The Struggle for Shared Schools in Northern Ireland: The History of All Children Together (review)

When the violence that was to last for thirty years erupted in Northern Ireland in 1968, the leaders of the Catholic Church and the Protestant churches were at pains to explain to the world that it was not about religion and the scandalous division of Christians. Perhaps the most prophetic sign that they could have given that this was the case would have been to join together in starting an experimental “shared school.” It would have been an experiment because school segregation was almost total—all but a handful of Catholic pupils attended Catholic schools and virtually no Protestant pupils attended Catholic schools. To have been able to present to the world a desegregated school, shared by the Catholic and Protestant churches, would have been an ecumenical project of the first order, demonstrating most effectively that whatever the violence was about it was not about differences between Christians. Sadly, as the vivid cartoon on the cover of Jonathan Bardon’s The Struggle for Shared Schools in Northern Ireland makes clear, most clerical leaders chose the other side of the struggle.

All Children Together (ACT) was established to campaign for an alternative to Roman Catholic or state (i.e., Protestant) schools. Driven from the outset, as Mary Robinson, former president of the Republic of Ireland, states in the preface, by “a group of ordinary women, not previously prominent in public life” (p. viii), ACT is to be commended for commissioning this history of the organization. Tracing its origins in 1973 through to its winding-up in 2003, Bardon’s book complements Fionnuala O Connor’s A Shared Childhood: The Story of the Integrated Schools in Northern Ireland (Belfast, 2002). As one would expect from the author of A History of Ulster (Belfast, 1992), Bardon’s history of ACT is extremely well written. The two opening chapters—a summary of the three previous, failed attempts to establish nondenominational schools (Lord Edward Stanley’s National School system in 1831; Lord Londonderry’s Education [Northern Ireland] Act in 1923; Basil McIvor’s Shared-Schools Plan of 1974)—skillfully sets the context for the ACT story. The fourth chapter, “Direct-Rule Dilemmas,” is an object lesson in how to make best use of confidential government files recently released under the “thirty-year rule”; it is fascinating, for example, to discover how Northern Ireland direct-rule ministers and civil servants referred unenthusiastically to Cardinal William Conway, Bishop William Philbin, and Bishop Edward Daly as “The Armagh Three.” There are a number of very helpful appendices, including a chronology of the conflict against which are set significant developments in the progress toward shared schools. The decision to include an epilogue by Donald Harman Akenson, who has written so influentially about the history of Irish education, was inspired, helping to chart the terrain ahead in the continuing struggle for shared schools.

Notwithstanding Bardon’s considerable strengths, there remains a major problem: his failure to consult Tony Spencer, one of the leading Catholic sociologists of his generation and the key ideologue and activist of the movement. At the dramatic heart of the story is Spencer’s split in 1984 from his closest colleagues in ACT. Bardon fails to offer a more than one-sided account. Thus the book falls short of being a definitive history. It is to be hoped that the veteran Spencer will find his historian before it is too late to speak to him in person. Certainly, future researchers interested in understanding how the struggle for shared schools in Northern Ireland started should not ignore his archive, which is now in the process of being deposited in the Centre for Catholic Studies at Durham University.