Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness

Over at the Integrated Education Fund's new blog I ask why the Executive's Programme for Cohesion, Sharing and Integration has stalled.  

Slugger carried an excellent blogpost yesterday by Michael Shilliday, who broke down the consequences of student debt associated to a hike in fees.  It's a bit of an eye-opener and Michael's argument that scare-mongering over the issue could have the greatest effect on take-up of university places is persuasive.  In yesterday's Belfast Telegraph  I also argued for a more realistic debate on education cuts and fees.  The final article was edited down a little, so I include a fuller version below the fold:

In the interests of impartiality, how about a little praise for the DUP?  It’s pretty infrequently that there is cause to hand any out.  Still, the party has not yet reverted to type on the education issue. Indeed when the Alliance party proposed a motion at Stormont calling on Caitriona Ruane to actively promote an integrated and shared education system in Northern Ireland, the DUP provided the backing needed to pass that motion. Less worthy of applause, on this occasion, were the SDLP, Sinn Féin and, disappointingly, the UUP, who all backed an amendment seeking to water down the resolution.  The existing sectors should be encouraged to interact more, rather than amalgamate, according to the amendment. The motion was passed without any alteration and rightly so.  The Belfast Agreement called for progress on integrating education and housing and the original motion is only a restatement of existing obligations which the Education Minister refuses to carry out....

A guest post from Dr Phil Larkin A CULTURE OF BUSINESS FOR THE NORTH: A SCHOOL OF BUSINESS FOR BELFAST? Introduction Working as I now am in the South of England, and making frequent trips down to London to visit friends and family, one thing that has struck me is the number of people from Northern Ireland who are living and working down here, either in a professional capacity or as proprietors of their own businesses (this is true also of people from other parts of Ireland, but for the purposes of this article I intend to concentrate only on those from the North). Very often, they are the graduates of top universities, and are highly intelligent, industrious and motivated individuals, keen to advance in their own professions, or build up their own businesses for the benefit of themselves and their families – in other words, the type of people one would encourage to come back and live in Northern Ireland, where they could work as potential wealth creators for the benefit of the whole of...

“Don’t know what I’m doing here / I’ll carry on regardless”, sang the Beautiful South. It is a lyric which could have been written for Northern Ireland’s Education Minister. Caitriona Ruane proved incapable of striking an acceptable compromise on selection for post primary schools. Other parties continue to make progress towards an agreed position, but the minister carries on regardless. Similarly, her two bills aimed at establishing an Education and Skills Authority (ESA), which would centralise functions currently carried out by the five Education and Library Boards, as well as the CCEA exam board and the Regional Training Unit, have run aground at Stormont. However, in a statement delivered to the Assembly yesterday, Ms. Ruane set out plans to (you guessed it) carry on regardless of dissenting voices and start implementing the ESA project. The two UUP ministers, Michael McGimpsey and Sir Reg Empey, have delivered their response: “The statement made today by the Minister of Edu...

You’ll remember that Alex Easton and Jonathan Craig, a pair of DUP MLAs, recently proposed a motion suggesting that efforts to recruit university students should be focused on Protestants. The motion fell. Why? Because the pair failed to turn up for the start of the debate. Great work fellas. (H/T Michael Shilliday on Twitter)

On Open Unionism O’Neill offers an excellent post on education in Northern Ireland. He argues that debate has become fixated upon the selection question to the exclusion of broader issues. It is hard to disagree with his thesis that an education system’s primary objective must be to help every child reach his or her potential. O’Neill believes we must be more open-minded as to the means by which this can be achieved. I cannot approach the level of specialist knowledge which O’Neill brings to this topic, although I wonder if the system in Finland (to cite his own example), where there is a small gap between the top achievers and those at the bottom, fosters excellence amongst the most academic children, or exhausts its resources targeting the mean? Doubtless, as O’Neill contends, there is a balance to be struck. Clearly, striving to raise levels of attainment at the lower end of the ability range is a noble aim. Whether it is worth some sacrifice at a higher echelon, or whether t...

Northern Ireland’s new Finance Minister, Sammy Wilson, has been showing off the grasp of economics which he acquired teaching the subject at Grosvenor High School. Let’s not forget that he was head of department and helped to set some exams. The East Antrim MP has repeated the DUP’s occasional mantra of ‘Tory cuts’ which, whilst it is echoes a theme developed by Labour leader Gordon Brown, does not quite share the Prime Minister’s intellectual disingenuousness. He is simply lying about his intentions for the economy but the DUP neither knows nor cares about the national picture, as long as Northern Ireland retains the same sized slice of a diminishing pie. None of which is new or particularly surprising, but Sammy has accompanied his pre-empting of Conservative policy with some ludicrous claims, wonky sums and awe-inspiring ignorance. Wilson demonstrates his wobbly grasp of Tory pledges by claiming that George Osborne has promised to ‘ring fence’ spending on health and education....

Previously we have discussed the DUP’s preposterous insistence that the Programme for Government need not be revisited because it ‘prioritised the economy’. The logic apparently being that any document which is focussed on one particular policy area is immutably appropriate regardless of the fact that prevailing conditions pertaining to that policy area might alter. It is, to put it mildly, a reductionist argument, whatever the PfG’s merits. This site has also long bemoaned the ‘Themselves Alone’ Coalition’s carve-up of government and its non-existent strategy to integrate Northern Ireland’s perceived ‘communities’. One of the first casualties of government led by Sinn Féin and the DUP was the Shared Future initiative. Effectively the goal of building a shared society was dropped and the two parties agreed, in preference, to horse trade the sectional interests of their respective constituencies. Alliance MLA Stephen Farry is the latest politician to point out that not only doe...

I was rather enjoying Boris Johnson’s typically spirited defence of academic selection, on egalitarian grounds, until I happened upon this rather puzzling sentence, “I know a lawyer from Belfast, a man of my age, who believes fervently that he would never have gone to university had it not been for the grammar school system, and who cannot believe that no one – no one from any party – is objecting to their abolition at the hands of, yes, Martin McGuinness.” No-one, other than Boris’ own Conservative colleagues in Northern Ireland, their Ulster Unionist partners, the DUP and a coalition of parents and schools spanning the maintained and voluntary sectors.

Historians have often speculated that Northern Ireland’s history might have been less troubled had Stormont’s first Education Minister been able to realise his vision of an integrated education system. Under enormous pressure from Catholic and Protestant clerics, Lord Londonderry’s 1923 Education Act was amended beyond recognition. The Minister retired from politics here in disillusionment and an early opportunity to draw some of the sectarianism from society was lost. Eamon McCann revisits those events in his Belfast Telegraph column and laments the lack of any current impetus towards integrated schooling in Northern Ireland. Whilst current Education Minister, Caitriona Ruane, deplores separating children using academic criteria, she is supportive of the religious division and indeed she actively encourages further partition of pupils along community lines by championing separate Irish language schools. In truth the situation in education is merely one of the baleful consequenc...

Jim Allister is attempting to generate something of a furore about a ‘citizenship roadshow’ at Laurelhill Community College in Lisburn, which involved a highly representative panel of no less than five DUP politicians. The Traditional Unionist leader has accused Peter Robinson and his party of ‘taking over’ the school for ‘political propaganda’ . Although I would uphold children’s right not to be subjected to the blethering of more than one DUP spokesman at a time, surely the school itself is ultimately responsible for the composition of the panel? With this in mind, it would be interesting to know who at the school organised the event, why they didn’t invite representatives of other parties, and if the organiser had any prior connection to the DUP? Certainly an unbalanced line-up of this type does smack of indoctrination when it is chosen to address young minds. And given the subject matter, were the panellists really best placed to lecture children on citizenship? After all, th...

A depressing little story appeared in the Sunday Tribune yesterday illustrating that whilst attitudes may be changing as regards recognising the heritage which we share on these islands, there remains in Ireland, north and south, a deep vein of hatred towards anything which might be associated with the ‘other side’. Students at St Mac Dara’s community college in Dublin have been persuaded to alter a mural depicting historical events of 1916. A parent complained in an anonymous letter that one half of the painting, which portrayed Irish involvement in the First World War, included a ‘loyalist symbol’. The offending item was of course a poppy. No matter that the other half of the mural was dedicated to the Easter Rising which also occurred during that year. No matter that the poppies were painted as part of a wider view of Flanders’ fields. This lone, spineless bigot was determined that no image which he associated with the British tradition would grace a mural at his child’s scho...

The Irish Times reports that a complaint has been lodged with the PSNI regarding Catriona Ruane’s loathsome address delivered at a West Belfast school prize giving. Certainly her remarks, praising terrorist hunger striker Bobby Sands, would fall foul of legislation aimed at eradicating the glorification of terrorism by any normal application of such criteria. It is unfortunately highly improbable that any charges will be brought. Ulster Unionist education spokesman Basil McCrea summed up the incident rather neatly. “It is a matter of profound shame that an Education Minister of the Northern Ireland Executive stood in front of schoolchildren and lauded a terrorist hunger striker. It is also incredibly disturbing that the Education Minister revealed frightening authoritarian tendencies by attacking those who dared to criticise a film that gave a historically inaccurate account of the Civil War.” Ruane turned film critic at this gathering as well, heaping opprobrium upon those advancing...

If it weren’t about Ruane you might greet this little gem with incredulity. Mark Devenport reports that the poorest member of a poor executive attended prize giving at St Colm’s High School in Poleglass in her capacity as Education Minister. In her remarks she then proceeded to stress the gratitude which students should feel toward IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, who had paved the way for their brighter future! So there we have it. A minister in Northern Ireland’s government abusing her position in order to commend as a role model to children a terrorist who starved himself to death. Simply shameful.

Bobballs has already exposed this particular News Letter ‘article’ as a touched up DUP press release. Scrutinising the paper’s politics pages on a regular basis anyone can see that this is not an isolated instance. The low density, ‘background radiation’ type stories on which the News Letter subsists, when there is nothing particularly startling to report in its political coverage, almost always bear the hallmarks of rehashed pieces from party press officers. On this occasion, Nelson McCausland becomes the latest DUP representative to have a pop at Ulster Unionists for striking a deal with the Conservative Party. It is extraordinary that a matter which has, as yet, concerned only the internal organisation of two parties which are not linked to the DUP, has occupied its press office so regularly. There is nothing terribly concrete for Nelson and his ilk to attack, so the ad hominem assault on Reg Empey which comprises the meat of this piece is fairly typical. Personal abuse has ...

When Lord Londonderry attempted to introduce integrated education to a nascent Northern Ireland state in the 1920s, he faced opposition from both Catholic and Protestant churchmen, as well as politicians drawn from the two main communities here. In 1998 the Belfast Agreement contained provisions by which the parties undertook to encourage integrated housing and education. As regards integrated housing, any progress which the NIHE attempts to make is often accompanied by opposition from both Sinn Féin and the DUP. Witness, for example , the controversies about mixed housing provision on the Crumlin Road gaol site, or in Enniskillen. Although integrated education occasionally is accorded lip service by both sides, neither is prepared to seriously promote its expansion, certainly at the expense of the existing segregated system. The Catholic Church remains one of the prime proponents of segregated schools and education minister Caitriona Ruane has concentrated her efforts on further ...

I’ve just had a text message from a concerned Three Thousand Versts reader (er, ok, it was my girlfriend) who has just discovered that this blog has been prohibited by Queens for its new term. In fact the ‘all weblogs and social interaction sites’ are apparently now blocked between 9-5pm. Now whilst I understand that QUB wish to keep computers free for students to work, rather than to update Facebook, weblogs are often involved in discussions which have direct academic relevance. Why should Queens’ students not be involved in the type of open ended dialogue promoted on this site and others? Whilst I’m sure the intention is not censorship, the effects might be rather similar. Is it really beneficial for students to be deprived of access to Iain Dale, Slugger, Guido Fawkes etc?

With justification Caitriona Ruane’s failures as regards fundamental aspects of policy have provided a focus for the bulk of criticism which Northern Ireland’s education minister has attracted. That said, Caitriona doesn’t just do macro-incompetence, she can manage micro incompetence with equal ease. Roy Beggs, UUP MLA for East Antrim, has pointed out that the worst minister anywhere ever ™ promised to deliver a leaflet outlining her proposals for post primary transfer procedures to every house in Northern Ireland, without having any notion how much such an operation will cost. After a question was tabled in order to establish the information, it transpired that this promise had been quietly dropped. Of course Ruane’s vague proposals have certainly not yet been agreed by the executive and any document containing them would represent nothing more than the minister’s own view on how post primary selection should proceed. Sequestering public funds for a huge, unnecessary mail drop out...

I went to Scotland to study, my girlfriend acquired her first degree in Scotland, my sister was educated in two universities in Scotland, a high percentage of my friends attended universities in Scotland and I would estimate that approximately one third of my school year did likewise. Universities in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen are filled with Northern Irish students and naturally many do not return to these shores when their studies are completed. Sir Reg Empey has been spearheading a campaign, not to reverse the trend, but rather to attract graduates from Scotland to Northern Ireland to work. To this end four top companies lined up alongside the Minister for Education and Learning at Glasgow University’s Summer Graduate Fair at the SECC. The intention is to establish a presence at various graduate fairs throughout Britain. This is a welcome initiative and I hope it is a successful one. The brain drain is a marked phenomenon, but it is healthy for talented people from...