In 1998, there were children as young as 11 reading the full text of the Good Friday agreement in class, such was the unbridled excitement about the opportunity it represented to shape a better future. One might have expected that the globally revered peace agreement responsible for ending Northern Ireland’s 30-year conflict would become a permanent fixture in the curriculum, especially given the living document’s direct and tangible impact on the lives of young people today. At only 36 pages, it is tantalisingly accessible – although “not like a novel”, as Dominic Raab pointed out, when the Northern Ireland affairs committee asked if he had read it in its entirety. However, despite its inverse proportionality of brevity and significance, the Good Friday agreement forms no part of the core programme of study in schools in today’s Northern Ireland, and nor do the decades of conflict that preceded it.
In Northern Ireland, the generations born after the historic agreement made on 10 April 1998 are known as “peace babies”, and expected to be the baton-bearers of a true and lasting accord. But, rather than guide and teach them about the impact of the Troubles and the Good Friday agreement, our largely segregated education system delivers them into a hostile political wilderness that seems designed to harden their ignorance into apathy at best, or hostility at worst.
