The proper title of the Mawhinney document is "Education in Northern Ireland — Proposals for Reform" and it was published by the Northern Ireland Department of Education in March. It is a Green Paper effectively, a discussion paper for various reform proposals in the Northern Ireland education system, and indeed it forms part of the Education Reform Bill in the United Kingdom as a whole — certainly in England and Wales. The Northern Ireland section contains certain different distinct proposals geared to the situation in Northern Ireland. As I understand it, the discussion was to have terminated by 10 June at which stage the British Government would take up as it were the various suggestions made on the basis of the Green Paper.
To the extent that it proposes curricular reform in the system, it really is not directly any business of ours. I pause here to note that some of the proposals are excessively utilitarian in tone. Like so much of educational obsession today, the Green Paper is somewhat over-concerned in my view with science and technology to the detriment of the humanities but that is really neither here nor there.
However, other proposals in the document do bear directly on our business and relate to the business of the Inter-governmental Conference. Ultimately, they bear on the prospects for peace and reconciliation between the communities in Northern Ireland and, therefore, in Ireland as a whole. The Green Paper — if I may call it that — puts forward as an objective, and I quote from page 6 of the document:
To act positively to facilitate the development of integrated education where there is sufficient parental demand to support a viable school.
In part at least the objective of the Mawhinney proposals is to promote the principle and practice of integrated education. To that extent the document spells out in detail further on the ways in which parents may be mobilised to change the nature of a school, whereby a school may change its standing from a voluntary school to a grant maintained school. Indeed there is a further category savoured by the British Government, a grant maintained integrated school, which is given special incentives in the context, once again, of furthering educational integration in Northern Ireland.
The document also — and this is very interesting — emphasises parental choice, parental control and parental power. It envisages a situation where a school may move to a grant maintained integrated status if, for example, 20 per cent of the parents in any school look for a referendum of the total number of parents. Then a simple majority of the parental body could transform the status of the school. Here is a real formula for real parental democracy, not just paying lip-service to it as is the case sometimes in our own Constitution, for example, where an ecclesiastical body has the real power but only pays lip-service to parental democracy. I think the real objection of the Northern Ireland Catholic bishops to this proposal is precisely this point, that this is power to the parents, power to the parents, away from the Episcopal trustees.
None of us in this Chamber is so naive as to think that integrated education is the panacea for the social and political ills of Northern Ireland. None of us believes that if you assemble Protestants and Catholics and mix them up in the schools tomorrow, within a short period you will have community harmony. Of course not. Let us not be put in the false position, by those who favour segregation, of having to defend the impossible. Of course not but at the same time this is a taboo subject, be it noted. It is quite extraordinary that in the civil rights movement of 20 years ago and in the Forum for a New Ireland some years back, virtually little or nothing was said about education as if somehow there was a conspiracy that this was a preserved area not to be discussed — a thunderous silence one might call it. In effect, we have to face up to the fact that segregated education may well be only a symptom of division. It may not be anything like a contributory cause of division but at the same time commonsense would dictate to us that if you have only 800 pupils in integrated schools out of a total pupil body of 340,000 that cannot be satisfactory.
At the back of all of this of course is the fact that the Catholic Church throughout the 19th and 20th centuries has consistently pursued the aim of control of schools. In a forgotten chapter of Irish history in 1919-20, one of the reasons the Catholic bishops supported the transfer of power from the Parliamentary Party to Sinn Féin was that the Sinn Féin organisation were willing to toe the Episcopal line on educational policy. It has not changed from the time 120 years ago when Cardinal Cullen said "There is nothing that so concerns us as education, nothing that is so much our business"— meaning Catholic business. The position has not changed today where Bishop Cathal Daly, for all his impassioned and no doubt sincere protestations of peace and reconciliation at the New Ireland Forum, refuses to appoint a chaplain to Lagan College which recently was rightly described as the flagship of integrated education. Fr. Denis Faul, an honest man indeed, said in his honesty, quite recently, "we will give up our Churches before we give up our schools." We know, then, where the Catholic Church stands on this matter.
Let it be said, that the Protestants have a similar attitude, that they have no enthusiasm for integrated education and that the Stormont Government from its inception down to its abolition also tacitly or otherwise favoured what I might call educational apartheid. I have very grave doubts about what is meant by the Catholic ethos or the Protestant ethos. When you strip it down it simply means each tribe controls its own schools. A poll in Fortnight magazine however shows a different picture. In the July-August 1988 issue of Fortnight, there is a detailed poll which shows that there is substantial parental support for the idea that Government should promote integrated schools.
We have heard over the past few months objections to the Mawhinney proposals. Some of the objections are reasonable indeed, for example, that the Irish language may well be downgraded if they are implemented. I certainly would hope that our Government in the Inter-governmental Conference and elsewhere will continue the difficult but essential task of educating British governors in the importance of the Irish language as an integral part of Ulster cultural heritage and the need moreover not to let the language go by default to the Provos. One of the most basic requirements of our time is that the Irish language must not become the bloodstained cultural uniform of the IRA. Let our Government plead that cause but our Government's stance, as reported in the newspapers, makes me uneasy in other regards, and this is why I brought this matter up tonight.
Do the Government oppose the essential thrust of these proposals which is towards encouraging integrated education? Do the Government really believe the line that these proposals should not be accepted in case the Provisionals take over some schools, in case they can mobilise 20 per cent of the parents and then a contrived majority? That strikes me as the most unbelievably weak argument against the proposals. Moreover, it smacks of blackmail on the part of the SDLP and the bishops. What they are saying is: "Look, you do not want the schools taken over by terrorists, do you? If you do not, then you cannot trust the parents; you will have to accept the status quo”.
I should like to know where our Government stand really on that basic matter. Do they uphold the status quo of educational apartheid? As I said already, allowing for all the simplifications and so on, there is no doubt that integrated education is a step towards community harmony. It is important to know where this Government, particularly Fianna Fáil, the Republican Party Government stand in this matter. Do they stand for Catholic nationalism or for a common Irishness or Republican Irishness, or even indeed a common Ulsterness transcending atavistic tribal animosities?