Schools of Reconciliation: Issues in Joint Roman Catholic-Anglican Education (Cassell, 1994)
by Priscilla Chadwick
He went on to quote from his speech in Parliament as recorded in Hansard (30 April 1974):
We would consider the possibility of changing the law to facilitate another class of school ... in which the two groups of Churches would be equally involved in management. Obviously the details ... will have to be worked out in consultation with the interested parties before political proposals for legislation can be formulated.
In his autobiography Memoirs of a Statement (1978, p.242), the late Brian Faulkner recalled McIvor's proposals being brought to the power-sharing Executive. Initially the members from the Catholic Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) had reservations about some details of the scheme but they supported the principle and, in the second meeting of the Executive to debate the matter, gave McIvor's scheme full support.
Once the decision had been taken, no one wavered from collective responsibility even when the Cardinal and the Catholic bishops launched a strong attack on the whole idea after publication. But the hopes of dealing with this important problem, like many other hops for Ulster, died with the Executive.
Nevertheless the 1974 decision showed that a Northern Ireland government, in which both Catholics and Protestants participated, could act to allow for shared schools. The plan cohered with power-sharing.
Under the pressure of the Protestant workers' strike in May 1974, designed as a challenge to constitutional authority, and with the effective failure of London to help the Executive, the Stormont government resigned.4 Direct rule from Westminster was imposed. The minister responsible for education in Northern Ireland declared that because of a lack of `substantial agreement in favour of the idea', the government was not continuing with the plan for integrated education. Bishop Philbin wrote in his 1975 Lenten pastoral: `short of banning religion altogether, there is no greater injury that could be done to Catholicism than by interference with the character and identity of our schools'.
Yet by 1977 a `cautious policy of charitable neutrality' established the principle that the reorganization of secondary schooling `should not create nor perpetuate barriers against integrated schooling' (cf. the Dunleath Act of 25 May 1978).5 A working party of representatives from Protestant and Churches had even advocated integrated six-form colleges and nursery schools, ecumenical RE, exchange of teachers and `agreement that the churches should promote pilot schemes and research projects to find effective ways of bringing together Protestant and Catholic young people at school level.6 It is noteworthy that at several stages the proposal for some integration attracted interest as long as there was no interference with the segregated schooling of 5-16 year-olds.
The fact that by 1980 none of these ideas had been taken up suggested that `everybody's business had become nobody's business'. Even the 1980 Chilver Report interim recommendation to amalgamate the Protestant and Catholic teacher training colleges fell on deaf ears (only the two single-sex Catholic colleges merged in 1985). As Gallagher and Worrall observed in 1982, in spite of discussing the issue of integration the Churches seemed 'uncovered at a deeper level than that of a passing thought'. These authors were drawn to the conclusion that 'irrespective of the ideology, both in the short and foreseeable longer terms, integrated schooling in Northern Ireland is "not on" (p. 171).
2 National opinion polls for the Belfast Telegraph (1967, 1968) and Fortnight magazine (1972) showed a majority in favour.
3O'Neill (19772), p.79. His remarks were criticized by the Cardinal but supported, surprisingly, by a Nationalist MP.
4Basil McIvor later revealed that, as the violence increased, Protestants involved in the strikes admitted to him privately that they would probably have given in if her had `held on for another two weeks'. It was probably one of the British government's worst decisions.
5The government's 1977 proposal for comprehensive reorganization was blocked by grammar school interests.
6The Report of the Joint Churches Working Party (set up by the Catholic hierarchy and the Irish Council of Churches), Violence in Ireland (1976, p. 86)
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