comprise just over eight per cent of its "workforce”, well below the national figure of 13%, despite genuine efforts. But it needs to ask itself even more urgently how to get officer numbers in line – they are below 3%.

This isn’t a quick fix. But it is a practical one. And, if we are looking for ways now to give under-represented ethnic groups a fair long term stake in society, this might be a good time to take another lesson from Northern Ireland, besides on how to do a protest march while socially distancing.

George Fergusson is a retired senior diplomat