Exactly right. As a Catholic Irish republican with an English father, I'm basically doomed on all sides unless I'm talking to someone who's actually been educated. It's a real shame to see. It seems Northern Ireland has just come to the conclusion that they would rather airbrush history than learn from it. As a result, I almost guarantee that there will be further dissident activity on both sides. In the last two days, we've had a bomb planted, a kneecapping and a death threat issued to a journalist. This is just going to keep on escalating. Northern Irish schools simply don't address the issue well enough. When I was studying the Troubles, all we were taught about was the NICRA marches, the UWC strike, the Irish republican hunger strikes and the Good Friday agreement. None of this actually highlighted why people decided to go to war, or even gave unbiased information on how much people suffered. When we had to talk about Bloody Friday, you could practically feel the tension in the room rise as all the Loyalists started thinking about how they wanted revenge and how all Irish republicans should be killed and the likes. Not once did they mention the Dublin and Monaghan bombings when the UVF killed 32 people in one day, as opposed to the 9 killed on Bloody Friday. I can only assume the bias works in reverse in predominantly Irish republican schools. All this does is give the students a boost of patriotism, anger and a feeling of justification for the killings of others.
