Why South’s tales of North have no sense of direction

Down south sixth form students are, God help them, going to have to learn about our Troubles.

By next year the recent history of this part of the island will be a compulsory section in the Leaving Cert history curriculum.

Needless to say teachers down there must be cart-wheeling with joy at the thought of having to explain the likes of decommissioning, Drumcree and d’Hondt. And that’s just some of the less contentious stuff.

According to the report compiled by the Oireachtas Committee on Education and Science there is quite a bit of reluctance on the part of the teachers to introduce the subject.

The teachers cite all sorts of reasons for this including the fact that they feel they don’t know enough about what happened up here, they believe that students already get enough information about our recent history from their community and when they have raised the subject in class they’ve found it can lead to ‘discriminatory attitudes and name calling’.

The clincher though, is the obvious one. Students down there find our history up here dull and bogged down in politics. And boring, boring, boring.

Not to worry. The Oireachtas Committee has a cunning plan.

In order to ‘engage’ children — ie interest them in the unfathomable — it suggests using comedians to reel them in. The report argues that the humour of the likes of Jimmy Young, Patrick Kielty, Nuala McKeever and Des Bishop (who he?) could be used as an educational tool to generate interest and insight.

To some extent they may have a point. It depends how far you take it though.

The hole in southern students’ knowledge is surely not to be entirely filled by the Hole in the Wall Gang?

The problem with our history is not just the boring stuff but the complex stuff. In the broad brush stroke telling of our Troubles will the stories of both sides of the community in Northern Ireland get a fair shout?

I’m thinking here of a children’s book I once almost bought in a bookstore near Trinity College in Dublin. It was billed as a history of Ireland from more or less the Year Dot to the present. Always a useful and instructive sort of tome to have around.

Idly, I turned to the back couple of pages which were laid out in pictorial spread to illustrate our peace process.

The book claimed that the people portrayed in this spread — and there were very many of them — represented the main players in the Northern Ireland peace process.

Only one of them was a unionist (of any shade). David Trimble, I think it was.

No other unionist apparently was seen as having played any major role in processing peace.

Elsewhere in the book it was much the same message. Unionists featured only on the periphery. And almost always as the baddies.

And ok, that was just one kid’s book. But fairly representative nonetheless of some attitudes down south.

So will the South’s education department now take a wider, more inclusive look at our history in its Leaving Cert curriculum? Will there be ructions if it does?

History isn’t just about capturing the attention of your audience.

It’s the way you tell it.

Belfast Telegraph