Just 8% of children in the North attend integrated schools. 90-year-old former priest David Rice says helping to change this is his final battle
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Today, just 7 per cent of children in Northern Ireland go to integrated schools, more than a quarter of a century after the Belfast Agreement pledged to “encourage its growth”. Churches have propagated and defended faith schools and “denominational interests are still embedded in the system and contribute to the enduring separation of schools”.
“Two groups, both thoroughly decent but polarised by culture, religion, ethnicity, politics, prosperity levels, by interpretations of history and by geography, living in separate areas and even divided by peace walls. And, above all, separated by schooling,” he says. Rice, who educated several generations of Irish journalists in the Rathmines School of Journalism, has spoken directly about his views with Bishop of Killaloe Fintan Monahan, one of the contributors to Sundered Children.
Illustrating the possibilities, Bishop Monahan pointed to the existence of Gaelscoil an tSlí Dála, which is jointly run by the Catholic Church and the Church of Ireland, largely thanks to the efforts of his predecessor, Willie Walsh. “I think school should be for mathematics and all the other things and faith should be taught on the sidelines.”
“Why could we not create integrated schools with the right teachers who could do extremely well, so that children could be well educated?” Demographic and social change may lessen the unionist/nationalist polarisation, “but time alone will not do it. The last 100 years did not do it”.
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