Queen’s to host virtual conference on sensing divisions in human societies…

The School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics, and the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen’s University will host a virtual conference exploring human divisions in society on 21-22 May. This free conference aims to investigate the nature of troubling and persistent divisions in human societies that often keep societies from producing stable governance. Some societies which will be explored are Northern Ireland, Australia, Austria, Cyprus, Greece, India and Nigeria to name but …

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The north’s economic problem – education…

John FitzGerald is one of Ireland’s most respected and influential economists –formerly research professor at the Economic and Social Research Institute and currently chair of the group advising the Irish government on climate policy. He is a strong critic of Northern Ireland’s policies on education and skills training, arguing that these are core factors in the weakness of the northern economy. He is the latest interviewee in the Holywell Trust’s Forward Together podcast series. “In terms of productivity, Northern Ireland …

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Orangefield, and an unexamined aspect of Northern resistance to sectarianism and political bigotry

In the cruel winnowing ways of time the last two years have been unsparing in regard to a generation of teachers brought together in the early 1960s to teach at a new school in east Belfast which had opened a little earlier in 1957. The school was called Orangefield and it played a key role in the dissemination of skills, opportunity and challenge to almost five decades of Belfast school children – first as an all-Boys school, which was then …

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Why careful consideration must be given to when we re-open schools and how

John Barry’s book, The Great Influenza, provides an extraordinary account of the medical and scientific struggle against the Spanish Flu in 1918. In the second edition of the book, written after the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic, he added a chapter on the issues that would need to be addressed and the lessons learned for any future pandemic. Reading the chapter now in the midst of the covid-19 crisis it is extraordinarily prescient. He considers the experience of various ‘non-pharmaceutical …

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Northern Ireland’s mental health crisis

Mental health is a global challenge, but poor mental health is at crisis levels in Northern Ireland. That crisis is in part an ongoing impact from the Troubles, Siobhan O’Neill, professor of mental health science at Ulster University, says in the latest Holywell Trust podcast. “We’re seeing a rise in mental health problems in the Western world,” says Siobhan. “We know that around one in four or one in five people in Europe and the West have a mental health …

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Schools: Locked down, separately…

On 12th March, from the steps of the President’s Guest House in Washington, Leo Varadkar announced that schools across the Republic of Ireland would be closed to slow the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic. His statement echoed concerns that had been raised by teaching unions and parents in Northern Ireland and increased pressure on the Assembly to follow suit. On 18th March, First Minister Arlene Foster declared that NI would by closing all schools with effect from Monday, 23rd March, …

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Reforming government in Northern Ireland

Government in Northern Ireland needs reform, but the fact that it works at all is actually impressive given the past, says Jess Sargeant of the Institute for Government, a London-based think-tank. She was speaking in the first of a new series of podcasts produced by the Holywell Trust, which feature opinions from policy experts who consider some of Northern Ireland’s biggest challenges. The Institute for Government published a review of Northern Ireland’s system of government at the end of last …

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Online Teaching – A guide for teachers and parents…

I spent the past few days helping my local school get ready for teaching online. As of yesterday, schools have gotten no official guidance at all on how to do this, they have been left to sort it out themselves. In this post, I will outline how it all works. For schools, you will likely be using Google Classroom . This is free to schools and you will access this via your C2k email address. Login and create a class. …

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Ahead of the Stormont budget, should the Executive be rethinking its priorities?

With the first budget of the newly reconstituted Northern Ireland Executive expected shortly, there will be an opportunity to consider whether public resources are being directed appropriately to deal with Northern Ireland’s priorities for the decade to come. The table above shows UK public spending per person in each UK region for various expenditure categories for the 2018-19 fiscal year, in both monetary terms and expressed as a percentage of the UK average. For example, health spending in Northern Ireland …

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SOAPBOX: Why university staff are striking…

Dominic Bryan, is a Professor at the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queen’s University Belfast. You can follow him on Twitter. Staff in Northern Ireland at Queen’s University, the University of Ulster and the Open University, myself included, are on strike again. Staff at Universities all over the UK are on strike again. This is the second time in a year and the third time in three years. It is utterly frustrating that we are back in …

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Fact checking and fast news

Wearing my hat as a director of FactCheckNI and participating in a recent lunchtime webinar organised by ResponseSource, I commented that while social media are used to spread misinformation and disinformation, these platforms also give access to a “huge, big brain” of “experts who do actually know some of those numbers or do know what happened” who can pick holes in arguments and claims.

A challenge to the separation of schools…

A closed and boarded-up primary school must be one of the commonest, and saddest, local sights.  Crumbling façades. Peeling paintwork. Broken windows. The silent playground that once resounded to excited chatter.  Weeds breaking through the tarmac where generations of children played football, rounders and ‘chasies’.  Schools aren’t just places of education, they are centres of community and repositories of communal memories, but there is little place for such sentimentality in educational planning.  Empty school desks and restrictive budgets mean that …

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