2 Irelands together

 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.

The mischievous streak in me likes the word ‘collaboration’: it is a subversive word. I believe in the obvious: that the road to peace out of any conflict, short of outright military victory by one side or the other, lies in eventually collaborating with the old enemy. But in Britain collaboration still has a strongly negative undertone left over from the Second World War: those who worked with the Nazi enemy were collaborators and therefore people to be shunned and punished. And this sentiment was easily adapted by unionism to the fearful instincts of that community in Northern Ireland.

Collaboration also assumes legitimacy and equality between the two sides doing the collaborating.  Irish republicans don’t like the concept for this reason. They insist on believing that Northern Ireland and – to a lesser extent – the independent state of Ireland don’t really exist, that they are unruly half-completed waiting rooms on the journey to the ultimate destination of a proper all-Ireland republic.

In the actual Republic of Ireland collaboration has no such negative undertones. But its nice sister, cooperation, when used in the context of cooperation with Northern Ireland as part of the peace process, has an only slightly less damaging connotation: it reeks of boring ‘do-goodery’, marginal to the real problems of a republic which has been struggling for its very existence as a self-governing state for the past five years.

I have spent the last 14 years – until retirement last month – as director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies, promoting and developing what many unionists still consider to be collaboration with the ancient enemy in Dublin; what many republicans believe to be irrelevant to the real business of driving towards a united Ireland; and what many people in the South think – when they think about it at all –  is a deeply uninteresting and probably fruitless endeavour to win over the seriously mad, often violent and probably unreformable people north of the border.

Most political leaders in both jurisdictions on this island now devote little thought to North-South cooperation. In the early years after the Good Friday Agreement, Bertie Ahern used to bang the table and tell his Ministers that such cooperation had to be close to the top of their agendas. However since Bertie departed and Western capitalism as we used to know it imploded after 2008, everything has changed. With the depth of the financial crisis facing both Ireland and Britain, it was quite understandable that the dreary and predictable problems of little Northern Ireland would slide rapidly down the agenda.  The 1998 Agreement’s marvellously complex interlocking architecture was always predicated on all three ‘strands’ – within Northern Ireland, North-South and East-West – working together. But in recent years – to this observer at least – this has decreased to the point where there is now a worrying lacuna in Northern Ireland policy-making in both Dublin and London.

Admittedly relations between the two states have never been better, a closeness symbolised by Queen Elizabeth’s hugely successful visit in 2011. I would argue that the East-West institutions set up by the Good Friday Agreement have become largely symbolic and the real business between Britain and Ireland is now done on a bilateral basis between the two sovereign governments. But North-South cooperation, which until recent years was much more vibrant – largely because of the Irish Government’s commitment to it – has also fallen way down that government’s agenda.

This falling off in governmental interest is reflected in other key areas of society. The media couldn’t be less interested. In Northern Ireland this is because of a provincial obsession with the goings on at Stormont and the old sectarian issues of flags and parades. In the South it is indicative of the collapse of interest in anything to do with both Northern Ireland and North-South cooperation, along with a deep bout of 26-county introspection caused by our failure as an economically independent entity.

The higher education system is another key sector which is losing its North-South dimension. The number of undergraduates crossing the border to study at universities in the other jurisdiction continues to fall: Southerners going north have dropped significantly from over 10% of the total undergraduate population there in the late 1990s to under 4% now; and Northerners coming south have declined from a much lower base to around 1%.

So why is this important? Why shouldn’t Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland retreat into their silos – one orientated almost exclusively towards London and the other increasingly towards Brussels – and have relatively little do with each other? After all, that is how the two Irelands behaved for half-a-century up to the outbreak of the ‘Troubles.’

The first answer to this question is obvious. It lies in what 50 years of discriminatory self-rule in the North and wilful ignorance in London and Dublin led to: 30 years of political violence, 3,600 deaths, and a society whose deepened wounds and divisions will take many generations to heal.  In Dublin the North was ignored for most of the first 30 years after independence and then briefly became the subject of a futile international campaign against partition – until finally Sean Lemass and Ken Whitaker embarked on an initiative in the 1960s to make friends across the border through the first fragile attempts at practical cross-border cooperation.

So practical cross-border cooperation as a tool for helping to remove fear and suspicion between the two parts of this island is nothing new. And remove fear and suspicion is precisely what it has done over the past 15 years. As the late Sir George Quigley said in 2008:

“The negative attitudes to the South, which have historically reinforced internal differences, have steadily weakened. The development of surprisingly widespread acceptance of the North-South economic project demonstrates that the straitjacket within which people mistakenly seek to preserve their identity can be exchanged for more comfortable clothing in situations where positive relationships, which are able to replace negative stereotypes, can develop.”

The economy also provides the second answer. All but a minority of unionists now agree that in a fiercely competitive, globalised environment, it makes total sense for this small English-speaking island to present a united face to the investing outside world, to cooperate where possible in developing new export markets and to capitalise on an all-island ‘domestic’ market of more than six million people.

Unfortunately Northern Ireland’s politics and society are not yet mature enough to solve their problems of division and violence by themselves. Sectarianism and  its ugly outworkings remain a constant. The sovereign governments must stay engaged: London in particular by supporting the cause of cross-community cooperation; Dublin the cause of cross-border cooperation. For the two are as intertwined as when John Hume first articulated his ideas on the tangled ‘strands’ of Northern Irish politics and identity 40 years ago.

PS  I am this year’s director of the Merriman Summer School in Lisdoonvarna, Co Clare, from 14-18 August with the title: ‘Ireland, North and South: two societies growing apart?’ Further details from http://www.merriman.ie

After nearly 14 years it is time to say farewell to the Centre for Cross Border Studies and to ‘A Note from the Next Door Neighbours’, which ran for seven years on the CCBS website (as well as on Slugger O’Toole).

We have done some good things in our small centre in Armagh during that time, and I must pay tribute to my CCBS colleagues for their huge support and extremely hard work: incoming director Ruth Taillon, particularly for her superb work on impact assessment; deputy director Mairead Hughes, a brilliant financial manager, who has been my most valued colleague since the day we opened in September 1999; Patricia McAllister, as conscientious and efficient a personal assistant as exists on this island; Annmarie O’Kane, who has done wonders with the Border People cross-border information service; Eimear Donnelly and CarolAnne Murphy for their impressive organisational and ICT skills; and also to our good friends John Driscoll and Caroline Creamer, director and deputy director of CCBS’s ‘sister’ organisation, the International Centre for Local and Regional Development. Successive chairs and vice-chairs – Chris Gibson, one of the North’s leading businessmen, Helen Johnston of the National Economic and Social Council, and Pauric Travers of St Patrick’s College Drumcondra – along with the CCBS board have always been there for us when we needed them.

The Centre’s contribution to ‘Strand Two’ of the Northern Irish peace process has been welcomed by leaders from a wide range of backgrounds. The Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, has called us an ‘important entity, doing important work’ and the Tánaiste, Eamon Gilmore holds that work ‘in very high regard.’ Fianna Fail leader Micheál Martin has called us ‘a courageous and pioneering initiative.’ The Republic’s most senior civil servant, Martin Fraser, says the Centre’s publications are ‘fundamental to understanding how cross-border cooperation works on the island of Ireland.’ Northern Ireland Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness has talked about the Centre ‘leading the North-South inter-connection process.’ For the unionists, DUP MP Jeffrey Donaldson has warmly and publicly thanked the Centre for its work. Abroad, one of the EU’s top experts on cross-border cooperation, Joachim Beck of the Euro-Institut in Germany, has called the Centre’s impact assessment toolkit ‘a top project with a top partner – it would be hard to find a better one in Europe.’

Yet it is disappointing that we have become prophets with little honour in our own country. The lack of interest by the island’s third level institutions in the subject of cross-border cooperation as part of the Northern Irish peace process never ceases to baffle me. In the past 18 months I have spoken to academic and policy audiences on this fascinating topic from Norway to Israel, Austria to France, England to Belgium. But I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of such audiences I have been invited to address in Ireland over the past 14 years.

The media are another element who are almost totally uninterested in what we do. If I had not been a former senior journalist with The Irish Times (and a dab hand at putting out press releases, harassing newsdesks and writing letters to the editor), I doubt whether the Centre’s work would have raised more than a line or two in the press and on radio on this island. I have, for example, been trying in vain for a decade to interest education correspondents in the unique Irish success story that is the Standing Conference on Teacher Education North and South (SCoTENS), described by the Professor of Education at Oxford University, John Furlong, as ‘an incredible achievement’.

None of this would matter if North-South cooperation remained high on the agenda of the responsible governments. But it doesn’t. I have to say that in recent months in particular it has seemed to me to be lower than ever. With the Northern system wrapped up in its interminable and risk-averse processes (and the G8) and the Southern system totally distracted by its presidency of the EU, necessary ‘North-Southery’ has almost disappeared off the map. The less pragmatic wing of unionism must be delighted.

All this is worrying. Without the active interest and involvement of both the British and Irish governments, the two main parties in Northern Ireland will go back into the tribal silos where they feel most comfortable, the world will forget about this insignificant and awkward province, and in another generation the malign cycle of sectarianism and violence which has been the pattern here for the past 160 years and more will be in danger of raising its ugly head again. And that active involvement can still pay off. Witness Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness’s recent package of measures aimed at a more shared society, which appeared to cynics to be a product of pressure from London along the lines of ‘share more and get more money from us’ (and we’ll announce it before the G8 comes to Fermanagh!).

Maybe this will change for the better in the autumn. I will be more an observer than a participant then (although I will continue to manage the Centre’s ‘Towards a Border Development Zone’ project). I plan to start writing a book about North-South cooperation and the Northern Ireland peace process, and to put up the occasional blog on this new site, http://www.2irelands2gether.wordpress.com. If any of the readers of ‘A Note from the Next Door Neighbours’ would like to subscribe to this new blog, perhaps you could let me know on andyjpollak@gmail.com. I’m also available to do anything that will further the noble cause of cross-border cooperation for peace, reconciliation and mutual benefit in Ireland (occasionally for a small charge). I will be, in short, a cross-border gun for hire.