Emergency debate: Campaigners for integrated education of Catholic and Protestant schoolchildren should bypass the Northern Ireland Office and go directly to British prime minister Tony Blair, delegates at the Alliance Party annual conference were told in an emergency debate at the weekend.
The conference voted unanimously to condemn a decision, announced last week by Northern education minister Angela Smith, to refuse state funding for three new integrated schools and an existing independent primary on the grounds that there was surplus classroom capacity in their locality.
Proposing the emergency motion, Cllr Michael Long, of Castlereagh Borough Council, said that the NIO decision, taken at the same time as £380 million in extra funding was granted to segregated schools, was "nothing more than a sop to the Democratic Unionist Party".
The education minister had "lost the plot" and the matter should now be taken to the prime minister.
Seconding, North Down councillor Ian Parsley said he was a "nice, middle-class person" but on this issue he was determined to "rock the boat". Alliance was supposed to be the party of tolerance but it would "not tolerate the utter destruction of parents' rights to an integrated education".
"People from outside Northern Ireland simply cannot believe that we are still living in such a segregated society and that that society begins at school level.
"How can we claim to be serious about a shared future when we are not even serious about a shared present?"
Party spokeswoman on education Cllr Naomi Long said: "Angela Smith should be ashamed of herself."
Claiming that the minister had done less than her former Sinn Féin counterpart, Martin McGuinness, to further integrated education, Ms Long said the issue should be brought to the corridors of power in Downing Street as well as in Washington on St Patrick's Day.
Party vice-president Colm Cavanagh said he was "enraged" by the decision and added: "Shame on you, Angela Smith! Shame on you, Peter Hain! Do you still not understand what integrated education is all about?
"Do you say to Protestant children: 'There are empty desks in Catholic schools, go there?' Do you say to Catholic children: 'There are empty desks in Protestant schools, go there'? No, you do not. But you still think it is acceptable to tell children who want an integrated education to go to segregated schools."
Ms Deborah Girvan, of the Northern Ireland Council for Integrated Education, said she was "utterly stunned" by the decision, adding: "There is no surplus capacity in the integrated sector." Demand for integrated education had never been higher and she was "bitterly disappointed" for the parents who had worked so hard to establish the new schools.
Addressing the delegates earlier, guest speaker Marian Harkin TD, MEP said that since the French and Dutch referendums there had been a "big panic" in the European Union about the need for better communication with its citizens. "We are the politicians, we have to find a way," she said.
In the economic debate, former Belfast lord mayor Cllr David Alderdice said that the public sector in the North was bigger than in communist Hungary but the real problem was the small size of the private sector. "What we need to resolve this is vision and strategy," he said.
