Nationalist myths: education

There are many myths put about by Republicans and nationalists, whether on purpose or simply as the result of having heard rumours. Some myths are, through a process of Chinese Whispers, blown out of all proportion. This is particularly true of Irish-America, and even affects people in England.

One such myth concerns education in Northern Ireland. Let's start with a fact. Education was effectively denied to many children in Ireland as a result of the Penal Laws. This affected people through the 18th and 19th centuries, before Northern Ireland came into being well into the 20th century.

The myth may have its origin in that history and may well have played a part in affecting a lot of people leading up to civil rights demonstrations in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s. To suggest that we have long memories in Ireland is to perhaps stretch the truth. More likely is the fact that conflicts had occurred more frequently and kept on a back boiler. A parent or grandparent was always available who remembered and lived through some injustice or other, and who passed this down to children. I believe this has particularly been the case for nationalist and Republican families - forever creating martyrs of themselves and attempting to out-suffer all comers.

So because education was a target of the Penal Laws up to a century prior, armed with this knowledge passed down, it might be natural to become paranoid and assume that there was still some deficit or discrimination involved. So much so that even in recent years that wild suggestions have been made by some otherwise intelligent people. Such as, for example, that, "As part of the attempt to suppress nationalists, schools in Northern Ireland were denied funding" or that they were denied funding specifically for the Gaelic language.

The fact is though that when Northern Ireland came into being as a result of the Free State separating from the rest of Ireland, the government's Permanent Secretary for Education was a Roman Catholic: Andrew Nicholas Bonaparte-Wyse (the great-grandson of Napoleon's brother Lucien) was charged with the task of updating and reforming the education system for Northern Ireland. Ireland had long lagged behind the rest of the UK with regard to education, but this became one of Northern Ireland's successes. Unfortunately, the Roman Catholic body responsible for education in specifically Roman Catholic schools elected not to represent themselves on a governmental commission on education. Perhaps part of the reason was because many people believe that the 'partition of Ireland' was going to be a temporary thing. However, the Roman Catholic Church did not want its children "corrupted" by non-Roman Catholic influences. They refused to cooperate with the government in terms of auditing and budget requirements and instead looked to Dublin for their funding.

State schools in Northern Ireland were created with the intention of being secular and non-denominational. That remains the case to this day, despite catchment areas in which people of one religious background dominate numerically over another and despite Roman Catholics sending their children almost exclusively to Roman Catholic schools wherever possible.

The government of Northern Ireland had no idea what the requirements and needs of the Roman Catholic schools were, either in terms of finance or policy. They could only guess.

At some point though, funding from Dublin dried up and so the Roman Catholic Maintained Schools of Northern Ireland turned to the Northern Irish government at last. The government subsidised the RC system in a similar way as they were funded in England and Wales. The Roman Catholic schools adopted the Northern Irish curriculum, with a few exceptions or differences.

Universities of course accept all comers, locally, nationally and internationally. Despite this, Queen's University of Belfast is often seen as being largely a Roman Catholic mainstay while, ironically, Trinity College in Dublin has been seen as a Protestant mainstay.

Roman Catholics had been held back with regard to education - particularly at the higher levels - through no fault of the government. Working class Roman Catholic kids came from larger families. Larger families had different demographics and different problems than those with smaller families. Basically, with more mouths to feed, the onus was on the eldest children to immediately seek work upon leaving school. The earliest a child could leave school used to be at 14 years. Today it's compulsory that children remain in full-time education until the age of 16.

Fewer Roman Catholics therefore went on to gain higher levels of education. This, in turn, affected employment-related demographics drastically and there were more knock-on effects besides. Already numerically inferior to non-Roman Catholics, they were also less likely to be qualified for certain positions in employment or even community representation.

People who lose their jobs then, and who are considered unemployable due to competition from people with similar experience but perhaps higher levels of education, are likely to become disaffected. History shows that this is indeed what happened in the last few years of the 1960s. This is just one of a series of factors which caused some people to become resentful.

Today however, Roman Catholic schools are performing well and, in fact, recently out-performed state schools in terms of results attained. A couple of years ago the number of Roman Catholic entrants to local universities was higher than the number of entrants of non-Roman Catholics for the first time.