Ahern hails new era on visit to Paisley's heartland

Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern today visited Ballymena in the heart of Ian Paisley’s constituency without any loyalist protest.

As he met Protestant and Catholic schoolchildren involved in a Government-backed scheme to tackle sectarianism in the Co Antrim town alongside its Democratic Unionist mayor Maurice Mills, Mr Ahern said the fact that he could visit Ballymena without any fuss was a measure of the political progress that has been made in the North in recent times.

But while he welcomed those steps forward, the Fianna Fáil minister stressed Northern Ireland still had a lot of work to do in addressing sectarian attitudes in society.

“It is absolutely changed times – changed times in that Dr Paisley can come down to Dublin as well and not throw snowballs or whatever at us,” he said.

“Thankfully that’s part of the courageous moves that politicians here in Northern Ireland eventually took as we were exhorting them to come together to work on behalf of their people. What better way than for them to organise their own affairs rather than allowing other people to do it for them?

“I do feel comfortable here. Why not?

“It is a beautiful part of the world. It is a part of the world where unfortunately because of the Troubles my parents did not bring me to too often, and thankfully since I became Minister for Foreign Affairs I have been here a lot more.”

Mr Ahern and Mr Mills visited young people at the All Saint’s Boxing Club in Ballymena, where the actor Liam Neeson once boxed, to attend the launch of New Day – a peace and reconciliation initiative encouraging young people to address their own sectarian prejudices.

They also launched a scholarship at St Patrick’s College in memory of one of its pupils, 15-year-old Michael McIlveen, who died after being assaulted with a baseball bat in the town in May last year.

A number of youths are awaiting trial for the Catholic teenager’s murder.

Pupils from nine local Protestant and Catholic schools will be chosen each year to work on special reconciliation projects.

The Government has contributed nearly €80,000 towards the Michael McIlveen Scholarships, which will run for the next five years.

Michael McIlveen, who was nicknamed Micky-Bo, died in hospital after he was attacked by a gang in Ballymena on May 7, 2006.

The murder was condemned across the sectarian divide. At the time, Mr Paisley, the MP for North Antrim and now the North’s First Minister, sympathised with the teenager’s grieving family.

Mr Ahern said the nine schools - St Patrick’s College, Ballymena Academy, St Louis Grammar, Cambridge House Grammar, Slemish College, Ballee Community College, Dunclug College, Cullybackey High School and Dunfane Special School - participating in the Ballymena Learning Together project had a role to play in decommissioning sectarian attitudes among young people.

“I suppose it is a catchphrase that young people are the future but they are the future because young people now do not remember all the awful incidents we had – they don’t remember Enniskillen, they don’t remember the Omagh bombing, the Loughinisland shootings and all those terrible incidents,” he observed.

“From that point of view, as one person said to me earlier this morning, we grow up in a way that perhaps we are bigoted and we do not realise we are bigoted. People need to break out of that and through projects like this with young people from schools learning at the very bottom they will realise there is a different life, particularly in the multi-ethnic society we have now.”

Kate Magee, the principal of St Patrick’s College, said while schools in the area had been laying the foundations of working together to confront sectarianism, the murder of Michael McIlveen had acted as a catalyst.

“After Michael’s death, we felt we could not wait any longer. We needed to get this up and running,” she said.

“The funding we got from the Department of Education and from the Department of Foreign Affairs helped us to put the plans into place and meant we could do things a lot more quickly.

“While I tend to concern myself with young people in school and would not know what they are like after half past three – although I do take an active interest in local shops if anybody has a comment about my pupils – at the same time you do notice definitely that there is not that sense of: ’We don’t know anybody who goes to that school or anybody from that part of town’.

“So the fact pupils from different schools have been involved in different groups means they are meeting children from other schools that they probably wouldn’t have met.”