Cautionary
Irish tale•
P.S.L. Lyons
Education and Enmity: The Control 'of Schooling in Northern Ireland, 1920-50 D. H. Akenson (David and Charles, Barnes and Noble E4.95) Grim as are the daily bombs on the streets of tlelfast or Londonderry, grimmer still is the reflection that, whatever settlement 'may be reached in the coming months or years, the fuse is already lit that will produce similar (Plosions in the next decade or so unless 8.°me miraculous change of attitudes occurs to the meantime. No truism is more obvious than that the change can only occur if the generation now growing up in conditions of almost unimaginable stress can be weaned from the violence which is all that many of them have known and brought to a frame of triind which will allow the opposed cornMunities to contemplate living peacefully together rather than blowing each other to bits. The question is how? , Well-intentioned outsiders, trying to solve t.oe seemingly insoluble, tend to mutter the tocantation 'integrated education' as if that would somehow take care of everything. The evidence on this much vexed question is unsatisfactory both in character and extent, but while there is some ground for arguing that the educational segregation which Still prevails in Northern Ireland probably reinforces prejudices previously acquired by Children outside school, there is no guarantee that integration will remove those prejudices .1!,s by some magic wand. Indeed, Richard Kose's pioneering study, Governing Without Consensus, which remains the pre-eminent survey in this field, suggests that the correlation between integrated schooling and political moderation is relatively slight and that While attendance at mixed schools tends to reduce ultra and rebel views, it does so only to a very limited extent."
, Professor Akenson in his new book, which .iistorical ither than sociological, criti
's the methodology of Governing Without C..nsensus ,aF leading to conclusions about
Change ever period, while based on data Follected at only one point in time. He himself Is modestly, though cautiously, optimistic about the therapeutic value of integration, Provided all such experiments steer clear of both local government and church authorities. That he can even envisage such conditions being met may suggest to the initiated that Professor Akenson's ivory tower is of skyscraper proportions, but the story he unfolds in his book suggests that it is either that or nothing.
His is certainly a cautionary tale. Confining himself to the first thirty years of home rule in Northern Ireland, he analyses in depth the main phases of the struggle for control of the state schools, especially at the primary level. As he tells it, this is essentially a study of pressure effectively exerted by the Protestant churches upon successive Unionist governments to convert what had begun as a nonsectarian ideal into a thoroughly denominational reality. As the historian of the Irish school system in the nineteenth century, no one knows better than Professor Akenson that what happened in Northern Ireland after 1920 bore a strong family resemblance to what had happened in the country as a whole under the Union and to the student of comparative history there is a strange fascination in watching how the Protestant clergy in the six counties slipped as to the manner born into the role previously filled for the thirtytwo counties by the Roman Catholic hierarchy.
It is a legitimate criticism of Professor Akenson's approach that his illustrations of rampant sectarianism are somewhat one sided and that his searchlight plays bleakly upon such worthies as the Reverend William Corkey while leaving the Roman Catholic champions in semi-darkness. To this he could reply with justice that he has not ignored the Roman Catholic aspect of the question, but that for him it was nevertheless of secondary importance, partly because it has already been much explored, and still more because Roman Catholics, having early decided to opt out of the system as much as it was possible for them to do, were less well placed to in fluence the government and also freer to pursue their own form of denominational educa tion,without having to fight the sort of battles in which the Protestant communities were so incessantly engaged. The precise manoeuvres of the Protestant churches may be followed in all their ranco rous detail in Professor Akenson's narrative which curiously combines admirable clarity of thought with occasional obscurity of ex pression — here there is room to note only some of his more important conclusions. One is the inescapable fact which it is fashionable nowadays to ignore, that" religion is the bed rock reality upon which the political, social and constitutional structure of Northern Ire land rests." It may not be everyone's idea of religion, but of its centrality to the Ulster predicament and its fundamental importance to both communities Professor Akenson is in no doubt whatever. Neither is he in any doubt about another of his conclusions, which is that the viewpoints of Roman Catholic and Protestant divines on the education question have often demonstrated a striking similarity.
Even in the earliest clashes (on Lord London derry's Education Act of 1923) he finds that "the religious leaders of both groups believed that Ulster's children should be taught by teachers of their own denomination, that children should attend school with their co religionists, and that religious instruction should be woven into the school curriculum." These entrenched positions only became more entrenched as the years rolled on.
• Finally, he points to a third conclusion still relevant today, the extent to which seemingly impregnable Unionist governments could be coerced (sometimes against their better judgment) into concessions by the Protestant cler gy even when those clergy were unsupported or lamely supported by the Orange Order. The undignified figure cut on more than one occasion by the formidable Lord Craigavon tells us much about Craigavon but possibly even more about Captain O'Neill. Although in some respects Catholic and Protestant schools have come closer to parity of treatment (especially in finance) during recent years, Professor Akenson's study, with its insistence on the continuing gulf between two communities each convinced of the righteousness of its own cause, leaves one with the same oppressive sadness which the contemplation of Northern Ireland so often provokes. He ends with the wish that "for the sake of Christian charity some hopeful careful experiments in integration are attempted." One would like to say Amen — but is the wish merely wishful thinking, in fact just another of those' incantations ' he warns us against himself?
F. S. L. Lyons, Professor of Modern History in the University of Kent, was born in Northern Ireland and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. He is author of Ireland Since the Famine and numerous other works on Irish history.
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