In playgrounds a new Northern Ireland is taking shape
It was inevitable that Patrick Kielty’s moving documentary on the Good Friday Agreement would eventually be broken down into the familiar stuff of phone-in-show knock-about and newspaper controversy. Which is a shame, because it was a rare attempt to engage with Northern Ireland’s past on a human level.
The headlines were captured by Arlene Foster’s suggestion that she would probably leave a united Ireland if one came about. But a more telling moment was when Kielty visited Shimna Integrated College and found students happily mixing despite differing harbouring different aspirations for Northern Ireland’s constitutional status (for readers outside Northern Ireland, integrated schools educate Protestant and Catholic children under one roof). “I see myself as a unionist but I don’t let unionism define me as a person”, one explained, sitting next to a friend who said he was in favour of a united Ireland.
Kielty explains that he hadn’t spoken socially to a unionist until he left school. “The fact that this represents less than 10 per cent of the education here…I mean come on. If we want to change, there has to be more of this”, he said.
His thoughts were echoed in an Economist editorial last week: “Protestants and Catholics still lead segregated lives. Just 5.8 per cent of children are in formally integrated primary schools.”
This was borne out by some fascinating opinion polling by Sky Data, showing that 18 to 34-year-olds were at least as segregated as older groups.
But this isn’t the whole picture. I’ve pointed out before that state schools in Northern Ireland are becoming less segregated, both because of a burgeoning population of “none of the aboves” and because Catholic parents are proving more willing to send their children to traditionally “Protestant” state schools.
I revisited the numbers and the extent of this surprised me. Over the last 18 years the proportion of Catholic children attending non-Catholic or Irish-language primaries has doubled to 12 per cent. Meanwhile the proportion of children who are not classified as Protestant or Catholic has more than doubled from 7 per cent to 15 per cent. (The number of Protestant children attending Catholic and Irish-language schools remains minimal.)
This matters. While the march of integrated education has stalled, the state sector is slowly becoming more integrated — in other words less Protestant. Children schooled in a mixed environment are less prejudiced and hold more moderate political views.
The grip of history is loosening, to paraphrase a soundbite from 20 years ago. The political implications of this have not been properly thought through.
The received wisdom is that demography is the friend of Irish nationalism. Yet despite growing numbers of Catholic children the proportion of Northern Irish children educated in Catholic-majority schools has been flat or even fallen slightly at about 46 per cent (or 44 per cent according to one data set).
Northern Ireland is secularising more than it is Catholicising. There is no demographic reason to expect a nationalist majority any time soon. Brexit and the DUP, of course, may provide political reasons.
David Trimble, Arlene Foster’s predecessor as first minister, described Northern Ireland in his Nobel Prize speech as a “solid house, but a… cold house for Catholics”. The Agreement changed that. Slowly, perhaps, a warmer house is being fostered in playgrounds and classrooms.
