Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness

I usually find much to applaud in Alex Kane’s commentary. The UUP’s Director of Communications writes a weekly News Letter column, which is frequently cited on this blog with commendation. I have to challenge a section of Alex’s latest piece , however, which includes a rather blithe dismissal of ‘shared future’. It’s a puzzling stance, because the Ulster Unionist party should be proud of its position, holding the ‘Ourselves Alone’ coalition to account for its abandonment of the strategy. “It is taken as a given that people in Northern Ireland want ‘something different’ in political and social terms and millions of pounds are spent on all sorts of cross-community projects and shared future propaganda. If only we could all be educated together, live together, play sports together and work together, it wouldn’t be long before the old barriers collapsed, the peace walls crumbled and spanking new parties emerged to build a new Northern Ireland. Isn’t that right? But maybe, just maybe, ...

Previously we have discussed the DUP’s preposterous insistence that the Programme for Government need not be revisited because it ‘prioritised the economy’. The logic apparently being that any document which is focussed on one particular policy area is immutably appropriate regardless of the fact that prevailing conditions pertaining to that policy area might alter. It is, to put it mildly, a reductionist argument, whatever the PfG’s merits. This site has also long bemoaned the ‘Themselves Alone’ Coalition’s carve-up of government and its non-existent strategy to integrate Northern Ireland’s perceived ‘communities’. One of the first casualties of government led by Sinn Féin and the DUP was the Shared Future initiative. Effectively the goal of building a shared society was dropped and the two parties agreed, in preference, to horse trade the sectional interests of their respective constituencies. Alliance MLA Stephen Farry is the latest politician to point out that not only doe...

Historians have often speculated that Northern Ireland’s history might have been less troubled had Stormont’s first Education Minister been able to realise his vision of an integrated education system. Under enormous pressure from Catholic and Protestant clerics, Lord Londonderry’s 1923 Education Act was amended beyond recognition. The Minister retired from politics here in disillusionment and an early opportunity to draw some of the sectarianism from society was lost. Eamon McCann revisits those events in his Belfast Telegraph column and laments the lack of any current impetus towards integrated schooling in Northern Ireland. Whilst current Education Minister, Caitriona Ruane, deplores separating children using academic criteria, she is supportive of the religious division and indeed she actively encourages further partition of pupils along community lines by championing separate Irish language schools. In truth the situation in education is merely one of the baleful consequenc...

When Lord Londonderry attempted to introduce integrated education to a nascent Northern Ireland state in the 1920s, he faced opposition from both Catholic and Protestant churchmen, as well as politicians drawn from the two main communities here. In 1998 the Belfast Agreement contained provisions by which the parties undertook to encourage integrated housing and education. As regards integrated housing, any progress which the NIHE attempts to make is often accompanied by opposition from both Sinn Féin and the DUP. Witness, for example , the controversies about mixed housing provision on the Crumlin Road gaol site, or in Enniskillen. Although integrated education occasionally is accorded lip service by both sides, neither is prepared to seriously promote its expansion, certainly at the expense of the existing segregated system. The Catholic Church remains one of the prime proponents of segregated schools and education minister Caitriona Ruane has concentrated her efforts on further ...

As Catriona Ruane continues to fulminate at both fellow Assembly members and the press for suggesting that she should do her job properly, it is heartening to see at least one of her ministerial colleagues tackling her brief by setting out concrete proposals and formulating a lucid set of policies. Margaret Ritchie has outlined her plans to tackle housing problems in Northern Ireland and provide affordable housing based on need. She has consulted widely and in bullet points the following is her plan to tackle problems in this area. • Build more homes- at least 5,250 in the next three years • Make the existing co-ownership scheme more attractive for first time buyers • Introduce a not-for-profit Mortgage Rescue Scheme • Allow existing social housing tenants the chance to buy a stake in their homes • Re-use houses through an Empty Homes Strategy • Requiring future developments to include a proportion of homes for social and affordable housing • Increase the energy efficiency o...

Woe betide the man who puts his head over the parapet in Northern Ireland and argues for integration and neutral spaces. The Alliance Party are subjected to vicious attacks from Brian Feeney and today Newton Emerson has been fielding a broadside on Slugger O’Toole for having the temerity to suggest that a neutral ethos needs to be preserved if the Assembly begins to require social housing provision as part of new developments under the 1991 Planning Order . With the carve-up between the TNA in operation, flaunting your symbols is in, separate but equal apartheid is in and the idea that we should look toward a shared future is certainly out. Emerton highlights the lack of will to instigate mixed social housing. He points in particular to the Crumlin Road plan, where a wrangle over the development being allocated to one community, may yet see no social housing at all on the site. A genuinely mixed development in Fermanagh was attacked by Sinn Fein’s Michelle Gildernew because it d...