2 Irelands together

I was looking through the Government’s 2014 spending estimates the other day (as one does) and noticed that spending this year on international cooperation (i.e. cooperation with countries in the developing world) will be €481.5 million, down from €629 million two years ago. This represents 0.47% of Ireland’s Gross National Income, not bad by international standards, but well below our nearest neighbour – whom we love to characterise as isolationist and right-wing – which, under a Conservative government, last year became the first G7 nation to reach the United Nations target of 0.7% of GNI spent on development aid.

In another spending category under the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade I noticed how much the Government is spending this year on ‘reconciliation and cooperation on this island’. This amounts to just over €17 million. Most of it will go on the North South Ministerial Council and the seven North/South bodies and companies set up under the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement.

That represents 28 euros spent on aid to the developing world for every one euro spent on the cooperation and reconciliation process in Ireland. I’m not criticising this imbalance – in fact, I believe Ireland should be following the UK’s lead and increasing her aid contribution to 0.7% of Gross National Income. But is does show where on the scale of government priorities peace and reconciliation in Ireland comes.

Compare this to the recent news – unreported by the Southern Irish media, as far as I can see – that the EU have awarded €463 million to Northern Ireland and the Irish border region under the PEACE and cross-border INTERREG programmes for the period 2014-2020. This is only very slightly down on the amount these two EU programmes spent in the northern part of the island in 2007-2013, despite warnings that the PEACE programme in particular, after nearly 20 years in existence, and with the EU in poor financial shape, would be very small this time round.  It brings to more than €2.5 billion the total given by Europe to this small region since the mid-1990s. Congratulations to the Irish Government and the Special EU Programmes Body (SEUPB), under Pat Colgan and Shaun Henry, for negotiating another extraordinarily generous deal.

Whatever about the Department of Foreign Affairs’ negotiating skills, it is noticeable that once more the great bulk of funding for peace initiatives in Northern Ireland and cross-border cooperation between North and South comes from Europe. The British and Irish governments put very little of their own money into such work (apart from the 25% national government match funding that is required by the EU in order to draw down its money). It is also deeply ironic that this largesse by the European Union to the island of Ireland is almost totally unappreciated here. Indeed, the euro-scepticism of the Unionist parties and Sinn Fein has, if anything, increased. The strong antipathy towards the EU from the ‘little Britons’ of the DUP and UUP was particularly striking during the recent elections to the European Parliament.

A new emphasis in the post 2014 PEACE programme will be on children and young people, with the ‘shared education’ agenda espoused by the ruling parties at Stormont in line for significant funding (whatever happened to integrated education, one might ask). On the INTERREG side, there will be a strong emphasis on research and innovation, which will benefit both business and higher education institutions (although the latter have hardly been trail-blazers for cross-border cooperation up to now).

The SEUPB have also managed to find a useful home for the €17 million in EU money that wasn’t spent on the abortive Carlingford Lough bridge project. As somebody who believes in rail as an environmentally preferable option to road, I’m delighted that this money is now being spent on improvements to the venerable Drogheda railway viaduct and upgrading the carriages on the Belfast-Dublin Enterprise express.

You probably won’t have read about any of these important developments in the national press in Ireland. Northern Ireland and North-South relations are simply off the agenda as far as the mainstream media is concerned. When I listen to lively debates on RTE about the nation’s finances, education, health service or mother and baby homes, I realise that in the 16 years since the Good Friday Agreement, the hugely important issue of relations between the different – and historically opposed – groups of people on this island has never even entered the mainstream of debate in the Southern jurisdiction. Apart from the occasional flare-up caused by contentious parades, the North is now ‘out of sight, out of mind’ as far as the vast majority of citizens of our Republic are concerned. Which leaves the all-Ireland field entirely in the hands of Sinn Fein, with dangers I have outlined in previous columns and will return to in the future.

Let me end on a personal note. The reason I became interested in Ireland’s record on development cooperation is because I have recently completed a review of a couple of Irish Aid development education projects. I bid for this work because, disappointingly, there seems to be little or no research into North-South cooperation at the moment. There is actually very little new work in North-South cooperation at all, although a couple of interesting ‘baby steps’ (in the words of one official) have emerged in recent months: an InterTradeIreland led North-South steering group to maximise the island’s take-up of EU research and innovation funding under its Horizon 2020 programme, and an inter-governmental committee to plan a joint bid to host the 2023 Rugby World Cup.

But is there any cross-border research going on?  I have expertise in cross-border governance, education, health, business, trade unionism and community development. A year after retiring from the Centre for Cross Border Studies, that expertise is still relatively fresh – in two or three years it won’t be.  This is an unashamed pitch for work. Without wanting to appear immodest, it seems to me a pity that 14 years of knowledge of how to do cross-border cooperation in Ireland and leadership of  the highly successful Armagh-based CCBS can’t be put to some use in researching and developing new ideas for this still vitally important area of peace and reconciliation in Ireland.

Earlier this month Eamonn McCann wrote a column in the Irish Times debunking the idea that the Northern Ireland peace process had anything to teach other conflict areas in the world. He painted a picture of Northern Irish politicians and officials touring the world’s trouble spots – Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, Sri Lanka, the southern Philippines, the Basque country, Thailand – to offer assistance in situations which had few similarities with the North.

He pointed to a May 2012 conference in Dublin of the 57 member Organisation of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) which examined the Northern Irish process “as a case study of possible relevance to conflict resolution efforts elsewhere.” Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs Eamon Gilmore told the conference: “Exporting the lessons learned in Northern Ireland has been one of the themes underpinning Ireland’s chairmanship [of the OSCE] this year.”

Leaving aside McCann’s overall contention for the moment, the most baffling and disappointing thing for me is that one of the three fundamental ‘strands’ of the Northern peace process in general and the 1998 Good Friday Agreement in particular, North-South cooperation, is rarely if ever raised at these international gatherings. I chaired another OSCE seminar on the peace process in April 2012, organised by the Glencree Community and addressed by senior Department of Foreign Affairs officials, at which the success of the North-South ‘strand two’ of the GFA was not even mentioned until I dropped it in at the end of the event.

And it is a success story. Peter Robinson says frequently that North-South relations have never been better in his lifetime. The inter-governmental ‘architecture’ of the North South Ministerial Council, with its biannual meetings of the entire Irish and Northern Irish cabinets and regular bilateral meetings between individual ministers, works well, even if they don’t do a lot together these days (other than oversee the North/South bodies). Cooperation between the PSNI and the gardai has never been closer. Business links are picking up again after the cataclysm of the post-2008 collapse. The border region health network Cooperation and Working Together and the all-island Institute of Public Health in Ireland are going strong. In higher education, the Centre for Cross Border Studies, the Institute for British-Irish Studies, the International Centre for Local and Regional Development (ICLRD) and the Standing Conference on Teacher Education North and South (SCoTENS) are all flourishing. EU funding, although now a shadow of its former self, has seen a huge increase in cross-border local authority, business, educational and community connections. One could go on and on.

This is a very long way from the paranoia of the Unionists in the run up to the 1998 Agreement about anything to do with greater North-South institutional links, with John Taylor famously saying he would not touch the large number of North-South bodies then being proposed “with a barge pole.”

In my 14 years as director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies, I can’t recall a public event, at home or abroad, where I heard an Irish politician or senior civil servant – with the honourable exceptions of Bertie Ahern, Micheal Martin and Martin Mansergh – praising the contribution of North-South cooperation to the peace process.

Ironically I have found great interest abroad in this aspect of our process. In the past year and a bit I have spoken about the Irish experience at international conferences on cross-border cooperation in  Brussels, Jerusalem, Marseille and Martinique in the Caribbean (being knowledgeable about such cooperation in Ireland has its compensations!).  There was particular interest in Israel and Palestine in the kind of practical, mutually beneficial cooperation we were promoting in Ireland, although of course I emphasised that political agreement must come first if meaningful  cooperation is to follow.

There was also a lot of interest (as there was among senior officials in the European Commission’s regional affairs directorate) in a ‘toolkit’ devised by the Centre to measure the impact of cross-border cooperation in Ireland and elsewhere, which has been developed by my successor as CCBS director, Ruth Taillon, and two German collaborators, Joachim Beck and Sebastian Rihm of the Euro-Institut in the Upper Rhine region. However there was never a scintilla of interest in – let alone attendance at – any of these events from the local Irish embassy (although no fewer than 22 European, Caribbean and Latin American nations were represented at the Martinique event last month).

This lack of official government interest is a pity. Because the audiences I spoke to were particularly interested in the sophisticated inter-governmental and cooperation structures set up by the Good Friday Agreement, which I believe are superior to comparable structures anywhere in the world. And that includes the European Union, whose instruments for cross-border cooperation remain extremely opaque and onerously legalistic.

In late 2012, before Ireland took up the presidency of the EU, I wrote to a range of people from the then Minister for European Affairs, Lucinda Creighton, to senior Department of Foreign Affairs officials, suggesting that the Irish experience of cross-border cooperation as part of a peace process involving a contested border was something other European countries might be interested in learning from. Nobody even bothered to reply.

Why is the Irish government so reluctant to ‘blow the trumpet’ of North-South and cross-border cooperation as a highly successful element in our peace process?  Senior officials used to say privately it was because they didn’t want to offend the Unionists. Cynics might say that 15 years on this fear has been replaced by embarrassment that the brilliant North-South structures devised at the end of the 1990s and implemented by a remarkable group of civil servants from both jurisdictions now achieve so little – outside organising meetings it is very difficult to say what the North South Ministerial Council actually does these days, although North/South bodies like InterTradeIreland and Tourism Ireland continue to do excellent work.

Maybe it’s too late to reverse this unfortunate trend, as the attention of both politicians and people at a time of prolonged economic crisis has understandably turned elsewhere. Even so, it would be nice to hear the odd Irish politician extol the virtues of practical, mutually beneficial North-South and cross-border cooperation as an activity in which Ireland, rather amazingly, has come to lead the world over the past decade.

 A republican acquaintance of mine once said that Bobby Sands didn’t die for cross-border teacher training. I’m very sorry that Bobby Sands had to die at all. I don’t believe his cause, the IRA’s armed struggle (or terrorist campaign, depending on your point of view) to unite Northern Ireland with the rest of the island, was worth one death, let alone the more than the three and a half thousand it led to between 1968 and 1998.

Cross-border teacher training is precisely the kind of thing that John Hume – whatever about Bobby Sands – might have chosen as a symbol of the kind of noble Irish cause that one could devote one’s life to. I believe passionately that cross-border education in general, and the work of SCoTENS (the Standing Conference on Teacher Education North and South) in particular, can become one of the building blocks for the slow, difficult work of constructing peace and reconciliation on this island that is our common home.

One of the striking features of this island’s history is its people’s traditionally high regard for education. According to the 1824 Census, this then very impoverished country supported no fewer than 9,300 hedge schools. The national school system, introduced in 1831, was a stunning success – by 1870 there were 7,000 schools catering for a million pupils, again long before compulsory attendance. And it was very much an all-island system: one of my favourite 19^th century writers is the polymathic PW Joyce who, along with his work on the Irish language, music, antiquities and place names, published A Child’s History of Ireland (used widely in schools in the early years of the last century) and came from Meath to organise schools in Antrim.

Stressing the virtues of moderation, the avoidance of exaggeration and bitterness, and the importance of “giving credit where credit is due”, Joyce hoped his children’s history book would “help to foster mutual feelings of respect and toleration among Irish people of different parties, and teach them to love and admire what is good and noble in their history, no matter where found.”

Then we had partition, and the two parts of Ireland turned their backs on each other. As the co-founder of SCoTENS, Professor John Coolahan, told a conference in 2001: “I trained as a teacher twice in the 1960s in the South and as far as education in Northern Ireland was concerned it could have been Timbucktu. There was no reference to it, no mention of it, it was just out of one’s consciousness.”

We are now in a more benign period. For the past 15 years since the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, we have experienced relative peace and no little hope in Northern Ireland. Particularly in the first 10 of those years hundreds of cross-community and cross-border educational programmes were generously supported by funding from the European Union. In the new Europe, born out of the horrors of the Second World War, education was seen as fundamental in helping to overcome barriers between nations and peoples and to foster and cultivate a sense of shared heritage.

A report in 2005 from the now defunct North/South Exchange Consortium detailed the extraordinary range of cross-border educational initiatives. It listed 123 programmes and projects funded either directly or through government agencies, usually with EU Peace Programme money; another 11 major projects with over 700 participating youth organisations, youth groups and schools; and 106 other projects. The report estimated that, in total, more than 1,800 organisations, comprising over 3,000 schools and youth groups, and more than 55,000 young people, had participated in funded North-South school and youth projects in the period 2000-2004 alone. Most of these projects have since been wound up as EU funding has expired, although a few of the most successful are still going. Among these are the Dissolving Boundaries ICT programme for schools, the European Studies Programme for post-primary schools and SCoTENS.

Sceptics may ask: What was the real value of all this cross-border educational co-operation?  Is all the talk about mutual understanding and reconciliation through education just pious middle-class wishful thinking? Is it grounded in robust educational values? Does it lead to any improvements in educational practice and mutual understanding on this island?

I believe strongly that it does all these things. It does not take a genius to see that education, acting as it does on the more open minds of young people, can greatly increase the mutual contact, knowledge, understanding and respect which have been absent from relationships on this island for so long.

In the area of educational practice, there are clear and tangible benefits. Anyone who has watched the interaction of young people through scores of cross-border projects, as I have, can see their frame of reference widening and their cultural experience deepening.  I have a vivid memory from nearly 20 years ago of watching a group of 16 year old Protestant students from Ballymena and their Catholic peers from County Wicklow wrestling with the issue of real, live, multi-coloured multi-culturalism – until then utterly alien to both groups’ experience – when presented with the challenges it posed for a group of young Indian, Pakistani and English students from Birmingham.

Active learning methodologies are alive and well in many of these projects, allowing teachers and students to break out of the rigid straitjackets imposed by statutory curricula and old-fashioned ‘talk and chalk’ teaching methods. I have seen teachers, in particular, genuinely energised by the possibilities of such new teaching and learning in projects like the City of Dublin VEC-run Education for Reconciliation project for second level schools.

The purposeful utilisation and integration of ICT in schools is national policy North and South. Projects like Dissolving Boundaries are leading the way in this vital area. But Dissolving Boundaries also teaches mutual understanding and reconciliation: two years ago it was selected by the UK National Foundation for Educational Research as the only Northern Irish case study in a piece of international research aimed at tackling the risk of violent extremism among young people.

Another clear consequence is the fostering of a sense of confidence and a stronger sense of identity. This goes with a reaching out to the other person by realising that there is a lot more to him or her than the received stereotype. I remember the account of a student from Leitrim doing teaching practice in Belfast as part of a SCoTENS-sponsored North/South student teacher exchange project, who in three short weeks totally undermined the anti-Catholic prejudices of both his fellow-teachers and his pupils in a primary school in an overwhelmingly Protestant area of East Belfast by his superb leadership of a project on the Titanic.

The impact in terms of mutual understanding over the longer-term is, of course, more difficult to measure. Education is a very slow burner in terms of its societal effects. However John Furlong, Professor of Educational Studies at Oxford University, who evaluated SCoTENS  in 2011, clearly felt the organisation had an important role to play. He said that SCoTENS was ‘an incredible achievement’ and without its leadership and organisation a whole range of all-island activities and networks – conferences, research programmes, student and teacher exchanges – simply would not have happened. It had contributed to the peace process by helping to normalise relationships between those vital cultural multipliers, teachers and those who trained them, within and between North and South.

Can you imagine what would have happened if SCoTENS’ successful model of North-South working together for mutual benefit had been replicated elsewhere in education on this island?  If the teaching councils, the curriculum councils, the education trade unions, the parent organisations, the inspectorates, the Departments of Education themselves, had come together to work in a sustained and systemic fashion on issues of mutual concern?  I believe there could have been a genuine explosion of mutual learning and creative thinking in Irish education, with potentially far-reaching consequences in transforming the attitudes and prospects of our young people. Two small examples: the South could have learned from the North’s internationally recognised success in the implementation of ICT in schools, and the North could have learned from the South about the value of an extra non-exam ‘transition year’ in helping schoolchildren grow into more mature and rounded young people.

Of course it didn’t happen. Maybe it was never going to happen given the timid leadership of the North-South cooperation process by Dublin’s politicians and civil servants and the largely indifferent, sometimes hostile and always ultra-cautious attitudes of their Northern counterparts. Maybe I am being over-optimistic, but I believe it could have led towards a real meeting of minds between education administrators, teachers and even parents in an area where everybody wants one thing – what is best for the children of Ireland. Because for me such a meeting of minds around something that is of clear mutual benefit to everybody is the real meaning of unity:  the voluntary unity of people in a common cause, not the unenforceable unity of states with clashing identities.

So let me finish with a quote from my favourite republican, the United Irishman William Drennan. After giving up being a revolutionary, he became an educationalist. In 1814, giving the address at the opening of one of Ireland’s oldest secondary schools, the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, Drennan said that the school’s founders were “of nothing more desirous that the pupils of all religious denominations should communicate by frequent and friendly intercourse in the common business of education, by which means a new turn might be given to our national character and habits, and all the children of Ireland should know and love each other.”

It is salutary to have to admit that two centuries on Drennan’s words are still a challenge for those of us involved in the vital business of increasing  mutual understanding between Irish people through education. In our darker moments we need to remind ourselves that this is what we are about: we are trying to give a new turn to our national character and habits, so that all the children of Ireland, so long divided by fear, suspicion and misunderstanding, can come to know each other better and love each other more. I hope the idealistic and courageous young man who was Bobby Sands would have agreed with that.

This is an edited version of a speech given at the SCoTENS annual conference in Sligo on 10 October.