Irish Times

As if the problems in Northern Ireland were caused by the existence of “segregated” schooling. The significantly higher standards of education there, where neither comprehensivisation nor secularisation had ever happened, have already been subverted by the abolition of the grammar schools. And now, this.

The only way to maintain the Catholic school system in Northern Ireland is to keep Northern Ireland within the Union. For each of this Kingdom’s parts contains a Catholic intelligentsia, whereas the Irish Republic’s is the most tribally anti-Catholic in the world. The Republic’s Catholic schools, among much else, are doomed.

As would be Northern Ireland’s, if Sinn Féin had its way. Under the pretext that they teach through the medium of Irish, wholly and militantly secular Sinn Féin schools have been set up at public expense, in direct opposition to the Catholic system, by that party’s Education Minister. Her exclusion of Anglican, Presbyterian and Methodist clergy from their historic role in the government of schools is the dry run for her party’s openly desired exclusion of the Catholic Church from schools throughout Ireland.

Greatly assisted, it must be said, by the terrifying rise of Official Sinn Féin in the 26 Counties. It changed its name to the Workers’ Party, which changed its name to Democratic Left, which staged an organisational and ideological takeover of the Irish Labour Party, which has just captured the Presidency (even if not, to be fair, in the person of an old Stickie) while having its Leader as Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister.

That Leader was in Democratic Left until the moment when it merged into and effectively subsumed the Labour Party. He was in the Workers’ Party until the moment when it changed its name to Democratic Left. And he was in Official Sinn Féin until the moment when it changed its name to the Workers’ Party. He never left Official Sinn Féin, nor did it ever leave him. There was no confirmed decommissioning of Official IRA arms until 8th February 2010, within the last 24 hours of the existence of the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning.

To return to the latest utterance from Peter Robinson, the Orange Order’s ban on Free Presbyterian ministers as Chaplains may have been lifted, or it may now be widely ignored (like, lest Paisleyites gloat, the ban on alcohol in Orange Halls, and the ban of attendance at Catholic weddings and funerals because the Mass is celebrated), but it certainly used to be in place and in effect, well into the recent past. What are the Church of Ireland, the Presbyterian Church in Ireland and the Methodist Church in Ireland to the DUP? As little as mainstream Irish Catholic culture is to Sinn Féin, so is mainstream Ulster Protestant culture to the DUP.

Yet Northern Ireland has been carved up between it and the anticlerical fanatics of Sinn Féin.