The 2018 All Children Together Dunleath Lecture: by Colm Cavanagh at Riddell Hall, The Queen’s University of Belfast. 7 March 2018: (7,420 words). ​ “THY PEOPLE SHALL BE MY PEOPLE: (Ruth 1.16): Integrated Education in the 21st Century”. I am honoured to speak today and to hold up again the name and memory of Lord Dunleath in this 2018 Dunleath Lecture. The Dunleath Lectures began in 1997 when Brian Lambkin gave the inaugural lecture. I remember that a strong focus of his lecture was the fact that in Northern Ireland we were not addressing two religions, but two understandings of one religion. This issue was highlighted again a few weeks ago in the television series “Derry Girls”. It was pointed out to the young Catholic girl Clare that Protestants and Catholics were not two different religions - but simply two different Christian denominations. Clare paused to take this in, and when we next saw her, she was wearing a union jack dress for reasons I can’t remember - but which immediately appealed to the sole young loyalist youth who clung to her with the words “We’re outnumbered …” Flags/faith. It’s hard to prise them apart in Northern Ireland. So: Why Integrated Schools? What I am going to do in this Lecture is look at that question? -Why Integrated Schools? -Then look at the religious and political context that has brought us to where we are in 2018. -Then look at the differing roles of churches and governments. -And finally look at Northern Ireland’s way forward - including the process of change - to see how to make one community: Thy People-My People.. --- 1 Even as I tell overseas visitors that we are not fighting here about religion, I am reminded that when the Boundary Commission drew up its reports in the 1920s, they labelled their working maps not as “unionist” and “nationalist”; not as “British” and “Irish”. “But as “Protestant” and “Roman Catholic”. Indeed one Commission map describes areas as [1] “Catholic” or “Non-Catholic”. ​ (“And they say” commented a clergyman recently on seeing ​ ​ ​ that map, “that our Troubles have nothing to do with religion!”) ​ ​ Now obviously very few people here have been fighting a religious war, a theological war. ​ ​ ​ ​ The word “Transubstantiation” was never attached to a bomb. “Ne Temere Decree” was never graffitied on a wall. Nor was “Salvation by Grace Alone” ever written on a bullet. But the IRA at Kingsmills DID ask Catholics to stand out of the way before they killed the ​ ​ Protestants. People WERE sometimes asked to recite the Lord’s Prayer to see whether ​ ​ they used the “wrong” defining word “who” or “which” - and thus deserved to be beaten, or worse. The Pope does still appear in graffiti. Ian Paisley’s first political party with two MPs in Stormont, both Free Presbyterian ministers, was the Protestant Unionist Party, forerunner ​ ​ of the Democratic Unionist party. And in North Belfast young Catholic primary school girls told of being verbally abused or stoned when in their school uniforms they would go through a Protestant neighbourhood. We can all provide similar examples of religious labels for issues of identity or politics. So when, 20 years ago, in 1998, I had the honour of giving the second Dunleath Lecture, I gave it the title: “Thy People Shall Be My People: The community impact of integrated schools”. Whatever the future holds, a united community would be better than a divided community - or, even worse, better than having TWO communities. When I recently ​ ​ re-read that lecture, it was so full of hope, the Belfast-Good Friday Agreement, had been signed by almost all our political parties and supported by enormous votes in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. What has happened that hope in the intervening years? --- Listen again to those beautiful, words from the Book of Ruth: “She answered: Be not against me, to desire that I should leave thee and depart: for whithersoever thou shalt go, I will go: and where thou shalt dwell, I also will dwell. Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. The land that shall receive thee dying, in the same will I die: and there will I be buried. The Lord do so and so to me, and add more also, if aught but death part me and thee”. [2] ​ ​ 2 Biblical commentators draw many and different lessons from the Book of Ruth. But the plain explanation is of a total yielding of oneself to another. But Ruth’s story is a spiritual story - whereas politicians usually focus on more mundane matters. “Jesus”, as a UDA man once remarked to me, “made a good prophet. But he would have ​ ​ made a bloody awful prime minister”. Ruth was on a spiritual journey. Politicians are ​ usually not. And that throws up the Church-State differences that I will address tonight. The public policy case for a single system of publicly-funded schools in this island began on 31 October 1831. That’s 187 years ago this autumn - it’s a long time for Government policy to be attempted and remain unfulfilled. Why was that Whig Government in 1831 so determined to have all Irish children attend a single system of schools? Well, in 1831, Ireland was a pretty divided society and Chief Secretary Edward Stanley saw it as the Government’s job to help unite the whole community. Brian Inglis writes that "In 1828 a Select Committee of the House of Commons, appointed to see what could be done, advised that the remedy would lie in schools where the pupils could be segregated according to their beliefs, for purposes of religious instruction. But the assumption was that some basic Christian instruction - bible readings - could be given to all comers. The exact nature of this instruction aroused heated controversy when the Whig Government brought in an Irish Education Bill in 1831 at the height of the repeal agitation; ...“ [3] ​ ​ Inglis then quotes an interesting observation of how the whole scene looked to an Englishman, Charles Greville, clerk to the Privy Council, who wrote: 'while the whole system is crumbling to dust under their feet, while the church is prostrate, property of all kinds threatened, and robbery, murder, starvation and agitation rioting over the land, these wise legislators are debating whether the brats at school shall read the whole bible, or only parts of it". [4] ​ (Since Greville had attended Oxford University before 1828, one assumes that this was a Church of England perspective). And for the record, the reported serious crimes in Ireland in 1831 were: 3 Murders: 201 Robberies: 1,478 Burning houses: 466 Attacks on houses: 2,296 Burglaries: 531. Robbery of Arms: 678. This rate of serious crime was almost as much as the total for England and Wales - whose population was almost twice that of Ireland. So Ireland was not a quiet society. The 1831 Education Bill established a system from which - in the opinion of Chief Secretary Stanley - 'should be banned even the suspicion of proselytism'. ​ ​ Let’s look at Historical Background of our Government-Church Nexus: There are numerous examples down the centuries of those community divisions. And let me be clear that I am not claiming any higher or lower moral ground for Britain or Ireland. England acted as big countries do. Ireland would have done it to England if it could have. St Patrick did not first arrive in Ireland as a tourist, but as a captured slave! Prof James Lydon wrote regarding the aftermath of the 1315-1318 Scots invasion of Ireland: "The two communities were left to confront one another, two distinct cultures which were naturally antagonistic to each other….. they remained locked in hostility to the end and folk memory, epitomised by the use of such epithets as 'Old English' and 'Old Irish' by later generations, kept alive the feeling of difference. In some respects it has lasted down to the present day". [5] ​ April 1324: "We order that theology teachers of Irish nationality at present living in these houses be allocated to houses of Englishmen. …” [This was part of a decree of William of Rudyard, Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, Papal Judge-Delegate appointed by Pope John XXII to investigate King Edward II's charges against Franciscan friars of the Irish nation. 4 May 1324: " .. for the greater peace and tranquillity of this country we will and command that some English friars should be members of communities in all places of pure Irishmen, just as conversely Irish friars should be distributed among the English". [Dean William of Rudyard again]. In 1325, John Clyn, the Kilkenny Franciscan annalist, recorded that there was trouble throughout almost the whole Franciscan community in Ireland, 'each one taking the side of his own nation and blood'". 1366: The notorious Statutes of Kilkenny forbade English people in Ireland from marrying an Irish person; speaking Irish; using an Irish name; letting an Irish clergyman enter an English religious house; appointing an Irish cleric to any church in the English settlement; etc, etc. It’s widely assumed that English power was actually too weak to implement these rules. But they showed how King Edward III wanted to keep his English community in Ireland distinct and separate. John Watt, University of Hull, wrote in 1972:- "By the end of the middle ages, the natural process of inter-marriage between the two peoples had, despite all legislation to the contrary, brought about a considerable degree of assimilation of the two cultures on all social levels. Nevertheless, in that period, as in all periods since the Invasion, bitterness between native and colonist was always a poison to envenom the sores of the ecclesiastical body politic.