Segregation in Northern Ireland: Difference between revisions
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Revision as of 19:34, 22 July 2007
Template:Allegations of apartheid
Allegations of Northern Irish apartheid draw analogies between Northern Ireland and apartheid-era South Africa. The term "apartheid" has been used to refer to the partition of Northern Irish society into two communities which tend to reduce interaction with each other.
Education
Kenneth Baker, Baron Baker of Dorking stated,
"In Northern Ireland, apartheid starts in schools; 90 per cent of children in Northern Ireland still go to separate faith schools"[1]
Nick Cohen writes in "Stop this Drift into Educational Apartheid" in The Guardian:
"Limiting sectarian education was a noble aspiration of the Good Friday Agreement. Even Sinn Fein politicians said they supported it. Politicians appeared to recognise that the integrated schools movement has provided one of the few solid grounds for optimism. Run by parents who were determined not to start segregating toddlers, it was creating schools that were not merely non-sectarian, but anti-sectarian.
For all the praise given to them, just 5 per cent of Northern Ireland's pupils attend integrated schools today. As Philip O'Sullivan of the Northern Ireland Council for Integrated Education put it, the overwhelming majority of Ulster's children can go from four to 18 without having a serious conversation with a member of a rival creed. They mingle only when they reach the workplace because, oddly, the religious discrimination on which the education system rests is illegal at work.[2]
Peace lines
In an article titled "Apartheid" published in the New Statesman John O'Farrell refers also to :
"those peace lines - usually high walls snaking along the demographic faults, crossing roads and slicing streets in two - are proliferating: there are twice as many today as there were a decade ago."[3]
Housing
In 2002, the Chief Executive the Community Relations Council referred to the seperated communities of Northern Ireland as "self-imposed apartheid."[4] Two years later, Mary O'Hara of The Guardian explored this theme in depth in an article entitled "Self-imposed Apartheid." She wrote:
"The Northern Ireland Housing Executive, the body responsible for public housing, is taking radical steps to tackle the deep-rooted religious segregation of working-class communities. It proposes to build two housing estates that it hopes will be populated by both Catholics and Protestants. It's a laudable attempt to combat what has in the past been seen by the authorities as an insurmountable problem. Sadly, it is almost certainly doomed to fail."[4]
Violence
Cédric Gouverneur, in his article "Northern Ireland’s apartheid" for Le Monde Diplomatique, refers to a report commissionned by the Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister, "No longer a problem ? Sectarian violence in NI"[5], asserts that more than 1400 people have to move every year, as a consequence of intimidation, thus building a sort of apartheid in the sense of "separate development" of communities. [6]
See also
References
- ^ Lord Baker of Dorking, Daily Hansard, 18 July 2006 : Column 1189 www.parliament.uk, retrieved 22 July 2007
- ^ "Stop this Drift into Educational Apartheid", by Nick Cohen. Published in The Guardian on Sunday May 13, 2007. Accessed on July 22nd, 2007.
- ^ New Statesman, 28 November 2005, newstatesman.com retrieved 22 July 2007
- ^ a b "Self-imposed Apartheid", by Mary O'Hara, published in The Guardian on Wednesday April 14, 2004. Accessed on Sunday, July 22nd, 2007.
- ^ Neil Jarman, Institute for Conflict Research, march 2005 http://www.serve.com/pfc/misc/violence.pdf
- ^ Chaque année, mille quatre cents personnes doivent déménager à la suite d’intimidations pouvant aller jusqu’au meurtre (3). Ce sectarisme façonne une forme d’apartheid, au sens de « développement séparé » des communautés. www.monde-diplomatique.fr retrieved 22 July 2007, article translated as : "Northern Ireland’s apartheid"