Religion, education and conflict in Northern Ireland

Abstract

The aim of this article is to re‐evaluate and reaffirm the contribution of the churches and of Christianity to the realization in Northern Ireland schools of legitimate and progressive educational values such as the cultivation of tolerance, moral integrity and civic virtue. Implicit in this is a critique of educational initiatives that seek to undermine the influence of Christianity in schools. There is also discussion of the reasons why the increasing secularization of education in Northern Ireland should be resisted. The paper begins with a brief historical overview of the ongoing tension between religious and secular influences in education and notes the ways in which developments in education have tended to marginalize religion and to denude public education of Christian religious content and influence. Critical attention is then given to the role of religion in the Northern Ireland conflict, for it is the conviction that the conflict is religious that provides much of the stimulus for efforts to secularize education and schools. This is followed by some brief comments on the positive role that religion can play in religious education and in schools. The article concludes with a brief review of the reasons why a proper balance between secular and religious influences in schools in Northern Ireland should be maintained.

Notes

1. The use of the past and present tenses here in a disjunctive sense indicates that debate attaches to the issue of whether the Conflict is over or not. It is, however, a debate on which I will have little to say and for stylistic reasons only I will speak of the conflict as over.

2. John Whyte (1990) records that the most popular academic interpretation is one that sees two communities with distinctive identities locked in a contest for supremacy within a confined territory.

3. Full state financial support for Catholic schools has given rise to accusations of injustice by Protestant churchmen (General Assembly, 1995, p. 75; also Rodgers & McKelvey, 1995, p. 48).

4. For the most part the material presented in this section summarises Barnes (2005).