Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Welcome to Stories of Impact. I'm your host, writer Tavia Gilbert, and along with journalist Richard Sergay, every first and third Tuesday of the month, we share conversations about the art and science of human flourishing. This week, we explore a groundbreaking research project born out of the complicated history of Northern Ireland. The
The decades the country was mired in violence, what changed and what didn't in the years following the establishment of a fragile peace, and what dreams its young adult citizens now hold for their still divided nation.
We'll hear from a variety of voices, including Dr. Jocelyn Dautel, an American researcher and senior lecturer at Queen's University, Belfast. She's studying how Northern Ireland's divisions continue to impact the way young people consume and share truths about their nation's history.
and she's learning how educators are confronting their own beliefs and biases in the classroom. We'll also meet several of those teachers and students, participants in Dr. Dautel's investigation into how young citizens are grappling with persistent social division and how they imagine moving beyond it. Here's Dr. Dautel.
Thanks to the internet, thanks to social media, artificial intelligence, information is literally at the fingertips of young people. So rather than this abundance of information leading us to the truths in the world, it actually seems to be dividing us. So the world is becoming more polarized,
Rather than moving towards some unanimous truth, countries are becoming more divided politically, there's growing economic inequality, debates on cultural and social issues are getting more heated. And so the mission of our project is to explore this puzzling question. So when humans are naturally inclined to seek truth...
why is there rising polarization in the directions of the world? In Northern Ireland, where young people are modernizing, they have new tools at their hand, they have information abundant to them, yet they're constrained by a long and complex history of conflict in the society that might limit the information they have available to them across many levels of society. So, for example, for the division in the institutions,
segregation in schools, in towns. What is the history of that division and segregation? In 1922, after years of war against British rule, 26 of Ireland's 32 counties separated from the British government to form the Republic of Ireland was
The remaining six counties in Northern Ireland, where the majority were Protestants loyal to the British, remained part of the United Kingdom. So a border was formed on the small island of Ireland, separating the Republic from Northern Ireland, which remained part of the United Kingdom. The majority of residents in Northern Ireland were Protestant Unionists, but a significant minority of Catholic, culturally Irish Separatist residents remained.
This minority was treated in many ways as second-class citizens, restricted in their job opportunities, and with housing restricted by law. In the 1960s, inspired by the Black Civil Rights Movement in the United States, the separatists coordinated civil rights marches, which were met with violence from the British. This began a long period known as the Troubles.
Between the 1960s and the 1990s, the small nation of Northern Ireland, with a population of less than 2 million people, was rocked by intense civil conflict, violence, and bloodshed. Living in the midst of the conflict could be brutal and ugly.
Over the 30 years of the Troubles, more than 3,600 people died and 30,000 more were wounded in street fighting, sniper attacks, and bombings. And the dead and injured included not only paramilitary fighters, military and police forces, and political activists, but citizens caught in the crossfire.
Finally, on May 22nd, 1998, over 70% of voters approved a deal struck between the British and Irish governments, as well as Northern Ireland's unionist and nationalist factions, to end the three decades-long conflict. What progress toward peace has the nation made in the more than 25 years since the Good Friday Agreement formalized the end of conflict? What divisions remain? And what does the nation's future hold?
We'll begin to answer those questions with Dr. Dautel and with educators Jamie Art and Kieran Crudden, who are part of a Northern Ireland shared education program that works across religious and socioeconomic divides to promote a culture of inclusivity, respect, and mutual understanding. Both Mr. Art and Mr. Crudden are in their late 30s, and each of them is tasked with teaching the history of the Troubles to their teenage students,
They lived through that time themselves, and they're still trying to make sense of their own history. We'll start with Mr. Ard. He's a teacher of history and politics at the Quaker Friends School, Lisburn, and leads the school's shared education project. What does he believe has changed since the troubles ended? A lot has changed, but sadly, I think a lot has stayed the same. You know, I was 18 in 2004. The Good Friday Agreement was six years old, and
We had all these promises about what this would bring and how it would change society and how ours was the first generation that would live in a conflict-free society. And I think that's a really important point to make, that we do live in a largely conflict-free society. I'm not going into school worrying that there could be a bomb scare that might disrupt my route home anymore.
But so much hasn't moved on from 1998. So many of the conversations that we have had, and maybe the guys don't realize, are just things that are dragged up over and over again. Things about policing, things about flags and emblems, things about sporting, and particularly about the legacy of the Troubles, which still 25 years on hasn't been resolved in any meaningful way.
Mr. Crudden, teacher of history and English at the Catholic St. Dominic's High School, says, I remember things from my childhood and even my memories of, you know, the normalization of what nowadays we might describe as violence, bomb scars, troops, British troops that are sitting in your front garden when you're on your way to school as a four or five year old. When I started teaching, I didn't.
consider myself to have lived through the troubles I consider that something my parents had done you know they would talk about it and I would think oh that happened to them while walking past burning buses or you know and I thought that it didn't happen to me that wasn't the real troubles that was just you know just occasional sporadic violence but it did happen to me and it was only when I started teaching it to students and seeing the looks on their faces when I explained some of the things that happened there is maybe this isn't normal
Dr. Dautel has lived and worked in Northern Ireland for over a decade. She honors the legacy of a nation that voted for peace, but worries about the political dysfunction and polarization that plagues both her country of birth and her adopted home.
She believes that if Northern Ireland is able to evolve beyond sectarian division, it could serve as a global model of peace and reconciliation. I have a bit of an outsider's perspective coming into Northern Ireland. You know, the experts in this room are certainly not me. But from coming with this outside perspective, it really struck me at how...
salient the divide is in this context. And it made me think about the divides in the context where I grew up in, in the United States. So I think there are so many parallels that can be learned from Northern Ireland and the achievements that Northern Ireland have made towards peace.
that we can take and hopefully bring to other parts of the world. I think Northern Ireland has made progress and steps that other parts of the world haven't even considered taking. And so I think when we think about models for peace, Northern Ireland is absolutely a place where we should be looking at. But if Northern Ireland is still so politically polarized and hasn't fully realized the potential of the Good Friday Agreement, where is their hope for change?
Dr. Dautel says it's the kids. I am a developmental psychologist, so I'm really interested in studying young people because I believe that there is potentially this critical period where young people are forming their identities. This particularly tends to happen around the end of middle childhood through adolescence. And I think this is a time where
If we can hit and teach young people in the right way, that perhaps we can make positive changes. And sometimes, you know, absolutely adults, their beliefs can change, but they tend to be a bit more entrenched. And so hopefully working with young people, we can get them at this time where they're really a more formative period in their lives. So we're really interested to think about how young people who are being raised in this historically divided society
can think about and evaluate the information that's coming into them in order to be what we call epistemically vigilant. Epistemic vigilance is a scholarly term that was developed to think about how individuals don't just accept all of the information that comes in, but in fact they are wary about the information and they can choose which information they want to trust, which testimony they want to trust,
and which they might have more hesitation with. So we want young people to be wary of the information that's coming in, to be aware of the biases that they might see or hear from the information that's coming into them, and think critically about how they might seek out and share information. And so with young people being the next generation of peace in Northern Ireland, we're really interested to get young people's perspective
on where they stand with these issues in society today. Why does this matter so much? Polarization is a problem in our society. Polarization tends to lead to conflict. And what we hope is to ameliorate polarization and by empowering young people to be wary about the information that they take in, to avoid misinformation, and to become less polarized.
we hope that that will lead to human flourishing. Dr. Dautel's research included having students from different communities that don't historically mix share information with each other in a diffusion chain. This is a fancy word for an experimental game of telephone. So what we've done with young people is give one young person a polarized narrative, two sides of a story.
And we ask them to read it and recall it and pass it on to somebody else whose background is either similar or different in identity.
And we do then ask the second person to recall what the first person said for a third person and so on until we have a chain of four people. And at the end of that chain, what we're interested in seeing is how much of that original narrative is there and does it become more or less one-sided? Does the polarization extenuate or perhaps ameliorate based on who the information is passed between?
And the last piece of the study that we're doing is an interview. So we want to interview young people to really get a more in-depth understanding of how they feel about the information, the biases they're aware of, and the information in their surroundings. And when they would like to seek out more information, who or what they might go to to find that information.
Mr. Art and Mr. Crudden's students are part of Dr. Dautel's research and their respective schools' shared education programming, and these are very rare opportunities for young people in Northern Ireland to be exposed to a variety of viewpoints. Decades after the vote for peace, young people still live at a complex intersection of cultural, national, and political backgrounds, all linked to the historic conflict, says Dr. Dautel.
Not only do Northern Ireland's youth grow up in segregated neighborhoods that are 90% Catholic or 90% Protestant, but depending on their religious affiliation, they may engage in different hobbies or cultural or social events, worship in different places, and attend different schools. And unless there are programs like Shared Education and projects like Dr. Dottel's, that segregation makes it hard for young people to develop identities beyond historic tribal divisions—
Mr Cruttons says: You would need to sort of reset the whole system to try to move us as a society away from a school system that kind of entrenches segregation. And it's problematic as well, schools are often linked to the area that you grew up in. You want your primary school on your doorstep and the primary schools feed into secondary schools. So you have a situation where by the time you're three or four and your parents put you down for nursery, your whole life is decided for you when it comes to whether you meet someone from another community.
That's why 17-year-old Robin Smith, a student at the Friends School, appreciates participating in the Shared Education Program and Dr. Dautel's project. I think it provides an opportunity that you wouldn't necessarily have, especially if you come from a community that's maybe not as mixed as others. You're not always integrated in a way that the project's been able to facilitate.
18-year-old James Hamber, another Friends School student, agrees that it's vital to meet people from other communities. I think it's very good that we have shared education within the system that we're in, but it's also important to sort of recognize that this division comes from the ground up. And so, yes, it's great. We need this in education. We need it in our sports teams. We need it in where we live because the fact that
You know, us two, we can tell you we both live in mostly Protestant areas. You know, that itself is the root of the division. We are coming from areas which are a certain way. We're surrounded by people of a similar culture and education is so important to that. So it's all connected and it's all from the ground up. So if you want to address any division here, it has to be through stuff like education, people's pastimes and people's culture and how they live their day to day lives, because otherwise it's just going to remain
We're not going to get past the point of projects, you know, engaging with, you know, only a limited number of people. What was it like for the Catholic and Protestant students to learn together? James says. One of the key lessons that I sort of took from the project was how much sort of common ground there was.
St. Dominic's is a Catholic school, whereas Friends would be, while it's a Quaker school, you know, a majority of people here are from a Protestant background. I'm from a Catholic background, but I've grown up in a Protestant town. So the main thing that I drew from it was that there is a lot of common ground and people are frustrated with similar things. We're largely concerned with a lot of material things. And a lot of these issues have become a lot more broad to us. So we're less concerned.
trapped in the sort of community designations that you're sort of born with than you would have been, say, if you were born prior to the peace process. 18-year-old Scarlett Murray from St. Dominic's says...
My background is Catholic nationalist and I think that that kind of instills this view of the other or like the unionist Protestant community and I think those stereotypes especially were like views that I held that I wasn't necessarily even aware of. I think doing this program helped me really understand
We are more of a collective as young people rather than two sides and I think we're in such a great position that we are able to be a group of young people that can come together over issues that are important to us rather than just two sides that can't agree. It was a really, really insightful project to be able to get that cross-community perspective because being in an all-Catholic school it's very difficult to get a view that's not
very similar to yours and I think that did open up the avenue for that. But I also think that I was surprised that the amount as a group that we did agree on, we were more focused on issues that affected everyone rather than issues that affect one or the other. And I found that we were focusing on current issues that
we're damaging to our society as a whole as opposed to damaging to one side and I think that is kind of a privileged position to be in so that we can kind of look at the political landscape in a more balanced way. I mean we're all kind of suffering from the same issues and so that kind of just shows how far we have come whereas political issues before were very divisive we kind of get more focused on these issues together.
18-year-old Blahane Drain from St Dominic's school agrees. I feel like we were almost able to kind of detach ourselves from that core constitutional issue and focus on social issues in a way that really surprised me. I kind of had the preconception that we might, like the girls from St Dominic's, we would be discussing political issues, kind of meet some pushback and there'd be more hardline news issues. But I was really surprised at how I like
open the words and it just made me realise and look into myself and my own views, my own background and how I've embraced to perceive people from a different background. It really made me look into myself and think about it and think about how I've been sort of pushed in one direction into thinking, into buying into stereotypes and I think it really opened me up a bit and I've learnt that we do share so much more, like there's so much more uniqueness and dividedness.
Where did the students find common perspective? One place is a shared frustration with their parliament, which they refer to by the name of the buildings where it meets, Stormont. On February 3rd, 2024, Republican Party Sinn Féin and new First Minister Michelle O'Neill were finally able to form a government for the first time in over two years.
In 2022, despite the legacy and law of Northern Ireland's peace accords, disagreements between political parties on post-Brexit trade deals ground Stormont to a halt. During this period, the Democratic Unionist Party, or DUP, boycotted cooperation with the opposing party, the Republican Sinn Féin, despite Sinn Féin having won the popular vote in the May 2022 elections.
Still, the DUP refused to share power, as they're obligated to do under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, and this left Sinn Féin unable to form a government. This breakdown forced the nation of Northern Ireland to rely not on its politicians, but on its senior civil servants to keep the country running.
Here we were, like this new young generation of people from two divided backgrounds. And the thing that united us the most was a real frustration at Stormont, who couldn't cooperate in the way that we were cooperating. We have moved on and we are able to sort of push past those tougher issues at the very core and actually work together on things that affect all of us and we can agree on and can work towards solutions for. That is deeply discouraging, says James.
There should be an example of our politicians and the people who are sort of on TV representing, you know, Northern Ireland. You know, we should be getting hope from them. We shouldn't have to give hope to ourselves through projects like this. You know, we as 18 year olds getting ready to take on the world. You know, we're not the ones who should be the sources of hope. We should be being given it by the country itself. Blahane agrees with James.
She sees research projects like Dr. Dottel's and shared education programming as the way forward. Our generation are so desperate to escape from that division here. And I think that could be a precursor of something really positive in the future. Like once people have been educated and they're not going to forget about it here, they're not going to forget about what it was like to live here.
In the future, I hope people will go away and qualify and come back and work together and be able to work with the groundwork we have here, like young people socially. I think people from different backgrounds are always mixing in time in different places where it's less segregated now. I think that lays the groundwork for political and legal work in the future.
In addition to bringing divided young people together, another part of Dr. Dautel's research included having the students work together to analyze texts to evaluate how they might be polarizing. Robin says,
backgrounds were set to the side and we were more focused on you know the social and economic issues that we were sort of united upon and but also i think we surprised ourselves with the actual content we were able to deliver we were split into individual groups and some of the groups were getting into like the real nitty-gritty legal texts which i think was pretty unforeseen um i certainly didn't expect it james adds
You really get into the sort of detail and you know we produced a really good report in my opinion and we presented it well and we were able to have an impact from across those communities and show that you are able to achieve things together even when you know our own politicians aren't setting that example. Stormight Knocking and Up and Running was definitely an issue we were all really like interested in and trying how can we fix this, what can we do?
We looked at the Good Friday Agreement and I found that that was a really interesting way that young people can just come together now and I don't think that would have been the case 20 years ago. I think that's what surprised me the most, how we as a collective can work to try and challenge these certain things that maybe our parents' generation didn't have the opportunity to do.
Mr. Crudden says that it's very promising that the students have strong opinions about Stormont's dysfunction, and that they're building skills to analyze information and their national history. What those give me hope is that the project that these guys worked on last year, they did get into the nitty-gritty detail of the Good Friday Agreement. They were examining it as a legal text. They were looking at issues around legacy and culture. And they came up with a report that suggested reforms that could very much work.
But one of the local journalists here, Sam McBride of the Belfast Telegraph, did a feature piece after meeting with us for the day to talk about this. And in his piece, he was suggesting that the students had thought about the agreement in more depth than some of the politicians had. And he was right. The political institutions we have can actually entrench sectarianism. And what the students have said today about, you know, this silent majority that exists that doesn't fall into one category or the other, but might vote that way on election day because
The only other option is them or us. Those sort of sectarian narratives can move away with some tinkering to the actual political institutions. I mean, we have to move beyond that, I think, if we're to have hope that there will be someday maybe the harmony as well as the peace. But the students learned from the project, too, that many young people never learn about the Good Friday Agreement at all.
Dr. Dautel says: I read a statistic from the Northern Ireland Young Life and Times, so it's a representative survey across 16-year-olds in Northern Ireland. And one of the questions was, did you learn about the peace agreement in school? And the statistic was that 33, so about a third of young people, said that they never learned about the peace agreement, Northern Ireland Good Friday Agreement, in school.
The students who do know their national history recognize how important it is. Scarlett says,
I think it's extremely problematic that only a third of people know about the Good Friday Agreement. I think it needs to be taught to everyone. I mean, this is our history and the only way we can prevent history from repeating itself is by learning about it. And I think it is absolutely essential that we all know the ins and outs of this agreement, how it formed and how really delicate it is, because it's only really after understanding the Good Friday Agreement that you can kind of look at it and even try and come up with any sort of reform because it's
As a lot of people say about the Gooch Pride Agreement, it's a shaky structure and if you remove any single part of that, it could all collapse.
And I think learning about it and what it took to get to that agreement is an essential part just to live in a divided society and understand how the other side live and think even a little bit is definitely something that needs to happen. I think even understanding that it's there and how hard it was for them to actually achieve it, it makes you appreciate what we have now a little bit more. I appreciate like relatively stable life here is now compared to then.
But even those who learn the history of the Troubles and the Peace Agreement aren't necessarily being taught the same curriculum, says Dr. Dottel. In a divided education system such as there is in Northern Ireland, where there are different types of schools, there's also a division along school types as to which history module the schools choose to teach.
And so Catholic-maintained schools tend to teach a history module more focused on a period around the Troubles in Northern Ireland, while state-controlled schools that tend to be dominantly Protestant identity background
are split in whether they teach this module about the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland or potentially a module that covers the period of the World Wars, World War I and World War II in Northern Ireland. Mr Crudden adds... The different schooling systems here are kind of in trans-sectarianism where state schools can kind of
Focus on a different period of history that isn't as problematic as the Troubles, whereas nationalist areas tend to lean into that a bit more. I teach A-level history as well. Right up until 2017, so the 2017-2018 academic year, the A-level module looking at nationalism and unionism had segregated questions that essentially meant that
unionist background schools got to study one portion of the history for one question and the nationalists got to do the same. Now you could teach both, you were encouraged to teach both, but what was in effect happening was a sectarian split and carve up on the actual A-level history paper and it got right up to 2018 and now you're forced to do both.
Mr. Crudden's experience as a history teacher gives him unique insight into the challenges Northern Ireland faces.
One of the challenges, I think, being on the classroom that we have is that people say here that there's no agreed history. In my view, that's a totally wrong perspective. There shouldn't be an agreed history. You know, people who don't do history think it's all dates and figures and
the more you study it, the more you realize it is about the subjective, it's about interpreting and using facts to try to justify the truth to say, "This is a fact, and this is a fact, and this is a fact, so here's my interpretation, here's my conclusion." And historians are quite open to having their interpretations challenged by other evidence. And that's a really healthy thing that I try to drill into students as well, is that you're taking one particular view on this that always needs to be open to be challenged. So if you change your mind across the course of study,
and decide you know what actually I have this view now I have that view to me no matter what way that's moving politically it's healthy because new information new ideas has changed your perspective so I try to keep these things in mind and the other difficulty is just being aware of your audience you know the background that I'm coming from you know the background that the pupils are coming from so I guess your lead-in has to be carefully thought out you have to think about who it is you're speaking to and what maybe prejudices they're coming with
that could be a challenge as well. That's why projects like Dr. Dautel's are so important. Sometimes I think a basic set of facts can be agreed on, like the date in which a certain statue was created, but we still have subjectivity, subjective truths around perhaps what that statue might symbolize. Truth is subjectively defined, I think, in most cases. I mean, there's very few cases in which
And after participating in the research project, students are better equipped to evaluate that information, even if it's difficult. Blahein says...
If you're talking particularly about the North Island, it's really the issues like the Irish Language Act or flags where there's no concrete truth, there's no concrete right or wrong answer and it does come down to opinion a lot of the time and obviously everyone receives this information from people surrounding them and social media and it is hard to discern
truth from fact but with issues like this when there is no exact right answer it is hard to have a conversation like that and share your opinions without being shot down or without trying to
dominate someone else. To discern between facts and opinion, I think it basically just comes down to what I think can be proven. If I look at something as statistic, I know that it can either be proven or it's false. And so it's quite easy in that way to discern what is true and what isn't. But I think
What becomes really difficult is that statistics can be spun in any way, statistics can tell any story and so I think understanding the context of a statistic, where it comes from and the context of what you're reading really helps to discern what is truth and what isn't. Because I think statistics can be used to prove any point and I think it's important to understand where these come from and what implications this has and
really all the information you can gather surrounding the issue before you come to a decision on. James agrees. Being in this environment, you do, and through classes like our politics, you do have to learn to sort of take your own views into account every time that you're taking in other information. Because I think that truth can only ever really be your own. You can't really just take in someone else's truth and take it as truth. So you have to learn to sort of
between what's just opinion and what, you know, what your opinion is because your opinion can be truth to you even if it's not to someone else. That's why teachers must also examine their own prejudices, says Mr. Art, especially when teaching the nation's history. All history teachers
Anyone involved in history education has their own inherent biases. I think anyone involved in any sort of walk of life is going to have their own inherent biases. And when we're teaching events and we teach the module on the troubles of GCSE, it's
everything really has to be told as straight down the middle as possible. That's removing my own community background, that's removing any biases that I might have, and it's presenting the truth, the facts, because there are indisputable facts that happened in the Troubles. You know, some sides may say that's narrative, but there are facts about how people were treated, there are facts that how different groups were treated by the government, by paramilitary organisations,
that are just undeniable facts. And some of those, if I was teaching 20 or 30 years ago in a school of my own, I come from a Protestant background, some people would be very uncomfortable with those facts. And at the end of the day, if you wish to move this society forward, and history education obviously can play a massive part in that, then people need to possibly feel uncomfortable that their narrative or their own ideas
ideas that they have held are challenged. That can be especially difficult when looking back at painful events, such as what happened in 1970 in the Falls Road area of Belfast, where whole streets were destroyed, British troops and the Irish Republican Army clashed violently, and civilians were killed during three days of terror. Still, like Mr. Art, Mr. Crudden tries to teach without bias.
I agree with a lot of what he was saying in terms of trying to remove your own personal politics from the equation. I make it my mission to make sure that the students don't know what I think on the vast majority of issues, or that if I do eventually reveal an opinion about it, it's only after the full context of the discussion. So when we're starting to teach, for instance, something like The Troubles, we're coming from a, like we're on the Falls Road, we're right at the center of what was perceived by people in this community as a civil war for 30 years.
And you know that that's the audience that you're coming into. So we start the course looking at history of discrimination towards Catholics.
And students often then are riled up and angry. And then you flip it and you put it in the context. And once you introduce balance into the equation, you start to ask very difficult questions, moral questions about, well, is this justified? Or in the context of the troubles, you start from this position. But when you start to look through the narrative and look through the events as they're unfolding, which you do along a timeline, and you do very objectively and very straight, it allows students to make up their own minds. And I often would say, like, we're starting this course today.
I don't care if you become more unionist or more republican and nationalist, as long as you're an educated one, as long as you have the tools to understand why you have that view. Participating in these shared education opportunities with thoughtful and careful teachers like Mr Crudden and Mr Art, it's taught James the importance of listening.
It's really important to hear from the other side, our political supposed leaders, not listening and like a flat out reluctance and stubbornness with dealing with what they consider the other side. It's the exact thing holding up the country right now. It's the exact reason that there's a public sector strike tomorrow because we don't have a government, because people don't listen to each other. They shut their ears and they shut themselves off from the other side.
again, sort of in quotes, side, rather than recognising we're all people who have grown up in a very similar place. Actually, it's the same society, but it's the culture that's divided us. So it's really important to hear from other people. I think that we now have the ability to look at things from an entire perspective.
and societal perspective. So instead of just what happens to the Catholic community or the Protestant community, we get to look at the big issues affecting everyone. And I think that that is a very privileged position to be in. We're not worried about violence or conflict. We're more worried about intrinsic political problems and stormtroopers
storming being up and running I think that on its own is enough to kind of say how far we've come that we're not worried about that at all or any sort of physical conflict we're more worried on the political nuances of a divided society I think the only way we can ever actually improve as a society is listening to what the other communities think I think a lot of our problems stem from ignorance and stereotypes and mostly propaganda and I think
When we listen to the other side and figure out why someone believes what they do, it becomes a lot easier to figure out the solution to these problems. And I think listen really is the first step
to fix a lot of the contentious issues we have in Northern Ireland. To listen alone is more important than any other action. And I think having tolerance at a cross-community basis is essential for us to move forward. Blá Thain shares this perspective. Listening, it just opens up your own political views and it opens up opportunities like to be friends with people you never would have seen yourself having something in common with. Once you realise these things about each other and your culture, you can kind of appreciate each other more and it
invites tolerance. The students' commitment to listening is cause for optimism, says Mr. Art.
I think you have to be hopeful. We have a really bright, articulate generation of young people coming forward who don't just think there should be a change, but are, I think, going to demand that there is a change to the way that we work and the way that we live. I'm all for that and I welcome that. And, you know, my generation have failed, so it's over to these guys to sort out the problem. But the students worry that programs that bring diverse young people together to create change
won't be prioritised or sustained. I think we're privileged in the fact that we have got the experience after our education and a lot of people our age might not have and
If the funding's cut, it'll be really detrimental because I think it should be expanded completely. Like, everyone should have a chance to experience something like this because if you stay in your own bubble, in your own echo chamber, you're never going to hear other people's views. You're never going to have your own views challenged and expanded. And I just think the Shred Education Project is really vital to us moving forward as a society.
So with that funding being reduced, you might get children never having the experience. And if they're not having that shared experience in other walks of life, whether it be, you know, playing in a mixed football team or going to a school like Friends, which is a bit more mixed, you know, they're never going to have that experience, which is a real problem because then you come back to the same issues of divisions and stereotypes. The whole premise of shared education is really trying to break down
the walls of a divided society and I think the more shared education that we get the better outcome for young people because I think we are definitely a new generation and I think the more programs and the more funding that is pumped into this the better
a cohesive society we will be. I mean, when we are in a segregated education system, it is extremely difficult to try and hear a view different than the one you hear every day. And I think that element of things definitely needs to continue. And I think shared education programs really should be expanded and there should be so much more involvement and it should be a priority, but it isn't. And I think that really is like a fundamental flaw that we as young people can kind of recognize now.
Scarlett sees that it's up to young people like James, Blahane, Robin, and herself to continue their education and work for peace.
I think the Good Friday Agreement was always supposed to be the start rather than the finish line and I think sometimes we look at that agreement as the end of the peace process when in reality it is just the start and I think it is our generation that will uproot any problems in our society and I think it is our responsibility as young people to realise the problems in our new society.
society and work to fix those. I'm hopeful that we as a generation are strong enough to achieve those things. It's just essential that we keep working towards them because I think political apathy is a very common trap to fall into, especially in a divided society where some people just don't want anything to do with it because it's so complicated. But I think the more and more we learn and inform ourselves, the better we will be. And I do think we are on the right track, but I think it
requires an active effort. What does Dr. Dautel hope will be the impact of this research project?
What we hope to do is just continue building this research and taking it outside of Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland, as you've heard, is a really fascinating place to start to think about these issues, but of course issues of polarization are around the globe. So we hope to take some lessons that we can learn from young people in Northern Ireland, build models to start to think about how young people are using this information, hopefully
generalize those models to other contexts around the world as well. And hopefully we can do that and build from learning from contexts that perhaps are more pluralistic, where individuals live side by side with more amicable views.
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This has been the Stories of Impact podcast with Richard Sergay and Tavia Gilbert. Written and produced by TalkBox Productions and Tavia Gilbert. Senior producer Katie Flood. Assistant producer Oscar Falk. Music by Alexander Filippiak. Mix and master by Kayla Elrod. Executive producer Michelle Cobb. The Stories of Impact podcast is generously supported by Templeton World Charity Foundation.