This analysis focuses upon two boys, age nine and eleven, who live in two different housing estates in Northern Ireland.
They took part in a study I conducted to investigate children’s perspectives of their interactions at school, at home, and at play with their peers. During the course of 1997-1998 I interviewed about 140 children.
These children were tangential participants and victims of the accepted discourses of violence that they inherited by being born into their various families and communities. The way these children dealt with their individual dilemmas paradoxically placed them into deeper, unintentional, and unavoidable risks in their daily encounters with teachers and peers.I will use narrative analysis (Linde 1993) and applied semiotics (Danesi and Rogers et al. 1999), and touch upon discussions of “thirdspace” as developed by Edward Soja (1996) in order to make my sense of the children’s stories.
I begin with a minimal introduction to the children and the schools that they attended. For the purpose of this discussion, however, I will describe a single school, Bal- lybaile, in Northern Ireland. The school, the teachers, and the conditions of the social and economic lives of the people living in that community, with a few adjustments for an older or newer building, a different religious orientation, more or less sun, could be easily blurred into many schools, even the schools where I had taught in Western Australia over 10,000 miles and a seemingly different culture away.
Ballybaile is a “controlled” school—that is, a school in a Protestant neighborhood, or housing estate. Catholic schools are termed “maintained,” and in the general area I stayed there were three schools that integrated Catholic and Protestant children. The two Protestant schools where I interviewed took the name of the area, therefore, when a student went to Ballybaile Primary, he was “from Ballybaile.”
Myles, aged nine, was a Ballybaile boy. His eighteen-year-old school was bright, filled with wonderful art work created by the children, and had a fairly stable teaching staff.
The principal had been there many years and knew the children by name. The first day I set foot in the school I was walked about by the Deputy, a young woman, Stephanie O’Neill, who spoke to each child personally. Ms. O’Neill was an experienced teacher and loved her work and the school. The younger children swarmed to her and often received a hug, a pat, or some form of affectionate notice. It seemed to me to be a place of warmth and to be deliberatively supportive. Further, I was impressed by the dedication of the teachers. Each stayed after school until five o’clock almost every evening preparing lessons or working on special projects. In her concern for a researcher she had never met, Ms. O’Neill went to painful efforts to ensure that the conditions of the study were successful. She randomly selected the students, making certain there were an equal number of girls to boys, personally sent out the invitation-to-participate letters of consent to parents, and interviewed me quite carefully, preparing me to be sensitive and respectful of the community life.Ms. O'Neill was knowledgeable about the demographic information that statistically described the socio-economic conditions of the lives of the parents and their children. There were 265 children in the school, including two special units of children with mild learning disabilities. Most of the parents were unemployed and those who were employed mainly had jobs in local shops. Few belonged to the P.T.A., and only a few parents came to see school plays. Many of the children also had artwork on display in a town approximately five kilometers away—it was an outcome of the school having an artist in residence. The children had been taken to see their work but few parents went.
Ms. O'Neill described the school as a “haven,” a place the children were happy to attend. Although people in that community often moved from housing estate to housing estate, many of the parents had attended the school themselves.
The parents of Ballybaile children were represented as being welcome in the school, as being sought after to participate in the life of the school. I was told, and did see, that parents often came in to visit with the Headmaster, Mr. Davis, and freely discussed their problems with him and asked him for personal advice. This was a common feature at the two schools the boys attended.
One of the major events the school had just participated in was the Heartstone Project; the school teamed up with a Catholic School to work on issues of violence and reconciliation. A group of children from the school had visited the Prime Minister of Southern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, and asked questions of her. Individual pictures of these children were prominently displayed alongside a local newspaper article that had a photo of the children with the Prime Minister. One aspect of the project was to train children as peer mediators—the immediate effect of this program was quite noticeable, as it had eradicated bullying on the school grounds. Although the reconciliation program had been in effect for a number of years, Ms. O'Neill described the school and estate population as “staunchly Protestant—no mixing or mingling with Catholics.” Around the housing estate I had noted the curbs were painted red, white, and blue, and on the walls of some of the buildings were drawings and names indicating membership and loyalty to particular Protestant sectarian groups.
This particular aspect, “the troubles” that permeated the lives of some of the children in this school and in others, was unique to Northern Ireland. I cannot explain “the troubles” of Northern Ireland, nor why the situation—so difficult and devastating over a long period of time for so many people—is still unresolved. Many people I met who live there find it beyond their explanation. It is, of course, all about the discourses of power and rage and grief. It keeps fueled through the violence that is acted out among and between adults, but many children's lives are grimly affected. They grow up in it, become accustomed to it, and perhaps, as Burgess (1993) suggests, become immune or anesthetized by the expectation and anticipation of violence. People whom they love are affected by it, and they learn about it through direct and indirect experience. It is compounded by silences, leaving them to make meaning of events that sweep them up. The two boys I interviewed, in different housing estates, were deeply affected. Myles was nine at the time I spoke to him, and Ryan, eleven.