EDUCATION IS THE KEY
Educational performance, or the lack of it, is a major contributory factor to the low growth rate, productivity and income levels in the North. Since 2000, the North has continuously recorded the highest proportion of people with basic or no qualifications, and the lowest number of graduates of any region of the UK. The lower numbers entering third-level education in the North compared to the South is a further and dramatic illustration of the gap in overall living standards between the two jurisdictions. A comparison of attainment levels of 24-to 30-year-olds in 2015, showed that over 35 per cent of young people in the North were only educated to primary or secondary levels with less than 11 per cent in the South failing to advance beyond that stage. ESRI data from 2020 shows that only 40 per cent of young people in the North obtained post-secondary or third-level qualifications, compared to between 59 and 65 per cent across regions in the South.
The failure to integrate, and a selection system that excludes huge numbers of children from good education in their early teens, is a fundamental structural weakness in the provision of learning in the North. At age 11, about 30 per cent of children go on to grammar schools and will continue through the system. The remainder end up in schools of a lower standard and many tend to leave by the age of 16. As a consequence, only 74 per cent of children aged between 15 and 19 in the North are engaged in education compared to a figure of 93 per cent in the South. Most children in the South complete their Leaving Certificate or the vocational pathway known as the Leaving Cert Applied. There are no similar vocational platforms in the North and many drop out of education unless they have a defined route to university. Children from high-income, middle-class families who can afford private tuition are in a better position to pass the tests that allow access to grammar schools.
Unfortunately, a range of factors, including a restricted choice of subjects for children over 16, has driven many out of educational learning at too young an age. The education system in the South is also discriminatory against lower-income families with high pupil–teacher ratios, poor quality buildings and a lack of resources, but it achieves better outcomes than in the North.
For generations, from the age of four or five, children in the North have gone through a segregated system of education. Many, if not most, did not encounter children of another denomination until they finished primary school. Due to the segregation in housing between Catholic/Protestant and unionist/nationalist communities, schooling has reflected the divide, particularly in working-class areas. As society has moved on, and over 25 per cent of people do not identify with any particular church or faith, a comprehensive review is underway in order to seek a single, widely acceptable and more integrated education system.
Before the Covid-19 crisis disrupted the programme, over half the schoolchildren in the North were involved in education partnerships, with up to 716 schools and about 85,000 students sharing classes. According to Professor Tony Gallagher of the School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work at Queen’s University Belfast, the shared education programme, which is supported by legislation, requires the authorities to encourage collaboration between teachers and pupils across the communities, including students attending different schools in their own uniforms. He told this writer:
The basic idea of shared education is to try and create a collaborative network where kids were moving between schools to take classes and the teachers were engaging with each other across the divide. I’ve seen prize nights in schools where you have kids from different schools in their own uniforms receiving a prize for shared educational activity in the school. You see kids with different uniforms in the same classrooms or the same corridors and that is a visual demonstration of our capacity to deal with difference.
One of the advantages of having separate uniforms is it makes it clear to everyone that this is going on; that people from different schools are collaborating and working together and it’s terribly unproblematic. It’s one of the unexpected pluses of the project. We’d have always thought of uniforms as a negative and this has been a plus. This is all likely to continue.
According to Gallagher, the independent review of education is expected to encourage more investment of resources and energy into the integration of schools. He pointed out that the movement towards integrated education has stalled since 2000: only 65 schools were based on the model of having a minimum of 30 per cent of students coming from a Protestant, and 30 per cent from a Catholic, background. While most of the integrated schools are in middle-class areas, there are others, such as Hazelwood College in north Belfast, which are close to interface areas with a history of sectarian tension.
The main teacher training colleges are also divided by religion and resisted the proposal for a single, non-denominational institute some years ago. An exception to Fair Employment legislation allows schools to select teachers who share their ethos by imposing a religious test before they are appointed.
The education system is also badly served by an academic selection process for primary school children (usually aged between 10 and 11), in which students face a series of transfer tests that will determine whether they can access a particular grammar or state-controlled school, which will, in turn, either lead them to third level and university, or leave them behind. About two-thirds of the children attending the state-controlled schools are from Protestant families. Most Catholic-raised children attend schools managed by the Council for Catholic Maintained Schools (CCMS).
As education minister from 1999 to 2002, the late Martin McGuinness of SF sought to abolish academic selection before the suspension of the power-sharing institutions. Later, his successor, Caitríona Ruane, proposed a similar move but was obstructed when the British government conceded to a demand by the DUP that it would retain the power to veto any such legislation on the issue at Stormont. Ruane sought a phasing out of academic testing at primary level – which had been abolished decades previously in the South and in most OECD countries – and got support from many school principals across the North, and from the Catholic Church hierarchy. There was, however, resistance from boards of management of second-level schools in both communities as well as from unionist politicians. As Gallagher explained, the situation has, if anything, worsened:
Catríona Ruane tried to short circuit the system by ending the official tests, but because the academic selection itself wasn’t banned, two consortiums of grammar schools established their own tests. Ironically, one is largely used by Protestant grammar schools while the other test is largely, but not exclusively, used by Catholic grammar schools. That alternative eleven-plus has operated from 2008. It’s completely bizarre. We never thought that we’d end up with two eleven-pluses rather than one. These type of high-stake tests for kids that young has led to massive social class differences in terms of outcome. That’s what we have in Northern Ireland.
The failure to remove academic testing for 11-year-olds also means that children with special intellectual needs are filtered through the selection system and excluded from access to their preferred schools. Many parents, from both traditions, are now sending their children to the best-performing private secondary schools, basing the choice on their child’s prospects of getting to third level and obtaining professional qualifications rather than their religious ethos. As Gallagher put it during an interview with this author:
There’s always been a degree of crossover, particularly of Catholic parents sending their kids to, what they’d consider, the elite Protestant grammar schools. It’s risen over recent years and there’s probably about half a dozen Protestant schools who would have a significant minority of Catholic students. [There are] a couple in Belfast, and in different parts of the North.
The churches continue to wield a major influence on the running of both the Catholic and the largely Protestant, state-controlled education sectors. For many years, the Catholic Church provided the main civic institution for the minority nationalist community. Teaching jobs were an important route into the professions for Catholics, while the school curriculum encouraged a knowledge of Irish culture and language, which the state schools did not. According to Gallagher:
Until relatively recently the Catholic schools [service], apart from the Church itself, was the only civic institution for the minority community. Teaching jobs were very important jobs for Catholics. These schools were one of the few places where you could openly express a sense of your Irishness in a society where there was lots of discrimination against Catholics.
Getting rid of the religious test in the hiring of teachers so that they can apply for jobs in any school would be a progressive move, he said, and would break some barriers between the communities. Creating a single teacher training system would also help, as the existing colleges for primary teachers in Belfast, Stranmillis and St Mary’s, each serve mainly one tradition. Efforts to merge the teacher training colleges some years ago were unsuccessful and only about 20 per cent of student teachers at Stranmillis are from the Catholic/nationalist community while St Mary’s teacher training college is almost exclusively Catholic.
Another difficulty has been the difference in the teaching of history. State-controlled schools and others emphasise British culture and comparisons rather than look to the South; indeed some do not teach the subject at all in order to avoid controversy. Recent improvements to the curriculum, however, have tried to tackle this divergence. As Gallagher explained:
The curriculum we have now is quite good and there’s a lot of teacher interaction around particular areas like history teaching or citizenship, so there’s a lot of good professional development. There was a lot of collaboration during Covid as well where lots of schools and teachers were sharing resources and expertise.
Shared education has also helped to mitigate the imbalances and inequities in the A level exam system whereby second-level children in the North are forced to choose a small number of subjects for the final year. This has resulted in classes for popular subjects such as English and Maths being heavily subscribed, while minority subjects such as languages and science attract fewer pupils. Through the shared education initiative, schools have improved the numbers attending classes for these minority A level subjects.
Gallagher argued that, in a united Ireland, people of a Catholic/Irish background and other denominations, or none, will be in the majority with Protestant/unionists in a minority:
In a potential united Ireland, and assuming you will have a common school system across the island, the same principles must apply to protect minority rights and protect the position of a Protestant minority in terms of schools and education. If there’s going to be an all-Ireland system, there will have to be some sort of acknowledgement of the Britishness of Ulster Protestants. You need to ensure you find some way to protect that.
One way is to make sure the curriculum for mixed schools has something to reflect this, as in their British history and identity. The other way is by allowing minority schools to operate as a way of providing some of that protection. The key thing is recognising that that is an issue that needs to be addressed and that there isn’t a simple solution to it.
A transition period will be required to find a common education system and curricula that can be applied across the island, while also maintaining a choice for parents who want to raise their children in schools that reflect their ethos and culture. Among the most progressive and multicultural schools in the South are those in the Educate Together model, which provides for children of all religions and none. In the South, DEIS schools (Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools) have also helped to ensure that children from families living in disadvantaged communities are encouraged to attend and stay in the school system. The Gaelscoileanna, or Irish language schools, have allowed many thousands of children to learn through Irish and have grown rapidly in number across the North in recent years, while the demand has also grown in many communities south of the border. Gallagher said:
You’re not talking about radical change overnight. It’s also important to recognise some of the consequences of the social divisions, the class divisions within the system. Most children may not be able to access private schools. It’s better to try and bring as many schools as possible into the system but, as part of that, trying to ensure they don’t use mechanisms that are exclusive.
In the longer term, the goal would be to have an education system that is genuinely inclusive, has as few barriers to people as possible [and] that also is geared towards trying to provide as many opportunities for success as possible. One of the challenges we have in the North is that we have an exam-heavy system that’s very focused on the very traditional ways of doing things. It’s almost as if the purpose of education is to squeeze as many qualifications out of a young person as possible because the only privileged route that we talk about is getting to university. Less than half of young people go to university, so we should be thinking about everyone else.
For Jarlath Burns, principal of St Paul’s High School in Bessbrook, County Armagh, which is in the Catholic maintained education sector, academic selection in the North seems to be all about the preservation of an elite grammar school system in both nationalist and unionist communities. A former captain of the Armagh GAA team, Burns is critical of a system which discriminates against children with special needs and is obsessed with examination and learning by rote. In his view, a lot of the anxiety and mental stress suffered by young teenagers is a consequence of examination and testing pressure. The oversubscribed, 1,700-pupil St Paul’s, he said in an interview with this author, offers a completely different educational experience where the happiness of the child comes first. ‘The biggest challenge facing education is how to end the hegemony of the grammar school. Middle-class Catholics and Protestants have the loudest, most articulate voice in education. If we removed the unfair selection system, the raison d’être for elite grammar schools would no longer exist,’ he said.
St Paul’s is a mixed gender school in a predominantly Catholic and nationalist community, and the pupils have a strong say in how it is run, said Burns. It provides an extremely broad curriculum, ranging from extremely academic to vocational, and its pupils have a record of high achievement in GCSE and A level exams. In a recent inspection, it received ‘Outstanding in All Areas’ and is seen as a prototype for a possible future model of education. It is a Catholic school but you don’t have to be a Catholic to attend, he said. There are pupils of every faith and creed and non-believers, while local Protestants have their own smaller, state-controlled schools a few miles up the road, both of which rely heavily on the educational and recreational facilities at St Paul’s for support.
Since he became principal in 2013, Burns has adopted a policy of reaching out to the Protestant and unionist community of south Armagh:
In an area where nationalists dominate, we have devoted a lot of time to reaching out to the Protestant community, which suffered over the years in south Armagh. We have taken confidence-building measures to assist them including by bringing the Orange Order and the PSNI [Police Service of Northern Ireland] former chief constable George Hamilton to talk to our pupils. It would be a disaster for the Protestant community if their schools were to close, and they have depended on St Paul’s for resources to ensure that does not happen.
It is therefore common to see pupils from Newtownhamilton and Newry high schools walking the corridors of St Paul’s and accessing some subjects that are not available in their own schools. Burns believes this is a more realistic way of sharing education, rather than moving to a fully integrated model. He has also fought to ensure that the ethos of the school is inclusive and has encouraged pupils from St Paul’s to attend the annual Pride event in Newry; not, he said, to show how tolerant the school is, but to celebrate its diversity:
When we marched in the parade for Pride in Newry in 2015, some of the more right-wing elements [of] the community expressed disappointment and protested. We wanted to send out a message to the LGBT pupils in our school that it was not a question of simply tolerating or accepting them, but of celebrating our diversity and our humanity. It was controversial, but I contacted the CCMS – which controls Catholic schools – before the event and their reply was, ‘You are the principal, it is your decision.’
The Catholic hierarchy has spoken out against academic selection, which, it said, has led to the unfair distribution in post-primary schools of children with the greatest needs. Burns explained that academic testing resulted in a situation where many grammar schools have tiny numbers of pupils with special educational needs compared to St Paul’s and others in the controlled sector.
Special needs pupils include those with a range of diagnosed conditions – from attention deficit disorders to autism, Asperger’s syndrome to dyslexia – who in previous generations would have been dismissed as ‘bold’ or unruly children. These are the children who are filtered out by the discriminatory testing of 11-year-olds. As Burns said, ‘It is a question of values which, in our school, are built on integrity, truth, compassion and kindness. We never give up on a pupil. We believe there is always something special in every child.’
With a daughter and a nephew teaching in the South, Burns has been given an insight into the educational systems in both jurisdictions, which leads him to believe that the challenges of constructing an all-island education system are considerable, but not insurmountable:
I wouldn’t start from where we are now in either jurisdiction. The system in the South, while still superior to that in the North, is also not without fault. The pressure on young people to achieve is crazy. I was struck when it was explained to me that there is only an optional oral exam in Junior Cert Irish. The pressure of the Leaving Cert with so many subjects in such depth, is quite surreal.
We need a completely new model of education. A united Ireland should not be the North welded on to the South. We have to reimagine how we do education. We need to understand that young people do not exist solely for the purpose of school, but should be allowed to live happy, carefree lives, enjoying the outdoors and [getting] involved in sport, music, reading for pleasure, poetry and the arts.
In our school, up to the age of fourteen we do not impose excessive homework on the pupils. We try and make them enjoy the experience of education and, during this time, we work on building their resilience. We wonder why mental health is such a huge issue with teenagers. It is due to the pressure they are under. Instead, we teach our junior pupils about their local history and geography. We set our own curriculum. At their age, we were picking blackberries and climbing trees, not buried in homework.
He argued that in a new, all-island education model there should be a move from content-based to skills-based learning and an emphasis on problem solving and information literacy:
Our education system currently produces well-qualified people with few skills or common sense and this is the natural outcome of a focus on exams rather than actually learning. Teacher training should be streamlined and current obstacles to young graduates from the North teaching in schools in the South, eliminated.
The powers of the boards of governors and trustees, which promote the unfair system of academic selection in the North, and the private fee-paying secondary system, which only wealthy people can afford for their children in the South, has to be challenged.
Of course, a united Ireland won’t be a Utopia. There will always be those with money [who] can get access to private education or healthcare. But that does not mean we cannot try to create a fairer and better system of education for future generations.
Burns accepted that it is probably ambitious to assume that immediate and profound change could occur within the Irish education system within the context of a united Ireland. The wheels of educational change turn slowly and while most seem to be agreed on the nature of the problems, there is little consensus on how to fix them, particularly the high number of pupils who leave education in the North with no qualifications whatsoever. This, he said, is a direct consequence of the elitist nature of post-primary education there.
As a pragmatist, he suggested that a lengthy ‘settling in’ period would have to occur, which would not see the necessary changes in either jurisdiction immediately but would set a date five years into the future when the brand-new education system would click in, countrywide.
This system would see all children transferring at 13 from primary schools to their local, regional, non-selective school, whose admissions criteria would not be set by the school, but by the education authority. Each school would have an emphasis on transferrable skill acquisition and would have meaningful vocational pathways for pupils to prepare for apprenticeships or trades as well as university or institutes of technology. He would offer a post-16 choice between a five subject or three subject option, which would mirror the Leaving Certificate/A level model. Both of these systems have their advantages and disadvantages, but he prefers the A level system which, he argued, prepares pupils more effectively for third-level study.
In the South, proportionally more students attend third-level but many teachers and educationalists share Burn’s criticism of the Leaving Cert programme and the stress it imposes on young people competing for the limited number of places in their preferred university courses. There is still a massive deficit in the number of young men and women from working-class and deprived communities in the South entering universities, compared to those from wealthier backgrounds and with private schooling. The DEIS schools in the South have helped to keep vulnerable children, and many from poorer backgrounds, in school for longer and provide more options for vocational and skills training.
Aíne Hyland, a leading educationalist and emeritus professor at University College Cork, has long promoted an education system that is inclusive from early childhood to graduate education, where no child or young person is an outsider. In an interview she described her ideal system, in which ‘children and young people of all backgrounds, social, religious and ethical; race, colour and ethnicity, including refugees and asylum seekers; sexual orientation; and those of all abilities and (so-called) disabilities will be equally respected.’
She has called for additional resources to be provided to bridge the gap between those from disadvantaged backgrounds and their more advantaged peers. Provision for certification and qualifications, in a context of lifelong learning, should be flexible, allowing learning to occur in a wide range of contexts and environments. ‘Assessment at the end of formal schooling will be reformed to remove over-emphasis on end-of-final-year examinations without any dilution of standards. Equality and excellence can co-exist!’ she argued.
In the South, almost all young people (more than 90% of the age cohort) remain in full-time education until the end of senior cycle when they sit the Leaving Certificate or similar applied tests. The South has one of the highest completion rates of second-level education in the world, and one of the highest rates of transfer to higher education.
According to Hyland, however, the Leaving Certificate examination is set and marked in such a way as to discourage creative, imaginative and ‘non-conformist’ answers and to encourage stereotyped and pre-prepared answers. She said:
I believe that we shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater, but we need to seriously rethink how the Leaving Certificate assesses, examines and certifies. The current examination must be reformed. It should include orals and practicals, portfolios, continuous assessment, CBAs [classroom-based assessments] – which would account for at least 50% of the marks and should be completed and submitted well in advance of the final exams.
In the North, there is particular concern at the numbers of young people from more deprived areas in both communities leaving school early and disappearing from formal education. Too many young working-class Protestants and Catholics in Belfast and other urban centres are not in education, employment or training (NEET). Across the North, ESRI estimates that 26,000, or 13.2 per cent, of those between the age of 16–24 years were described as NEETs in 2020. The position of young Protestants is compounded by the experience of their parents who are part of a generation most directly affected by the deindustrialisation of the economy since the 1970s. The once skilled and semi-skilled Protestant workforce was decimated by the decline in traditional manufacturing, textiles and shipbuilding, in what was once the main centre of industrial production on the island.
These young Protestants are excluded from decent jobs and careers, are fearful of the future, and angry that their parents’ loyalty to the Crown has not been rewarded by those who urged them to risk their lives and freedom to protect the union. The existence of an alienated, under-educated and financially dependent section of the population in loyalist and unionist communities in the North is recognised as the most likely source of violent opposition to the integration of both parts of the island. Since the GFA, efforts have been made through state and EU support programmes, and projects supported by philanthropic and other funds, to engage the youth in these communities in education and training and away from the still-functioning loyalist paramilitaries.
Among those who are trying to improve the prospects of young Protestant working-class youth are some former members of the UDA and UVF. They are now fighting the systemic unemployment, poverty and the illicit drugs culture that have pervaded their communities. In some cases, they are in direct conflict with former associates in the same loyalist paramilitary organisations who are involved in illicit drugs and other criminal enterprises in the North.
Tom Winstone was a member of the Young Citizen Volunteers, the youth wing of the UVF, when he and Billy Hutchinson – a leader of the UVF while in jail and, later, a co-founder of the Progressive Unionist Party – shot dead two young Catholics who were walking to work along Belfast’s Falls Road in October 1974. Half-brothers Michael Loughran and Edward Morgan had let their father take the last seat in a black taxi before they headed off on foot to their jobs as labourers. At the time, Winstone and Hutchinson believed they were protecting their community and their British identity by shooting the two Catholic men. He does not believe that now. Since his release from prison, Winstone has spent his life trying to prevent other youths from going down the same road. A father and activist, he has devoted his energies to improving the living conditions for one of the North’s most impoverished communities who have seen little of the promised investment which was to flow from the peace agreement.
As co-directors of Northern Ireland Alternatives (NIA), a community-based restorative justice organisation working within grassroots loyalist communities, Winstone and his colleague Debbie Watters gave this author an interview in which they described their work with young people over the past 30 years as an effort to promote justice, peacebuilding and reconciliation. The key to change, in their view, is education. In July 2020, they spoke about their work with young people in east Belfast and with republicans and former IRA members in poorer areas of the city. They insisted that one of the greatest challenges facing their communities remains the failure of the education system in the North and the intergenerational impact of unemployment and poverty among loyalists. Winstone said:
The results are getting better by the year. And the opportunities are there. It’s not so much the young people, it’s their parents that don’t have enough faith in education to push their kids to go on to further higher education; or not enough of them.
It’s not just about changing the mindsets of the young people. It’s about changing the mindsets of their parents and maybe even their grandparents to say, ‘They have to have a better life; they have to have better opportunities than we had and what we went through.’ Otherwise, we’re just going into this spiral of forever looking over our shoulder rather than looking ahead.
Many parents with few or no qualifications perhaps do not have the tools to help their children through education, so NIA has tried to teach basic learning skills to early school leavers in the east Belfast community. As Winstone put it:
There’s not enough emphasis put on the help that those children and their parents need. We see it ourselves with young people coming into our place [NIA], kids who left school without qualifications. We are there for them, to put the arm around them and try and help them. Here, they get their basic English, Maths or whatever, and now some of them are going on to third-level education and getting employment – otherwise no one would have taken the opportunity to help them. Inner-city Belfast is no different from inner-city Dublin in that regard.
The change in Protestant communities will come with a different mindset among the present generation of parents, Watters argued:
It’s about giving extra resources to schools. But we can’t just blame the schools for the low level of achievement, we have to start at the home. We have to give the tools to those people who need it to help their children to go on to bigger and better things. Now, this could be a generation or two away, but it’s what is needed.
Brexit, she said, has further fractured the unionist family and has simultaneously promoted a discussion about the place of working-class Protestant communities in a new Ireland: ‘People within working-class Protestant communities are more open to the debate now because of Brexit in terms of what would our place in a new Ireland look like. I think there are conversations that people are entertaining now that they never would have before.’
In her view, Brexit exposed a divide within unionism between middle-class Protestants who want to remain in the EU, and more traditional voters who followed the DUP and Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) in supporting the leave campaign. Working-class loyalists voted overwhelmingly for Brexit. ‘I wanted to remain part of Europe,’ Watters said. ‘I’m still a unionist but I had no party that was representing my voice. The unionist family wasn’t strategic enough around Brexit, and Alliance got the vote,’ she argued, referring to the collapse of the DUP and UUP votes in areas where substantial numbers of their supporters shifted to the Alliance Party in the December 2019 Westminster election.
Winstone also voted to remain in the Brexit referendum, in contrast, he said, with his UVF associates and most people in his east Belfast community.
I voted to remain but you should not read too much into this. People went where they went for that particular reason, and I would not assume that they would be in favour of a watered-down union. I’m slightly different to most unionists and loyalists. I class myself as Irish but I’m Irish/British. I’m happy in my own skin saying that.
I think the difficulty that you would get now for even those that are voting Alliance, or maybe softer unionists going for a united Ireland or a new Ireland, call it what you wish, are the antics of Sinn Féin. Unionist people would be voting against it even if it was Utopia simply because they [Sinn Féin] are voting for it.
I’m a Democrat and whatever the democratic voice is, that’s what it’s going to be, but there’s an awful lot of discussion taking place around all the issues, and I’m not talking about orange and green issues. I’m talking about bread-and-butter issues: hospitals, work, pensions, all of those things that would need to be sorted out.
Can Ireland afford to be united? I don’t think so at the moment. Will Britain chip in to get rid of us? Possibly, to a degree, but I’m not sure the two things would marry up. What Britain could contribute and what Ireland could contribute and maybe get from Europe or wherever, I don’t think the numbers would match up.
Trying to convince people that they would be better under a new Ireland, is going to be a big, big sell. It used to be ‘Rome rule’ that we were frightened of. Ireland’s a different country now than it was 30 years ago. There’s no doubt that they’re more progressive down there in Dublin. But we are still wedded to this fear factor. This debate would have to be done in a way where people can explain what accepting this new Ireland is going to do for them, what safeguards there’s going to be. A lot of young unionists and loyalists are more worried about their unionism than they are about their way of life.
‘Loyalist’ is a word used to describe young working-class Protestants, but in Winstone’s view, it is often used in a way to denigrate his community:
I don’t like the word ‘loyalist’, it’s a dirty word for a unionist. It keeps us separate from the good people when you’re classed as a loyalist. But those young loyalists, let’s call them that, are more interested in their cultural identity than they are in their education and that’s just what we see here on a day-to-day basis.
Their cultural identity, Winstone said, centres around celebrating their past:
It’s being able to collect their bonfire wood; being able to march up and down the road; and being able to celebrate something that happened 300-odd years ago. Because that’s all they’ve been taught, it’s all they know. And I’m speaking as someone who was a young loyalist at one stage, not knowing anything different because we weren’t taught it. Obviously, it’s slightly different today than what it was 40 years ago, but you still get that mentality within households and within families.
Promising young loyalists that they can celebrate their historic occasions in a new Ireland may not convince many who already see their right to parade and light bonfires to celebrate the victory of King William of Orange in 1690 as being restricted under British rule.
‘We’re part of Britain at the moment,’ Winstone said. ‘We’re not in the new Ireland and yet there are certain things that you’re not allowed to do, so how could they be any better off under this new Ireland? That’s the argument these young loyalists would go with.’
While he accepted that Orange Order marches through communities that do not want them and burning fires in a way that endangers lives is not acceptable, he said that many young loyalists feel their identity is under threat.
For Watters, those fears are compounded by the growth of SF, North and South: ‘If they can’t do reconciliation up here, how could we be assured they would do reconciliation in a new Ireland? Our experience here is that the commitment to reconciliation is solely verbal,’ she asserted.
For all this hostility, the people with whom NIA work most closely in working-class areas of the North are republican activists. The organisations that are trying to ensure that young people do not get involved in violence, and which have promoted training and education in their communities, have often been funded by the same non-government sources, including Atlantic Philanthropies (AP), the charity funded by US businessman and peace broker, Chuck Feeney. Former loyalist and republican prisoners have benefitted from the AP programmes and regularly meet up. As Winstone said:
There is probably more discussion on the ground between the warring factions than between the politicians. But it doesn’t mean we agree. Just because we’re speaking to each other and we’re not shooting each other doesn’t mean to say we’re in agreement. I think there’s been more discussion going on over the last few years than there was over the last 20 years, but they are still difficult conversations.
We had Atlantic Philanthropies funding, which allowed us to be totally independent; to grow the organisation our own way and challenge the system. That American philanthropic money really allowed us to do our own thing for the first 15 years of NIA. That’s probably why the politicians didn’t want to come near us. If the government departments are giving you money, you feel like you owe them, whereas we didn’t feel like we owed them and we didn’t have to play their game.
One of the obstacles to their development have been political and media assertions linking NIA to illegal organisations. In order to build trust and strengthen their relationships within the Protestant working-class community, NIA has engaged with the UDA and UVF, but that does not mean encouraging or endorsing them. As a former member of the UVF, Winstone has a clear picture of where the loyalist groups currently fit in the complex, wider context of the North. The armed political campaign is over, although some of his former associates are engaged in criminal activities using the name of one or other of the main loyalist organisations, just as criminals in nationalist and republican communities use similar flags of convenience:
Some of them are involved in criminality on both sides, but they are doing it for their own needs, for their own back pockets. They are not doing it on behalf of an organisation. Some of those that were maybe on the fringes, or those that didn’t go home and put the feet up, are still actively involved in things that they shouldn’t be. They’re doing it for their own wee cabal, or whatever you want to call it.
Genuine former activists on both sides, he claimed, are usually the ones that try to protect the peace lines and divert young people from getting involved in violence, whether it is over disallowed parades, flags or bonfires: ‘They try to take them on a different route. Those others that are involved in criminality want those young people to get involved in violent activity because it takes the heat off them. Others like the sound of their own voices and the publicity they attract.’
Watters and Winstone reserve particular scorn for politicians in the DUP who campaigned for Brexit without realising the consequences, including bringing the prospect of a united Ireland closer. As Winstone explained:
Probably one of the unintended consequences of the vote is that we are a step closer to a united Ireland. Hundreds of middle-class unionists applied for Irish passports because they want to remain part of Europe and they want to have the benefits of Europe.
The DUP never thought through the unintended consequences of their actions. Those people who went for Irish passports are in some way saying that their identity is not one dimensional. I think that’s the key to all of this. Brexit highlighted that identity is not about one single issue. People have had to rethink what their identity looks and feels like.
What needs to be done is [have] an open and honest discussion so that, and I’m choosing my words carefully here, the hate-mongering people on both sides don’t come up with a bogeymen scenario. We’re talking about facts rather than maybes and what might be and that type of thing.
But as Watters put it, ‘Just because someone either carries an Irish passport or recently acquired an Irish passport doesn’t mean they’re going to vote for a united Ireland.’