Northern Ireland’s Department of Finance has been criticised for continuing to subscribe to the controversial Stonewall ‘Diversity Champions’ programme.
MLAs questioned the decision after Finance Minister John O’Dowd revealed that the Northern Ireland Civil Service (NICS) was giving £2,575 to Stonewall each year for its ‘service and advice’.
In recent years a number of organisations – including the BBC and Whitehall departments – have left the programme, which rewards employers for promoting LGBT ideology inside and outside of the workplace.
Funding ‘nonsense’
Democratic Unionist MLA Peter Martin questioned what “advice” Stonewall had given the department in exchange for the payments.
And in a related debate this week, the TUV’s Timothy Gaston MLA pushed back against ‘equality and inclusion’ spending, stating: “Some of that money was spent on membership fees for the discredited Stonewall’s Allies programme, which is used to push gender ideology.
“Why is taxpayers’ money being wasted on that nonsense, years after the Civil Service and even the BBC recognised the need to withdraw from the scheme?”
‘Biological sex is real’
Coinciding with a recent visit to Northern Ireland, Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch commented on the debate: “It is for governments to make laws and rules and regulations, not for external bodies. This is yet another example of ministers handing power to unaccountable organisations.”
The former UK Equalities Minister stated: “Biological sex is real. This is not something that ministers should be messing around with in order to get plaudits around diversity and inclusion, we need to be serious about what we’re doing”.
She added: “We need to have equality under the law, not from different groups that are doing different things and being treated in different ways based on characteristics”.
CI cautions Stormont to tread carefully with ‘standardised’ equality law