Mr. Peter Osborne:

There is a context of understandable resistance or different views from all the different sectors. Discussions will need to be had across all the sectors in education. I will give the committee another statistic from Ulster University. Of all preschool provision in Northern Ireland, 47% is totally segregated and of the rest, almost all would have only one or two preschool participants from the other side of the community to the majority. That would be one or two children compared to the other side of the community that would have all the rest of the participants in the preschool provision. Some 47% of preschool provision does not have anybody from the other side of the community participating.

When I chaired the Community Relations Council I carried a session somewhere around the north coast. Integrated education and education as a whole were mentioned and one of the participants came to me privately and told me he or she lived in a rural area up the end of the lane where there were two houses. This person said that his or her family was in one house and the other house had a family from a Protestant background. It only occurred to him or her after I spoke that the children of both families were of the same age and played together. However, when they got to the age of five and went to school for the first time, they went down to the bottom of the lane and one of them turned left and the other turned right. He or she said they had been turning left and right at the bottom of the lane ever since. It is a phrase that I have never forgotten because that is what is happening. It is abnormal for that to happen in an education system because what then happens is the children play different sports, make different friends, go to different youth clubs and organisations, have different social structures around them and live their lives in different ways. That is abnormal and we should not be surprised if at the end of that we have an abnormal society where people from different backgrounds do not know enough about each other, do not respect each other and do not understand each other. That relationship is what reconciliation is all about and if we do not address this issue within schools and the schooling system, including area planning and all sorts of other relevant issues, we will not address the issue of reconciliation in Northern Ireland.

I will go back to the question that was asked earlier about the political parties in the North. I have a great deal of time for all the political parties across the divide and it was wonderful to see that coalition from across the divide recently supporting the Bill going to the next Stage in the Assembly. That is a remarkable thing and I have a lot of praise for it. I ask members to go to their colleagues and thank them for what they did there. One of the main things is that those parties are convinced that this is the right thing to do. That is what the Integrated Education Fund is trying to achieve but it is a small team of staff, along with voluntary directors like me.

There is a limit to what can be done. In that context, apart from thanking the political parties for their support - and hopefully that support will deepen as people think through the consequences of not tackling the abnormalities in the education system - I also thank the Department of Foreign Affairs, because its reconciliation fund has helped the IEF to do some of the work it is doing.