A Derry Dropout’s New Faith

For many Protestants, Education Minister Martin McGuinness is the bitter pill they are forced to swallow for the sake of peace. He is a Roman Catholic school dropout and twice-jailed Irish Republican Army commander who sets a rotten example for children.

Many of Northern Ireland’s Catholics, on the other hand, regard McGuinness as the bellwether of change. He is the street warrior-turned-politician whose membership in a power-sharing government demonstrates that eight decades of Catholic exclusion in the province are finally coming to an end.

McGuinness understands that he is both things in a highly segregated land: persona non grata at most of the 600 overwhelmingly Protestant schools he oversees; welcomed with open arms by most of the 565 mainly Catholic schools also under his charge, such as Glenann primary in rural County Antrim, where he became the first education minister to set foot in the facility in its 100-year history.

“I only go to schools that have invited me to come,” McGuinness said. “It is fair to say that in the last year, the vast bulk of invitations do come from the Catholic sector.”

Once a symbol of the IRA’s three-decade armed struggle against British rule, McGuinness has become a centerpiece of the province’s struggle to make peace with itself. His participation in a Protestant-Catholic government--under the British flag and before the IRA has destroyed its weapons--is the clearest example of a people trying to overcome its sectarian hatreds.

It hasn’t been easy, and success is by no means certain. The Democratic Unionist Party, under the Rev. Ian Paisley, a Protestant leader, has vowed to undermine the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement from within. Republican extremists and unionist paramilitary groups want to break it out in the streets.

Even some supporters of the peace process are skeptical about McGuinness’ conversion to the democratic process--and by extension, the IRA’s. Some Protestants and Catholics who share a belief in cross-community cooperation have not forgiven the gunmen on either side for the 3,500 people killed in sectarian warfare. They resent the iron grip that paramilitary forces maintain on many working-class neighborhoods.

But the protests that greeted McGuinness’ appointment in November 1999 have quieted down. The longer he holds the job, the more doubters are willing to judge him on his performance in government rather than on his past in the trenches.

“I can’t fault McGuinness on anything he has said from an educational point of view,” said Desmond Hamilton, head teacher at the predominantly Protestant Strandtown Primary School in Belfast, the provincial capital. A pragmatist who needs 15 new classrooms to replace aging mobile units, Hamilton added that he would risk the wrath of parents to invite McGuinness: “If he wishes to come and announce new classrooms, he would be more than welcome.”

Ray Calvin, head of the largely Protestant Ulster Teachers Union, takes a more philosophical view.

“Peace comes at a price. Part of that price is dealing with people who would have been agin’ you before,” Calvin said. “There are things that I could say about Martin McGuinness. I prefer to wait and see how he does his job.”

McGuinness’ job is to manage a largely segregated school system that reflects a divided society in which everything from names and union affiliation to one’s pick of taxi company and pub serves as a clue to deciphering tribal membership: William is a Protestant name, Anthony a Catholic name; Protestants call McGuinness’ hometown Londonderry, Catholics call it Derry.

Absent the obvious cues, strangers might come out and ask each other “which foot do ya’ dig with.” Right means Catholic, left means Protestant. The wrong answer can mean the boot or a beating.

Segregation Lesson

McGuinness learned this lesson at the age of 15. The second of seven children from Derry’s working-class Bogside neighborhood, he left school and applied for a job at a Protestant-owned garage. The interview was going swimmingly until the owner asked McGuinness what school he had attended. When he mentioned the Christian Brothers Technical College, the interview came to an abrupt end.

The young McGuinness became a Catholic butcher’s apprentice instead. He joined the IRA in 1970, at the height of civil rights protests, soon rising to commander of the Derry Brigade and “very, very proud of it,” he told a court the first time he was sentenced to jail for his membership in the illegal organization.

About that time, the IRA embarked on a campaign of economic sabotage in Derry, blowing up the vast majority of the city’s 150 shops in an effort to oust the British from Northern Ireland and break the Protestant stranglehold on the province. It is widely believed that McGuinness went on to become the IRA’s chief of staff, although he has never admitted this.

For many, Derry has become synonymous with the 1972 “Bloody Sunday” tragedy, when British soldiers fatally shot 14 unarmed civilians at a demonstration. Catholics call this a calculated massacre, but many pro-British Protestants believe that the IRA fired first to provoke the soldiers.

A British government inquiry into the killings that is now underway reportedly has classified documents in which an informant said McGuinness had admitted firing the first shot from a nearby building. McGuinness dismisses the “unsubstantiated allegations” as the military’s attempt to absolve itself of responsibility and has said he will testify.

The education minister’s four-paragraph biography has him joining Sinn Fein political movement rather than the IRA militia in 1970 and breezes over the next 28 years, saying only that he was the party’s chief negotiator in the talks that led to the 1998 Good Friday agreement.

McGuinness, along with Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, played a vital role in forging a settlement, secretly traveling to London to meet with British officials as far back as 1972. While Adams has been viewed as the strategic thinker, McGuinness has been seen as the trusted link to the IRA, pulling the gunmen along with the political leaders. Together, they have persuaded the armed men and ordinary republicans to not abandon their goal of a united Ireland, but to pursue it by democratic means.

Under the Good Friday accord, which called for creation of a cross-community government for Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein won two seats in the 12-member Cabinet. When Adams named McGuinness as education minister, some hard-line unionists gasped and others walked out in protest. Sinn Fein’s Bairbre de Brun was named minister of health, social services and public safety.

Unlike De Brun, who has been known to speak Irish to some of her employees who don’t know the language, McGuinness has gone out of his way to win over the civil servants in his ministry, as well as teachers and principals.

“The reality is that the community I come from has been discriminated against for many years and the last thing we want to do . . . is turn around and treat other sections of our community in the way that we were treated,” McGuinness told civil servants. “This is about children, not about unionism, nationalism, ‘loyalism,’ republicanism.”

If he once lived by the slogan of “Brits Out,” it could be said that McGuinness’ mantra today is “slowly but surely.” He uses the phrase often, and it is part of his body language as he moves from school to school in a suit and tie, sharing cups of instant coffee with teachers and principals.

At 50, his famously cherubic face is finally beginning to age beneath graying curls that have been cut short. He speaks bluntly and can muster a steely gaze for fools and enemies, but he genuinely seems to enjoy his job. For the children, he has nothing but appreciative smiles.

Earlier this month, he visited the Camphill Training College for the disabled in Glencraig and the Glenann primary, where children were eager to meet the man they had seen on TV and to get his autograph in their homework books.

Glenann first-graders lined up to perform an Irish song and folk dance for McGuinness, who was eager to make the point that he was one of them. He was not a British ruler but a local Catholic who had made it to the top of government and so could they.

“I’m not from England. I’m not from Scotland or Wales. I’m from Derry,” McGuinness said proudly. “Do you know where Derry is?”

“In Londonderry!” a 5-year-old shouted.

McGuinness grabbed his heart in mock pain from the blow to his Irish nationalism but chuckled.

Slowly but surely.

Although a believer in integrated education, McGuinness is not about to bulldoze ahead with something that would be opposed not only by his Protestant critics but also by the Catholic Church, which controls the board overseeing Catholic schools. Some Sinn Fein promoters of Irish-language schools also would resist.

Integrated Schools

The 45 officially integrated schools, with 14,000 pupils or about 4% of the student population, were formed by parents seeking a cross-community environment. The government initially did not back them but now will fund such a school once it has proved itself viable.

McGuinness said he supports them and their goals of growing to include 10% of the student population within 10 years. In this, as in the rest of his politics, he takes the long view.

“What we have to do is recognize that there are sensitivities out there and the thing to do is move forward sensibly,” he said.

McGuinness has focused his attention on another type of segregation in the schools--between those who pass performance exams given at age 11 and those who do not.

Under the current system, all children of that age in Northern Ireland take an English, math and science placement exam called the “11-plus.” Those who do well are eligible to go on to the more prestigious grammar schools, which generally draw the better teachers and send more students to university. About a third of Northern Ireland pupils win places in grammar schools.

Those who do not pass the key exam are slated for secondary schools, where they are less likely to make it to higher education. Not surprisingly, these students tend to come from working-class families with unemployed parents.

McGuinness did not pass the 11-plus and, although most of his schoolmates didn’t either, he remembers it as “a very traumatic experience.” He believes that a system branding children a failure at such a young age is abhorrent and should be changed. He has already eliminated the British approach of performance tables to rank schools and has established a committee to review the grammar school system.

England, by contrast, has been phasing out grammar schools for 20 years. But rather than equalizing education, the effect has been to drive more upper- and middle-class students into private schools--an imbalance that British Prime Minister Tony Blair is trying to redress.

Advocates of the grammar school system in Northern Ireland say they do not want to make the same mistake. Sammy Wilson, a Democratic Unionist member on the Northern Ireland Assembly’s education committee, notes that the province has done well with the grammar school system, consistently producing better exam results than anywhere else in Britain, with a higher percentage of students passing university qualifying exams and of working-class students going on to higher education.

“We won’t support any legislation to do away with the current system,” Wilson said.

But then his party is unlikely to support any law put forward by Sinn Fein, believing that the republican group should not be in government so long as the IRA has not turned over its weapons.

McGuinness dismisses such criticism as the opinions of people who want to wreck the peace process and says their resistance “slowly but surely” will be broken down. He notes that although the Democratic Unionists lambaste his legitimacy, they engage with him on education policy.

Which is his job, after all.

Danny Kennedy, a member of the Ulster Unionist Party and chairman of the Northern Ireland Assembly’s education committee, takes the position that his feelings about McGuinness are secondary to education issues. He says there was less accountability in government when the British ruled the province directly, with one minister often taking several portfolios.

“At least there is an education minister from Northern Ireland, albeit a Sinn Fein one. That does provide more direct accountability and, in a sea of darkness, that is something to be hopeful about,” Kennedy said.

To McGuinness and his supporters, the sea does not look so dark.

“The fact that the executive has stayed together as long as it has, that there is a program for government and a budget for ministers . . . means people are buying into the system,” said Frank Bunting, head of the Irish National Teachers Organization.

As for his education department, McGuinness said, “We are involved in a journey here that isn’t going to provide all of the answers in the first year or the second year or the third year. It is a process of evolution and it is my responsibility to manage that as best I can, with a view to putting in place a much enhanced education system.”