Sir, - Many people, North and South, will agree wholeheartedly with Garret FitzGerald when he says that integrated education is essential for good community relations and a long-term solution to the Troubles (Opinion, July 25th). It is a fact that surveys of pupils' parents here have repeatedly shown that the overwhelming majority want their children educated in mixed schools (see the work of Irwin, Hadden and Boal of Queen's University, Belfast). There is popular support for reform.
But what about the practicalities? I suggest that there is no need to bus pupils or force pupils into other schools. Instead of mixing the pupils, integration can be achieved by mixing the staffs. That way the schools gradually lose their sectarian identities and so the pupils eventually integrate as a natural consequence.
The legislation is already in place and needs only a minor amendment. The Fair Employment Commission is a regulatory body in Northern Ireland which has been given the job of redressing any sectarian imbalance in the workplace. Theirs is a gradualist approach, encouraging employers to keep working at this problem and wearing it down over time.
But there is an arbitrary limit to the remit of the FEC. It can operate within tertiary education, but has been debarred from primary and secondary education. Yet those schools employ a lot of staff and there is no logical reason why the sectarian imbalance among such employees should not be subject to FEC rules. Obviously the churches think that they own the schools and, because FEC rules cannot apply to churches, therefore the rules cannot apply to "their" schools. But the whole point of the FEC is that ownership does not confer the privilege of disregarding imbalance; otherwise, the FEC would be pointless. The needs of society take priority over the rights of the proprietor.
Furthermore, the schools are funded out of the public purse, and so the "ownership" that the churches can claim is a matter of historical title, rather than financial power. It could be argued that publicly funded bodies have a greater duty to implement FEC goals than any other kind of business. Seen from that point of view, the existence of publicly funded sectarian institutions, i.e. denominational schools, contradicts the purpose for which the FEC was created. So the remit of the FEC should be extended to include primary and secondary education, thereby ending the sectarian imbalance in the staff of those schools. Once the staffs are mixed and the schools lose their sectarian labels, then eventually the pupil populations will become mixed too.
Segregation is deeply embedded in this society. But other countries have faced up to similar problems and have reformed their schools successfully. It can be done. Has the Northern Ireland Assembly got the courage and the vision to do what the churches and the British Government have failed to do? - Yours, etc, Les Reid,
School Lane, Greenisland, Co Antrim.