Cross-Border links that face differences

The last two years have been a veritable rollercoaster of hope and despair for those of us who believe that implementing the Belfast Agreement is the last chance this generation will have to start to overcome the violence and mistrust which have poisoned relationships on this island for so long.

However, whatever the politicians achieve or fail to achieve in the short term, leaders of so-called "civil society" still have a huge part to play in that long and difficult undertaking.

This is nowhere more so than in education. The gulf between the North's children is well known, with only about 4 per cent attending integrated schools where they mix on a daily basis with children of the "other sort". What is less well known, because so few people in the Republic ever bother to think about it, is what the divisions on this island have done to relationships between children on the island as a whole.

"Partition has worked," says Colm Regan, the Bray-based educationalist whose "Let's Talk" initiative has brought thousands of Irish second-level children together to discuss the difficult issues of peace, politics, justice and human rights. "The lack of face-to-face contacts and interaction has led to a high level of mutual suspicion and non-comprehension. The weakness of any links with Northern Protestants, in particular, has meant that when genuine differences arise, for example on the role of the Orange Order, we can't trust each other, we can't take each other at face value, and this reinforces the initial suspicion and incomprehension."

At "Let's Talk" conferences, the young people engage in drama and role-plays, with, for example, Southerners playing Orange marchers and Northern Protestants playing the nationalist residents Regan emphasises the crucial importance of teenagers being "open to people's collective and personal biographies" and not being trapped in the unthinking assumptions of their elders.

It is vital, he says, that young people find a means and a language to "engage with the difficult issues", and not to say, as wellmeaning would-be reconcilers often say: "Let's not mention the war."

This theme, of facing up to sometimes unpalatable truths, is echoed by Nicholas Casey, a teacher at Carrick-on-Suir CBS in south Tipperary, who has been organising exchanges with the largely Protestant Ballymena Academy, in Rev Ian Paisley's home town, for the past 20 years. He says he wants his students to realise that "unionist people in Northern Ireland have values in their lives, including the value of Britishness, which they treasure".

Casey says that, with the coming of peace, his students can experience "the real differences between us, without the distracting business of bombs and bullets. We will have to accept their Britishness, and they'll have to accept our Irishness, and we can only do that by meeting as people."

There have been some outstanding examples of young people meeting and learning across the Border - whether physically or virtually, by means of wonderfully unthreatening new technology - and the process has sped up in recent years in tandem with the peace process.

Understandably, the most popular and successful programmes do not deal with the difficult issues. Thus the European Studies Project, started in the late 1980s, brings together second-level students to look at common history, geography and local environmental themes at junior level, and contemporary European issues at senior level.

This programme now involves more 200 schools on this island, just over half in the Republic, plus more than 200 elsewhere in Europe. Its Irish co-ordinator, Andrew Ryan, claims that one consequence is that 80 per cent of schools in Northern Ireland with a sixth form now have some continuing contact with a school in the Republic.

Tackling thorny issues

There are a few projects that do tackle the thorny issues. In recent years, Co-operation Ireland's programmes, through which more than 100,000 young people have passed in the past two decades, have concentrated less on volume and more on exploring problems of culture and identity.

A much smaller but very worthwhile initiative is the Citizenship Development Project, started in 1997 by St Angela's College of Education in Sligo and the Western Education and Library Board in the North. This groups 15- and 16-year-olds in 28 schools in the north-west - 14 from each side of the border - in a 12-week programme around the theme "Is this a just society?"

Teachers are encouraged to have class discussions on controversial issues around the Northern Ireland conflict. This is highly unusual, since teachers on the citizenship education programmes within the two jurisdictions - Education for Mutual Understanding (EMU) in the North and Civic Social and Political Education (CSPE) in the Republic - usually steer clear of such issues.

However, like so many cross-Border projects, the Citizenship Development Project is paid for by EU money, which will run out this December. This means that its primary aim - to develop a cross-Border curricular model with a wider application in both jurisdictions - may go unrealised.

The small band of idealists involved in this work all emphasise that until room is found on the mainstream curriculum in each jurisdiction for some element of civic and political education about the other, there will be little significant movement towards greater communication and mutual understanding through the education systems.

Moreover, the lessons of the flawed EMU programme within Northern Ireland must be learned: the need for permanent and coherent structures to implement it; the dangers of a minimalist approach by teachers who find such programmes unclear and are unprepared to deal with controversial issues; the absence of a focus on human rights and political processes; and, above all, the lack of vital pre-service and in-service training for teachers.

Andy Pollak, former education correspondent of The Irish Times, is director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies in Armagh.