Children are noisy. Babies cry. Toddlers race around, bouncing on beds & doing a Batman jumping off the settee. They also do a lot of damage to your furniture, fixtures & fittings. Furnished accommodation was pretty much the norm, partly for convenience, partly because the landlord then had greater powers vis a vis the tenant. Would you want to be the next tenant of a single bed previously occupied by a small child?
Irishman, in the ads of those days, was code. Code for: I dont want single, Irish men as tenants. Probably here as temporary or seasonal migrants, employment insecure & uncertain so not a reliable payer of rent. Likely to do a moonlight flit. Probably working as a navvy, so bringing a lot of mud into the house. And over fond of a drink.
A nasty stereotype. But being Irish, as such, did not necessarily make life so difficult. I doubt a young Irish barrister would find it more difficult than his English equivalent to find somewhere to live
Unlike the pin-striped, plummy-voiced, Oxbridge-educated barrister in Two Gentlemen Sharing, who, when it came to finding somewhere to live was 'Hopelessly black, madam, hopelessly'
The differences between these categories illustrates the subtlety of discrimination, the differences between the remedies needed, & their likely success in practice.
To formalise anti-discrimination legislation is to risk encouraging competitive victimhood - My problems are worse than your problems. Adjudicating, holding the ring between all the claims, requires the patience of Job & the judgement of Solomon, & the tact to not alienate those who feel that their problems are undervalued & ignored because they cannot be attributed to membership of a particular group.
I wish the new overarching Equality Commission all the best
