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Anti Catholic Workplace Discrimination Case Study

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Does anti-Catholic workplace discrimination still exist in 20th Century Scotland? Prominent Scottish composer, James MacMillan gave a lecture in Edinburgh in 1999 where he labeled Scotland as a land that was "sleep-walking in bigotry" a country where, in his opinion, instinctual anti-Catholicism" was endemic within the political arena, in the media, in businesses and academe. He argued that anti-Catholic bigotry in Scotland “has a predisposition to restrict, to control and to enforce conformity and homogeneity and is an obsessive and paranoid flaw in the Scottish character. It is not confined to the Presbyterian mind. It has eased effortlessly into the collective psyche of much secular discourse, so that even the humanist arid liberal objections …show more content…

He contends that It was common knowledge that Kemp would not have got the job had he acknowledged being a Catholic. However this is where Devine and MacMillan go their separate ways on the subject. Devine disagrees that such bigotry persists today, or that a persons religious affiliation influences the employment opportunities and promotional prospects for Scottish Catholics. Notwithstanding Devine is of the opinion that anti-Catholic attitudes may well prevail in Scotland and in this would be most likely in west central Scotland. Moreover, he contends employers who might foster anti-Catholic biases tend to keep a low profile. Devine is at pains to point out that in his opinion there has been “an historic integration of the descendants of the Irish-Catholic immigrants of earlier times into the mainstream of Scottish society”. He believes this is down to a number of influences not least of which was deindustrialisation of the 1980s that he argues eliminated the culture of discrimination in industries such as engineering, steel manufacturing and shipbuilding. Furthermore, new overseas firms as well as American multinational enterprises that moved into the coalfields of Lanarkshire and those who created Silicon Glen, were totally contemptuous of old Scottish religious prejudices. The growth of education and the welfare state could be seen as being the redeemer of the Catholic population. Devine firmly believed these factors saw living standards rise for everyone, irrespective of ethnicity or religious background. For Devine, education was the catalyst that “extended the ladder of opportunity for Catholics from manual labour into the

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