"Our grammar schools are the glory of Northern Ireland,” suggested the DUP’s Sammy Wilson a while back, praising the procedure whereby children are divided into sheep and goats at 11.

Sammy and the Duppers have had to modulate their tune since. Consigning pre-teens to the dustbin of life on the basis of a once-off examination strikes most folk as irrational, not to mention unfair. So supporters of division now take their stand on the “principle” of academic selection: as long as all youngsters are tagged as hoodies or blazers at some early stage, the DUP isn’t dogmatic about which year the earmarking should happen.
The party’s commitment to divided education is such that they made it a deal-breaker at St. Andrews and won a written guarantee that Westminster legislation will rule out a restored Assembly abolishing selection.
Nobody held out at St. Andrews for the abolition of water charges, an end to child poverty, new measures to protect the environment, or, indeed, anything else whatsoever. Outside Orange-Green issues, no party was committed to anything as strongly as was the DUP to saving the North’s grammar schools.
Ho hum. Even, ha-ha.
Evidence has come to light suggesting that academic selection is crude class-based bigotry masquerading as belief in excellence. Not that we didn’t know this already. But the evidence unearthed by leading journalistic archaeologist, Suzanne Breen of the Sunday Tribune, is striking.
In the midst of one of those quirky and possibly significant pieces in which the gamine journo seemingly specialises, Ms. Breen quoted last month from letters written by two of Sammy’s DUP sidekicks, Ian Paisley Junior and Jeffrey Donaldson, to clergyman and retired terrorist Kenny McClinton (aka Dr. C.K. McClinton, BA (Hons), MA, PhD, D. Litt., Pastor of the Ulster/American Christian Fellowship Mission) who had demanded an explanation of the DUP’s betrayal of True Protestantism as exemplified in their support for the aforementioned St. Andrew’s Agreement.
(It might be useful at this point to explain that young Ian was long ago identified as a future trail-blazer, or at least blazer, bright potential discerned when he took the 11-plus and gained entry to the elite Methodist College and thence to an honours degree course at Queen’s. Jeffrey, on the other hand, it has to be recorded, was branded a failure at 11, deemed unsuitable for the glorious ambience of the grammar sector and dispatched to obscure Co. Down secondary Kilkeel High before going on to nondescript Castlereagh College.)
The younger Paisley was indignant at Pastor Kenny’s allegation of political apostasy. “Look whose under pressure tonight,” he stormed in the letter published by Ms. Breen, “the traitors in Sinn Féin, traitors to republicanism! Rejoice, our enemy is turning against themselves...”
Readers will instantly have identified the element of relevance to debate on academic selection.
The Junior Paisley had used the determiner or relative pronoun “whose” where he should have written the pronoun-verb contraction “who’s,” thus rendering his own sentence meaningless.
And there was: “Our enemy is turning against themselves.” The Big Man’s wee lad should, of course, have written either, “Our enemies are turning against themselves,” or, “Our enemy is turning against itself.” Singular noun, singular verb; plural noun, plural verb: as set out in “English for Infants: The First Steps.”
In contrast, the letter from Jeffrey published in the Trib. was near-perfect. As far as grammar, syntax and regard for the rules of the English language are concerned anyway. True, there was a comma missing from, “Is this what you fought for Kenny?” But, that apart, full marks.
Examiners might agree that two out of 10 for Paisley, nine and a half for Donaldson, would be a fair assessment of the pair’s performance.
So, the one who was selected for academic brilliance turns out a semi-literate gobshite whose efforts at English composition would bring a blush of embarrassment to the cheeks of a dull child, while the one who was discarded as a dunce and fast-tracked towards failure matures into (these things are relative) an elegant wordsmith.
Says it all.
Ian Junior won’t be embarrassed by any of it, not understanding what he’s supposed to have done wrong.
It’s the parents I feel sorry for.
Standards in religious knowledge are in steady, sad decline, especially among the religious.
I picked up the Northern Catholic Daily, the Irish News, one day last month, to be rocked back on my heels by the shocking headline, ‘Immaculate Conception At Chester Zoo.’ The inscription appeared above the story of a Komodo dragon lizard at the Lancashire zoo, which had laid a clutch of eggs despite never having had sex.
Clearly, the journalist involved had no notion of the difference between the Immaculate Conception, promulgated by Pius XI in the Bull Ineffabilis in 1854, declaring that the BVM had been conceived free from Original Sin, and the Virgin Birth, first defined at the Synod of Milan in 390 AD under the presidency of St. Ambrose, asserting that Jesus’s mum had never had sex.
Shocking but not surprising, I suppose, that so many minds should mix up mysteries in an era when materialism is commonly mistaken for lack of interest in religious ideas. What I say is, how can people be expected to see through religion if they don’t understand it in the first place? And how, in turn, can the first draft of history be accurately compiled if the compilers are unable to distinguish between the conception of Mary and the birth of her son?
Semi-literates campaigning for the preservation of elite schools. Catholic journals displaying ignorance of the core elements of Catholicism.
Dear god.
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I hear it said that Bono has been a disgrace to Ireland in bowing the knee to British royalty and agreeing to become a Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Bollocks. Hundreds of my best friends are British and there’s not one of them doesn’t believe Bono has been a disgrace to them, too.
What’s wrong about his acceptance of this absurd patent is not that he’s an Irishman in obeisance to Brits but that the shaming honour is symbolic of the role he continues to play in shoring up a system which offers the world deepening poverty and widening war.
I don’t go along with the theory that Bono doesn’t know what he is doing, that he has bewildered himself into believing that the corrupt global parasites with whom he chooses to hang out are, in fact, decent sorts doing their best. He’s an intelligent adult. I have to assume he knows who gains and who loses when he shines up the image of war-mongers like Bush and Blair and morally inert zealots for the free market like World Bank boss Paul Wolfowitz.
If he doesn’t understand what he is doing in giving filth a sheen of glamour, he’s too stupid for words, and I don’t think him stupid at all.
Blair’s “open letter” to Bono is best understood as one rich man’s thanks to another for helping defuse and divert the anger of the poor.
“I want personally to thank you for the invaluable role you played in the run up to the Gleneagles G8 Summit. Without your personal contribution, we could not have achieved the results we did.”
Pass the sick bag, somebody.