Madam, – I am pleased that you afforded front page prominence to the Equality Tribunal's award of €3,500 to a student who had been suspended for school for wearing his hair long ( The Irish Times, February 17th).
You obviously recognise that it is only through eternal vigilance regarding such apparently trivial matters that our liberties will be preserved.
Whatever the merits of this individual case, the Equality Tribunal has here upheld an important principle: that there can be no discrimination between boys and girls in co-educational schools on matters of uniform or deportment. In these days of economic gloom, many poor families will be relieved to know that older sisters may now hand down their discarded uniform skirts and blouses to their younger male siblings.
The possibilities are even more intriguing in those establishments which do not prescribe a uniform. Indeed, the imagination is so fired by the potential scope of this principle that only an outmoded propriety can quench its more lurid suggestions.
It is regrettable, though, that the finding applies only to co-ed schools. Those students not so privileged, many of whom attend fee-paying schools, seem condemned to regimes of oppressive and arbitrary conventions simply because of mere accidents of birth – their wealth and their sex. How they must pine for liberation. – Yours, etc,