My friend John Kellden says that every major issue in the world today is a crisis of governance. We know from the serial collapses of Stormont and the constitutional chaos in the US that to work institutions must be inhabited by people and ideas.
I used to ascribe the attitude of some of the advocates for the Belfast Agreement to a kind of neo-political Calvinism, which in having vouchsafed the peace then all manner of good things would naturally follow. Turns out things don’t work quite like that.
If Northern Ireland was saved from the hellish future that once haunted our waking dreams by a power sharing Assembly and Executive but it has struggled to kick start the kind of post conflict society we dreamed of. It’s been well said by the poet that…
On the one hand, I’m interested in how we avoid tearing one another to pieces. Peace is not that, peace is the absence of that, peace is the absence of war: the opposite of war is custom, customs, and civilization.
It’s 15 years since I was last at the British Irish Parliamentary Assembly (BIPA). Today’s it is the British government’s turn to host the Assembly in the quintessential leafy suburbs of Home Counties Surrey. There appears to be new life here.
The fact there were elections in the two main jurisdictions so there’s a lot of representatives here for whom the experience is still pretty new. The odd thing is that, as (pointedly) highlighted by former SoS Paul Murphy, no British minister is attending.
So this is an Irish only show. One in which you can see the working of the shared island initiative (in its fifth year of operation), which compels all cabinet ministers to bring a sustained focus on north south (and east west) facets in their department.
He noted that the whole population of the archipelago is 75 million, so there’s a need build bridges east/west as well as north south with the idea of pursuing ‘shared purposes’ by expanding pathways within formal education and apprenticeships.
Alliance MLA David Honeyford pointed out that the trend has been away from students in Northern Ireland going south. In the 1980s he said (when my contemporaries were going to uni), 10% of TCD undergrads were from the north, now it is less that 1%.
Honeyford also pointed out that the number of students heading to the north from the south had tripled since 2019, many of them citing cheaper accommodation prices. Three years ago monthly rent in Dublin was €2,022 and €1,164 outside of Dublin.
There’s two other factors. One, the student fees in Northern Ireland are cheaper than in Britain (where interest even Irish related studies have plummeted amongst students from the Republic. And two, NI campuses have massively expanded.
The problem, the Minister told the BIPA, is less about politics and more about logistics. Of the two clearing systems UCAS gives students conditional offers while CAO makes all of its decisions based on outcomes after Leaving Certs are announced.
In addition, both sets of results are announced at different times during the summer. And at the heel of the hunt it is left to individual schools as to whether they even inform students about the existence of the system in the other jurisdiction.
For many of the reasons stated above the posh state grammars in Belfast and beyond have all but abandoned the old favoured route to first class education via Trinity. Catholics and Protestants are both either staying at home, or both going to Britain.
The minister is due to meet Liz Kimmins on Friday when they hope to make an announcement on joint plans then. But whatever changes are planned within the system, the structural barriers keeping students apart are just as much economic.
As the minister noted:
We cannot afford complacency. Our relationship must be nurtured, not assumed. And it must be grounded in the values that have brought us this far: mutual respect, democratic accountability, and a shared belief in the power of dialogue.
The irony of the now notorious sh¡thole remark last week is that this week in the south SF was telling southerners the same story there, whereas, as Lawless put it, we need “stories of shared creativity, of minds in dialogue, of cultures in conversation”.
The trick is always to take the first step, not to get caught up in dreams of the last one in a long iterative process. As perhaps one of the most unsung heroes of the peace process once said, it’s about going on a journey and forgetting about the destination.
From the first step comes the second, third and fourth. But to do that we all need to be far more vigilant about the stories we tell ourselves.
“…it can happen that a civilisation can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of fact.”
Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty
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