Morning View: Northern Ireland education also offers equal opportunities

An Irish economist, who estimated the significant likely cost of an all Ireland, has now identified education as a problem if the island was to become one.

Professor John FitzGerald, who last month co-authored a report which estimated that the reunification of Ireland would cost around 20 billion euro a year, told Dublin’s Joint Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement yesterday that in the Republic “the ethos is one of equality of opportunity, whether you're from a poor agriculture background or a working-class background”. He then said that forcing the Irish system on Northern Ireland will be “unpopular with middle class nationalists as well as unionists”.

The alternative, he said, was to leave “an ethos that doesn't believe in equality of opportunity, and doesn't look after kids from disadvantaged backgrounds in Northern Ireland”.

The first problem with this argument is that it assumes the NI system of academic selection is worse than a non selective system. Yet in England abolishing grammar schools destroyed equality of opportunity, with bright working class children no longer able to reach the heights of society. Education became more unequal and dominated by public schools, unlike NI.

If the Republic is so successful in spreading opportunity then it is notable that it still has significant disadvantage, including an underclass as large as in Britain.

The second problem with Prof Fitzgerald’s remarks is that it seems to overlook a real division in NI schooling, not caused by grammars but by the religious divide. The key factor in that divide is Catholic schools, which have no Protestant counterpart.

NI segregated schooling has been criticised by President Higgins, yet fashionable concepts such as shared education seek to maintain a Catholic/non-Catholic system.