Educate the kids together and they won't grow up to shoot each other

Sometimes the best ideas are the simple ones. Like non-denominational integrated schooling in the North.

In the quarter century since Lagan College first opened its doors, thousands of children have had the opportunity to be educated alongside those from the other community, eliminating the likelihood of those children becoming the latest generation of bigots.

In a climate where living arrangements have become dangerously polarised into a patchwork of single community ghettos, school and the workplace have become almost the only environments in which both communities can encounter each other in the province.

This morning, it has emerged that the Catholic Council for Maintained Schools, which oversees the running of Catholic schooling in the North, is set to shut at least 50 primary schools because of plummetting demographics and lack of interest from parents.

And about time too. The old Jesuitical saying 'Give me a boy for seven years and he'll be ours for life' was never more relevant than in relation to Catholic schooling in the North.

In addition to the standard curriculum, far too often children in CCMS schools were educated in non-official subjects, like bigotry, sectarianism, Republican politics and violence.

Of course, the priests and nuns weren't usually to the fore when it came to politics or endorsing violence and paramilitaries. They were probably too busy with their own unofficial curriculum of Catholic guilt and brutalisation.

They tended to leave the overt bigotry teaching to their lay teachers in my experience. One Irish teacher I had used to hold the metre stick out the window when British army helicopters flew overhead, mimicking firing a rocket propelled grenade at it, and telling us 'That's how you do it, boys.'

It came as no surprise to me when it emerged that he was a member of a paramilitary organisation and he later fled to Spain to avoid arrest.

I've no doubt plenty of people went to Catholic schools and had wonderful times with wonderful teachers. I wasn't one of those. But even for those who were, I'd pose the question, did it do you any good not to be educated alongside Protestants?

The CCMS, or Catholic Council for Maintaining Sectarianism as I prefer to expand it, has bitterly opposed integrated schooling, preferring to maintain their own fiefdom over the hearts and minds of impressionable youths.

It's time they were scrapped, and all schools in Northern Ireland made mandatorily integrated and non-denominational. If you want religion taught to your kids, let them go to a Sunday school, and let the CCMS turn their attentions in that direction.

And if you wish to see religious education taught in schools, let the local clerics handle it, like they would elsewhere.

When I switched schools to attend one which had students of at least five different religions attending, they had no problem accommodating everyone in terms of morning prayer and assemblies, or in terms of what version of the religious knowledge exam paper they had to study.

If we ever really hope to see the end of bigotry and sectarianism in Northern Ireland, the best place to start is with the kids. Let's give them a chance to get to know each other before their elders teach them to hate each other.

The best way to do that is to integrate all schools in the province under a non-denominational banner for at least a generation.

And that involves restricting the Catholic Council for Maintaining Sectarian schooling to Sunday, if not scrapping it altogether.

Bogey at St Andrews

I'm still attempting to digest the latest version of the only deal in town presented at St Andrews yesterday evening.

But even if the DUP and Sinn Fein sign up to it, my first impressions leave me with that sinking feeling that we're into yet another round of proposal-vote-assembly-brinksmanship-collapse with no real change of benefit to the people of Northern Ireland.

The text includes a number of bogies, not the least of which is this little gem:

"The great majority of national security agents will be run by the PSNI, under the strategic direction of the Service, mirroring the arrangements the Service has with the police in GB.
This makes sense in NI in particular because of the interface between serious crime and national security; the police also have the advantage of local knowledge.
The Security Service will continue to run directly a small number of agents who are authorised to obtain information in the interests of national security as distinct from countering criminality, where the circumstances make that appropriate."

So we'll still have MI5 and Special Branch running agents, shall we? Lovely. Sadly, the document makes no mention of whether they'll be running entire paramilitary outfits, authorising murders, infiltrating political parties or simply looking for Al-Qaeda in Magherafelt.

But hey, we'll get a freeze on the current stratospheric house rates and a victims' commissioner, so that's all right then.

No Blow Area

The PSNI made the biggest ever drugs bust in Northern Ireland yesterday when they cracked open a lorry in a Newtownards warehouse and found 3.5 tons of cannabis.

This news is likely to be greeted with dismay among the stoners of the island, which like Britain has been suffering a 'drought' for some months, ever since the UDA decided to cease its dealing operations.

In fact, one local paper recently splashed the headline 'No Blow Area' on their front page while reporting the shortage of cannabis locally and throughout the two islands.

Reports of the bust, in which two men in their thirties were arrested, reveal that the police feared that the dope would be distributed quickly throughout the whole island, and possibly to Britain too, such was its scale.

But what those reports do not indicate is why people want to smoke cannabis despite health risks and illegality, nor why this current drought has come about.

There are a number of interesting factors at play here. The first is Loyalist paramilitary involvement in drug dealing. The recent purging of the UDA's Shoukri brothers from North Belfast, curiously coincided with the onset of this drug drought.

Yet PC Plod from the PSNI refused to be drawn on whether paramilitaries were involved in this particular consignment at today's press conference, or on speculation that the drought itself was caused by the UDA moving out of the drugs business.

To get cannabis into an island like Ireland, you need to export it from somewhere (usually Spain or Holland) and have guys on the ground to distribute it when it arrives. Little comment has been passed on the demise of a series of Dublin criminals in Spain and Holland in recent months. It appears likely that their removal from the scene has drastically reduced the availability of drugs to the Irish market.

So at one stage, we had Dubs in the Costas shipping dope to Egyptian UDA men in the North. And now? Well, judging by Newtownards, someone still wants to import a lot of cannabis to the well established market in Ireland. But who?

Either the UDA, or another paramilitary grouping, have decided to cash in on the drought, or else we have a new paradigm for drug dealing in the North, where entrepreneurial gangsters move in on the trade with violent consequences, such as the Westies once were in Dublin before their untimely demise in Spain.

In which case, how long before other gangs of young, gun-toting psychos decide to fill the gap left behind by the paramilitaries in the North? Having put the Troubles in the past for now, is Northern Ireland set for a Dublin-style wave of gangland activity?

The final point is the most obvious of all. A lot of people clearly want to smoke cannabis and are even prepared to break the law to do so. Why? Because they do not respect that law.

There is already plenty of debate elsewhere about the prohibition of cannabis, its rights and wrongs, and of the pros and cons of cannabis from a health perspective. But it would seem to me that one way to eradicate the possibility of a Belfast gangland developing, never mind the financial benefit, is to legalise the cannabis market now.