This Bill intends to add a further tenth form of discrimination to the legislation, that is, to expand the protections of both Acts to prohibit discrimination on the basis of disadvantaged socioeconomic status to ensure that people can no longer be discriminated against on the basis of their class or economic background. By continuing to exclude socioeconomic status from our equality legislation, we are creating a hierarchy of equality in which we recognise certain forms of discrimination while failing to prohibit discrimination pertaining to disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds and accents.
The purpose of the Bill is to introduce a new ground for discrimination into Irish equality law on the basis of disadvantaged socioeconomic status, which is important.
Key terms by TF-IDF across 4,206 words from 12 speakers. The summary quotes the highest-scoring sentences verbatim — nothing is paraphrased.
Tellers: Tá, Senators Garret Ahearn and Paul Daly; Níl, Senators Chris Andrews and Nicole Ryan.
Party shown is the one each member held on 2025-05-21, frozen by a dated join — not their party today. The Oireachtas API publishes no date of birth and returns an empty gender field for every member in this period, so no age or gender breakdown is shown.