Caitriona Ruane has no easy task in reforming secondary education in the North, but she must not make it harder still
NORTHERN CONSERVATISM is a curious quality. It Tippexes cultural faultlines, cocks a scornful snook at denominational labels. And as youthful radicals in many nations discover when they produce children and start comparing schools, education is the biggest conservative umbrella of all.
So life is not pleasant for the Sinn Féin woman under pressure in Stormont, from the mainly Protestant grammar school lobby, and from indignant parents on the phonelines or in the audience in countless chat shows. To be the second republican Education Minister was never going to be easy: Caitriona Ruane sometimes looks as though she is determined to make it as hard as possible.
The most friendly conclusion has to be that she is withholding details about replacement of the Eleven Plus exam for primary school-leavers, entry to second-level schools and a raft of other changes because she fears a crescendo of negativity – and perhaps because she fears destructive leaking from her own civil servants.
It still makes little sense to be shouting back across the Stormont chamber at the DUP’s Sammy Wilson and others. Wilson long ago began revelling in his image as a DUP shin-kicker: Ruane’s brief is provocative enough without oratorical flights. It hardly upped the chances of compromise for her to holler: “You can wriggle on a hook, you can bay at the moon and howl at the wind, but change has to come and it is coming.”
Her cooler public remark that the Republic had abandoned selective education 60 years ago won no unionist hearts either. The Co Mayo accent jars. Knowledge that she lives south of the Border but has children who head north to school, one to a Newry grammar, is grist to the indignant.
She has a thankless task, and more sympathy than is audible. Teachers’ unions and a fair chunk of the education world are glad to see the end of the Eleven Plus. Many know that Northern education badly needs reform, that “splendid” A-level results at one end of the scales are weighed down by a high proportion of school-leavers with no qualifications.
But republicans who come to office have to try harder. The dark overhang of the past means they must work out from under a shadow. The same can be said of the DUP, of course. Peter Robinson as an open-hearted, empathetic first minister would be a wonderful sight.
Many, not all of them unionist, hold their tongues for the sake of the future but think hard thoughts first when they look at a Sinn Féiner in a suit. Only the republican faithful have no unfavourable preconceptions to shuck off.
There is no point in republicans sniffing that their bona fides cannot be questioned. Martin McGuinness may be off in the summer to bring peace to Iraq but he cannot obliterate memory at home, however the republican revisionism machine re-processes history. Gerry Adams might be able to convince himself that he was interned as a civil rights activist – only a step on, after all, from consigning his IRA leadership to a memory hole. But there are too many civil rights activists of the time still in possession of fine recall and all their marbles to swallow the portrait of Gerry the pacifist marcher. And McGuinness might have useful things to say in Basra, though he must surely feel a little embarrassed at the complexity and scale of the Iraqi violence.
Up close to the operation of the North’s new politics, reality puts a damper on the hopes of a year ago. Pressure on the Sinn Féin Education Minister is not a pleasant sight.
The DUP and Ulster Unionists competing to impugn her talents is a fairly shameless business. Underlying a resurgent competition for the unionist vote with post-Paisley-DUP jitters at the prospect, is the same visceral reaction as when former IRA leader McGuinness supposedly “seized” education in the first powersharing set-up. Unionists could have blocked McGuinness in the post, of course, and likewise denied it to Ruane by taking the responsibility for education themselves. The suspicion is they ducked the difficulties, while happy to damn Sinn Féin.
Reorganisation of school provision began well before those pictures of a beaming McGuinness shaking hands with civil servants and revelling in the vast plush chair at his ministerial desk. Northern education reform has been driven as much by falling birthrates and surplus classroom places as by ideology. The SF leadership presumably decided education’s high profile merited going for the office, and the challenges that came with it. It was never going to be easy.
The Catholic sector began tackling the problems more than a decade ago, determined to stay in control, whereas unionist politicians have refused to confront the necessary pain of school mergers and closures. Instead they circle the wagons to defend grammar schools, and selection. Ruane needs a cooler head, and all the help she can get.