From Conflict Society to Learning Society

Abstract

The political crisis in Northern Ireland from 1969 to 2008, the period known euphemistically as “the Troubles,” can be seen as a crisis of learning, just as the political developments that led to the present settlement can be seen as part of the growth of a learning society. I use the phrase “learning society” advisedly, since it has been captured so successfully by government and recast to fit within the lexicon of economic need. In its original formulation, however, the potency of the term has to do with its meaning across a range of contexts, involving the broadest number of learning subjects, and I wish to retain that breadth in order to examine not just formal, structured, educational provision but the myriad informal ways in which the various partners to the conflict came to create the new, shared understandings that underpin the recent political settlement. It is possible that there are lessons here for other deeply divided societies, but that suggestion is offered cautiously. For many years the nature of the Northern Ireland conflict was obscured by misleading analogies with conflicts elsewhere and, as a consequence, so too was the search for a way forward. Northern Ireland was and remains a society with a very high degree of particularity, and there is little to be gained by reversing the direction of inappropriate analogies through an insistence that the template of this particular peace process can be applied elsewhere.