Minding Their Grammar In Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland's Education Minister, who believes the Provisional Army Council of the IRA to be the sovereign body throughout Ireland, is continuing the work of the Peter Hain, who introduced comprehensive schools there in order to punish what he saw as the recalcitrant political parties.

So several excellent grammar schools, with considerable endowments long pre-dating their incorporation into the state sector, are in open revolt, and will be admitting by means of the 11-plus anyway.

They can afford to go private, and, if pushed, they will, just as so many of England's ancient town grammar schools did, so that any number of schools originally set up by the Town Fathers or whoever for the whole community in general and for the children of the poor in particular, and which were simply taken into municipal control in the course of local government's natural development naturally, are now private schools.

Not that it will matter, just as it would not have mattered in England. If they stay in the state sector, then the house prices in the catchment areas will go through the roof, just as is the case in the catchment areas (if any) of the most elite "comprehensives" in Great Britain, themselves socio-economically the most exclusive schools in the country.

There is always selection. If it is not by academic means, then it is by means of parental income and social clout.