SCHOOLS POLICY:THE CONFERENCE got off to a rousing start with a series of attacks on Minister for Education Caitríona Ruane.
Spokesman Mervyn Storey, who chairs the education committee at Stormont, insisted to cheers from the floor that the party was confronting Sinn Féin education policy head-on.
“I can assure you that in dealing with Sinn Féin in relation to education, it has been no “love-in”. Rather, we have battled and will continue to do so.”
He insisted that Ms Ruane had no legislative powers to prevent any school from continuing to use academic criteria to select pupil intake at second level.
What he called the “conflict” over education policy could have been avoided, he said. “Parents, pupils and teachers could have been spared anxiety, uncertainty and stress.”
He once claimed, he said, that the Minister was grossly incompetent: “That means 144 times worse than the routinely incompetent. When it comes to education matters, Caitríona Ruane is about as confused as Adam on Mother’s Day and is about as much use as a trap door on a canoe.”
To a chorus of hoots from delegates, Mr Storey announced: “I will be meeting the Catholic bishops, which will be more of an experience for them than for me. Doesn’t it say something about this education minister that the Catholic headmasters are closer to our position than to hers?”
Other Assembly members insisted that more needed to be done to improve provision in the years before primary school, and to tackle those schools which were underperforming.
Minister for Industry Arlene Foster addressed the need for skills provision, especially during the current economic downturn. The Executive needed to do more to encourage the construction and manufacturing sector, she said – but to do that the Executive first had to meet.
Having completed an investment trip to Boston and California last week, she said, it was imperative that the work begun with last May’s US-Northern Ireland investment conference continued, despite the economic climate.
Despite the drive for foreign direct investment, Ms Foster said she would also encourage local enterprise and the wealth-creating sector, which had struggled throughout the Troubles. She criticised journalists who questioned business chiefs who had invested in Northern Ireland, claiming: “Headlines come at a price,” and she called on the press to ask where their loyalties really lay.
Head-to-head: page 14