From survey to policy: community relations in Northern Ireland

Public policy is expected to be both responsive to societal views and accountable to all citizens. As such, policy is informed, but not governed, by public opinion. Therefore, understanding the attitudes of the public is important, both to help shape and to evaluate policy priorities. In this way, surveys play a potentially important role in the policy making process.

The aim of this paper is to explore the role of survey research in policy making in Northern Ireland, with particular reference to community relations (better known internationally as good relations). In a region which is emerging from 40 years of conflict, community relations is a key policy area.

For more than 20 years, public attitudes to community relations have been recorded and monitored using two key surveys: the Northern Ireland Social Attitudes Survey (1989 to 1996) and the Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey (1998 to present). This paper will illustrate how these important time series datasets have been used to both inform and evaluate government policy in relation to community relations. By using four examples, we will highlight how these survey data have provided key government indicators of community relations, as well as how they have been used by other groups (such as NGOs) within policy consultation debates. Thus, the paper will provide a worked example of the integral, and bi-directional relationship between attitude measurement and policy making.

‘Plugging the Gap’: Shared Education and the promotion of community relations through schools in Northern Ireland

Although there is no consensus amongst educationalists as to the role schools play as drivers of hostilities in divided societies, there is broad agreement that they can facilitate more positive intergroup relations. In Northern Ireland the promotion of school based inter-group contact has been offered as a means through which this can happen. Until 2007, the approach was twofold, reflected on the one hand in short-term contact opportunities for pupils in predominantly Catholic and Protestant schools, and on the other, in support for integrated schools which educate Catholics and Protestants together. In 2007 the Shared Education Programme was introduced to ‘bridge the gap’ between short-term opportunities for contact, and ‘full immersion’ integrated schools. Informed by contact theory, shared education offers curriculum based interaction between pupils attending all school types, aimed at promoting the type of contact likely to reduce negative social attitudes and ultimately contribute to social harmony. In this paper, we examine the impact of shared education thus far. Our analysis suggests that whilst shared education is generally effective in promoting positive assessments of other group members, there is a danger that programme impact may be inhibited by the foregrounding of educational over reconciliation priorities. Appreciating that the downplaying reconciliation objectives may have been necessary when the programme was established in order to maximize recruitment to it, we argue that if the full potential of shared education is to be realized, moving forward, it is important for schools to engage with issues of group differences.