Sir, – Before the partition of Ireland, Michael Davitt, the Home Rule and Land League activist, hoped for reconciliation and healing to ease the religious divisions across the island of Ireland. Before his untimely death in 1906, he campaigned unsuccessfully for children of different religions being educated together in state-regulated schools, with religious instruction provided separately. Frank McNally writes about Fr Clarence Duffy, a Cavan priest in the 1970s who believed many of Ireland’s problems, including the then Northern Troubles, were the result of “sectarian schools” (An Irishman’s Diary, February 9th). Fr Duffy also “favoured a general separation of church and state, with a new constitution for the country on which Northern Protestants would be consulted”.
Decades later, their vision for an integrated system of education still lies ahead for 90 per cent of Northern Ireland’s young people. They attend an education system that causes a limited mixing of children from the Protestant and Catholic communities, maintaining the deep-rooted divide between unionists and nationalist positions. Judging by current progress, it may take another one hundred years for a fully integrated system of education to develop in Northern Ireland, and with it any far-fetched dreams of a united Ireland. – Yours, etc,
KEVIN McLOUGHLIN,
Ballina,
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Co Mayo.