Last week, on a visit to some of Belfast’s 29 ‘peace walls’, shadow NI spokesman, Quentin Davies, expressed outrage at a situation, which he said, ‘should not be tolerated in any civilised city in the 21^st century’.

"These walls are not a solution, they are a way of avoiding a solution by institutionalising and crystallising division."

In fact, far from promoting tolerance and equality, human rights legislation has often been invoked to ‘score points’ off the other side, for example over issues around parades, access to housing and local amenities. In the words of Quentin Davies, ‘each side is absolutely convinced that the other side is getting a better deal.’

The problem, which is not particular to NI but forms part of a wider political trend, lies in the way the language of human rights is increasingly invoked in the name of group identity, for example, women, gay people, the disabled, ethnic minorities and so on, rather than individual rights.

Not surprisingly, given its history, Northern Ireland’s human rights legislation categorises ‘political opinion’ and ‘religious belief’ in terms of group identities to be offered special legal safeguards. Opinions and beliefs having been legally redefined as culturally determined, accidents of birth rather than products of conscious thought and action, individuals engaging with new political ideas or rejecting old religious dogmas, remain officially tarred with the brush of indigenous culture.

Categorising people along cultural, biological or racial lines, and adapting laws and public institutions to accommodate ‘difference and diversity’ is an attack on civil liberties and a recipe for intolerance, conflict and political stagnation.

In the words of Quentin Davies, it offers no solution, but is simply a way of ‘‘institutionalising and crystallising division."