Today marks the one-year anniversary of the Hamas attack which involved the killing of Israeli forces and civilians.
The assault, to use the language of the Israeli Defence Forces, successfully eliminated many members of Israel’s armed forces.
In the eyes of the Hamas fighters, the Israeli civilians killed in the process – and the hostages seized in the raids – were simply collateral damage, a lesson undoubtedly learned directly from those who have oppressed the Palestinian people for many generations.
That makes it no more right nor just. Families of those mourning loved ones killed on October 7 feel the same loss as the Palestinian families who mourn many, many more loved ones killed since the Nakba trauma began.
History is full of such cruel and sobering ironies.
The Palestinian nightmare has been long, continuous and unrelenting, impacting successive generations of people whose only crime was to be born and reside in a land coveted by outsiders.
Throughout the past 70 years, Israel has inflicted countless October 7 attacks upon the often defenceless and vulnerable Palestinian communities, barely registering with a western world which long ago decided that atoning for centuries of shameful anti-Semitic practices and attitudes meant absolving Israel of the inhumane treatment it regularly metes out to Palestinians.
No American nor European leader can speak with any moral authority about notions of global justice, universal rights nor equality whilst standing with an unashamedly genocidal regime in Israel which has killed over 41,000 Palestinians in a single year and laid waste to the Gaza ghetto.
The western leaders have also stood silent whilst Israel killed 2,000 people in Lebanon over recent days and, by failing to rein in Netanyahu, have allowed a potentially catastrophic regional conflict to come dangerously close into view.
There is no happy ending to this story. As the late, great Kris Kristofferson wrote: “They hold the power and the money and the guns. It’s getting hard to listen to their lies.”
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The furore over the Loyalist Communities Council’s expressed opposition to the siting of an Irish language school in east Belfast has failed to take account of a number of other significant aspects of the story.
What has not been featured in the media-led discussions about the meeting was the specific reference to the RAISE programme by the DUP minister in his engagement with the loyalist representatives.
Post-Covid, education funding has taken a hit, severely impacting upon our schools’ ability to address the tail of educational underachievement long characterising our education outcomes.
The abrupt ending to the Healthy Happy Minds and Engage programmes in 2023 continues to be felt in our local schools. Those Stormont-led and funded initiatives are no more, and school leaders continue to nervously monitor annual budgets, knowing they no longer have the capacity to set up alternative provision to address needs formerly met by such programmes.
The RAISE programme discussed with the loyalist paramilitary leaders is, according to the DUP’s Paul Givan, a new initiative to “raise achievement to reduce educational disadvantage”. It’s a £20 million pound programme running over two years with the potential to be extended.
The most noteworthy aspect is that it is wholly funded by the Irish Government through their Shared Island initiative, an irony that won’t be lost on anyone. Perhaps Paul Givan could muster a ‘Go raibh míle maith agaibh’ to Simon and Micheál?
This initiative is not without controversy. The new DUP minister abandoned the respected and long-established means of identifying school communities most at risk of underachievement – ie those schools with the highest percentage of poor pupils on their enrolment – and replaced it with a convoluted new formula for determining eligible schools to receive funds via RAISE which has led to two-thirds of all grammar schools being deemed eligible whilst some schools in working class communities like Ballymurphy, Turf Lodge and Andersonstown are excluded.
This has been raised on the floor of the Assembly by Sinn Féin’s Pat Sheehan but deserves much greater scrutiny, not least by a Dublin government bankrolling the project.
The most recently published exam results (2022/23) for the north illustrate how just 56.5% of our poor kids (those deemed eligible to receive free school meals) passed five good GCSEs, with more than 82% of those not entitled to receive free dinners jumping this hurdle, confirming that relative poverty remains the biggest factor determining underachievement.
Indeed, 96% of grammar school pupils passed five good GCSEs yet only 61% of non-grammar pupils, further denting the credibility of the minister’s new formula for determining schools eligible to receive underachievement funding.
A final note. In that year, 705 poor Catholic boys fell onto the education scrapheap by failing to secure the five good GCSE grades. They were joined by 481 poor Protestant boys.
Those who constantly peddle the narrative that working-class Protestant boys are being left behind are either being disingenuous or simply ignorant to the fact that, year after year, far more poor Catholic kids leave our system without basic qualifications to enter the real world.
Perhaps the minister would be better spending more time with people interested in the plight of all our children and not with those who rage against bilingual five-year-olds and for whom interest in educational prospects is confined to kids with the ‘right’ background.