Most litigation from disabled people in Britain under anti-discrimination legislation came from existing employees, a conference on equality and discrimination has been told.
Mr Michael Rubenstein, editor of Industrial Relations Law Reports said that both the British and Irish legislation gave far wider definitions of disability than had been traditional. He was speaking at a conference of the Irish Society for Labour Law at the weekend.
The blind and wheelchair-users were covered, he said, but so were those who had suffered heart attacks, cancer, nervous breakdowns and a range of illnesses with long-term effects. "It provides protection for employees who become disabled," he said.
However, he warned of the danger of too much inclusion. The proposed Irish legislation could cover alcoholism, kleptomania and obesity, he said.
Mr Nial Fennelly SC, Advocate General to the European Court of Justice, pointed to recent decisions of the court extending the scope of equality legislation beyond the strict limits of the employment relationship.
A UK citizen brought a case against a decision of a British industrial tribunal which had found against her. She had argued that the refusal of her former employer to give her a reference, after he had settled her claim for unfair dismissal because of pregnancy, was discriminatory. The UK tribunal had said this fell outside the employment relationship but the European Court was unhappy with this and found in her favour.
Mr Ciaran O'Mara, solicitor, said that the Amsterdam Treaty would extend and strengthen anti-discrimination law in the EU. It allowed for measures such as positive discrimination, and this was not confined to employees. He also said that the new General Non-Discrimination Clause could be used to override the difficulty created by the Irish Constitution for the protection, for instance, of teachers' private beliefs, which exempted church-run schools from sections of the Irish Employment Equality Bill, 1997.
Opening the conference, the Minister of State at the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Ms Mary Wallace, stressed the emergence of new areas of discrimination.
"The increase in ethnic and religious diversity in Irish society leaves some minority groups in this country vulnerable in the workplace. It is vital that they are protected," she said. Rights were not just about processes and laws, they must be owned by those who needed them the most, a leading Northern Ireland trade unionist told the conference.
Ms Inez McCormack, regional secretary of Unison, said: "The importance of individual rights is giving people a vision of themselves as worthy of rights. Then they change things for themselves."
She said that, following efforts from a coalition of community groups, including those from both republican and loyalist areas, a comprehensive view of rights had been inserted into the Belfast Agreement. This covered the disabled and members of ethnic minorities and the travelling community as well as the major religious denominations.