North’s politicians need to work on making a better case for themselves

I WENT last week to listen to a talk given by Martin McGuinness on education at the Patrick MacGill Summer School in the Donegal town of Glenties. This year, under the broad theme of Building a More Civilised Society in Ireland, the summer school organised an evening’s discussion on the role of education, at which three speakers each gave a paper on the topic.

The first speaker was Derek West, the principal of the large Newpark comprehensive secondary school in Dublin. He had some interesting and innovative things to say, informed by his frontline perspectives.

The second speaker was Fine Gael front-bench spokesperson Olwyn Enright. A year into the education brief, she has certainly mastered the subject. She has the details of education process at her fingertips and appears to be well on the way to giving Fine Gael a distinctive voice on education policy.

However, like most of those who had turned up for this session of the summer school, I was particularly anxious to hear what Martin McGuinness might have to say. My interest was due in no small part to a curiosity about this former military man turned politician who had served, off and on, for three years as Northern Ireland’s Education Minister. I was also interested to hear what one of Sinn Féin’s leading figures would sound like talking about a specific social issue. The party’s line up of politicians down south is, in the main, weaker than those north of the border and, of course, only its northern leadership has had experience of ministerial office.

When McGuinness finally got up to speak, however, we had to wait before hearing what Sinn Féin thought about education. He spent the first few minutes telling some soft focus anecdotes about his fishing days in Donegal. Apparently, he is a keen angler. It fits with the contemplative persona he likes to portray.

As he talked my mind wandered. I wondered how he found the time in what was reportedly a busy late teens and twenties to go fishing.

Something brought my mind back to the speaker but McGuinness then spent the next 10 minutes of his speech giving us his views on things other than education. He subjected the audience to the current version of Sinn Féin’s single transferable speech “Unilateral suspension by the British Government of Assembly elections... blah blah, Unionist veto... denial of democracy..blah blah”. I’m sure many readers could fill in the blanks.

It’s not that we shouldn’t have to listen to Sinn Féin’s view on the current state of the peace process, it’s just that we shouldn’t have to listen to it ad nauseam. Sinn Féin can be selective about their commitment to democracy and selective about where the responsibility lies for the current suspension of institutions in Northern Ireland.

However, the real reason for my unease was that McGuinness had been asked to come to Donegal not to talk, again, about the peace process but to talk about education. I wonder why he was wasting this unique opportunity to present the party’s wider agenda.

When he finally did get around to talking about education, about half way through his speech, McGuinness actually had some interesting things to say.

Sinn Féin’s decision to choose the education portfolio when the Northern Ireland Executive was first appointed unnerved many people in Northern Ireland, some of them nationalist. Some were outraged at the concept of this leading republican figure being put in charge of their children’s schooling. The more sensationalist elements in the unionist community talked of McGuinness’s reign in education ushering an era of the compulsory teaching of the Irish language and indoctrination in Irish nationalist history.

However, by the time the Executive was again suspended last October McGuinness had received many plaudits for his stint in the job. Although most of the unionist voices who praised him did so very privately.

McGuinness introduced none of the policies some had feared but instead focused on building up school infrastructure. More controversially, shortly after his appointment, McGuinness announced that he wanted to explore the reform of access to post-primary education and, in particular, to review the 11-plus examination. The 11-plus is an examination which children in Northern Ireland of about that age take to determine which secondary school they go on to. Passing or failing decides a child’s future by sending him or her to a grammar school and opening the real possibility of university or, alternatively, to a secondary school and a working-class job.

Some commentators have argued that the 11-plus exam actually paved the way for the emergence of a Catholic middle class in the 1960s. The example is often cited of John Hume who, when just 10 years of age, sat the examination in its first year. Doing well in it meant that he could go on to St Columbs, Derry’s prestigious Catholic grammar school, and that the state would pay. Otherwise, he would have had to pay the then princely yearly sum of £7 which was well beyond his family’s means.

For intelligent Catholic children the 11-plus, initially at least, opened a gateway to educational and economic advancement. However, it had the opposite effect for those who did not blossom academically at an early age or who had not had the benefit of good primary education. Those children who didn’t pass it were dubbed academic failures at 11 years of age and, as a result, the test has blighted the lives of generations of Northern Ireland children. This early academic selection gave rise to real educational disadvantage from a very young age.

The evidence quickly confirmed that the 11-plus was highly discriminatory against lower socio-economic classes. This discrimination was evident in both communities. It is a particular problem, for example, in some loyalist areas. Interestingly, McGuinness pointed out to his Donegal audience that just 2% of the children in the loyalist Shankill area sat the 11-plus exam in 2002. In some pockets less than a handful of children passed it.

This has the knock on effect that from an even younger age, children in these areas, and sometimes their schools, give up on education even earlier, feeling that it is not worth preparing for an exam they are certain to fail.

A report commissioned by McGuinness on post-primary schooling has led into a public consultation process. The key decision to abolish the 11-plus has essentially been made but no clear consensus has emerged about its replacement.

While Labour Party MPs from the UK run Northern Ireland’s departments, McGuinness and his Sinn Féin colleagues have more time to go fishing or what ever it is they do in their spare time. McGuinness, and Sinn Féin generally, could do more for the restoration of democratic institutions in Northern Ireland if they spent less time giving audiences earaches about how everything is somebody else fault and spent more time emphasising the real social benefits which flow from Northern Ireland politicians having personal responsibility for key government departments.