Northern Ireland's Dance, Ctd

Mandan tribal dance - George Catlin (c. 1835)

I previously wrote about the Northern Ireland dance here. MCB alumnus now in Washington Niall Stanage wrote in the New York Times:

The abstentionism of the Catholics from 20th Century Northern Ireland life

Newton Emerson wrote:

"For the first five decades of Northern Ireland’s existence, nationalism’s approach to Stormont was instinctively abstentionist. 

Is that instinct returning? The turnout in this week’s assembly election may be little different to last time’s 54 per cent but it masks a typical 3 per cent rise in unionist constituencies with an offsetting fall in nationalist constituencies."

In this post I wanted to consider the original abstentionist instinct. John Hume wrote in his famous 1964 letter to the Irish Times:

Apartheid education in Northern Ireland

The patriots on each side matriculate hate. In Northern Ireland we inherit from our parents bigotry and hate, and to our children we bequeath bigotry. But the cause of division and mistrust goes beyond the familial and includes the educational apparatus with their curriculums of difference and confirmation bias.

Religious and political allegiance in Northern Ireland is singular. The two words are interchangeable. History isn't taught, it's inherited. We are bequeathed myths, biased and bigotries from a toxic matrix of parents, teachers and clergy. Edmund Burke wrote in 1792:

"[There were] thousands in Ireland who have never conversed with a Roman Catholic in their whole lives, unless they happened to talk to their gardener’s workmen… I remember a great, and in many respects a good, man, who advertised for a blacksmith, but at the same time added he must have a Protestant blacksmith."  

The "weirdness" and "freak show" of apartheid education in Northern Ireland

Cartoon by Ian Knox (@IanKnoxcartoon)

Ninety-three per cent of children in Northern Ireland attend segregated elementary schools. Causing what the New Yorker's Patrick Redden Keefe called, "sheer weirdness." Jude Whyte said:

"Politics has replaced the gun and the bomb yet in many ways I feel that we live in a more segregated society than ever. We live apart, educate our children apart... while sport (the source of such unity in the world) remains sectarian, poisoned and divisive."