Mo Mowlam is in trouble again. Ten days ago the Daily Mirror carried a story headlined "Mo: I'll Go!" The paper reported that Mowlam was prepared to quit politics at the next general election and hoped to return to her "beloved Ulster" to promote a crusade for integrated education. The former Northern Ireland Secretary has denied that she has any intention of quitting and says this is a storm in a teacup, but it is worth taking a closer look at the leaves.
There are two stories here. The first, with which the British media seem obsessed, is: What has happened to Mo Mowlam since her glory days in Belfast? There are hints of a conspiracy by the Blair administration to project her as an increasingly unreliable maverick, attractive enough in her own touchy-feely way, but not really up to the mark intellectually when it comes to serious politics.
Leave aside for the moment the implication that her main contribution to achieving peace and the Belfast Agreement was a penchant for kissing old-age pensioners and throwing her wig on the table in moments of stress. The serious negotiation, we are meant to infer, was done by Tony Blair.
What interests me about this story is Dr Mowlam's continuing commitment to the importance of integrated education in Northern Ireland. As usual, it shows an acute and sympathetic understanding of the need to build peace and reconciliation from the ground up.
The Belfast Agreement, as Dr Mowlam reminds us, contains a specific pledge "to facilitate and encourage integrated education" as an essential part of creating "a culture of tolerance at every level of society". A working party on integrated education was set up by the Department of Education in Belfast in l998, but official figures issued last year show that religious apartheid is still almost complete in Northern Ireland's education system. The campaign for integrated schooling is parent-driven, often with very little help, financial or otherwise, from government.
There are understandable political reasons for this. The main churches in Northern Ireland are adamantly opposed to integration. They see it as threatening their hegemony, though their objections are usually phrased (particularly in letters to this newspaper) in terms of the need to protect a particular religious and cultural "ethos". The main political parties have decided to go along with the churches. It has been left to smaller groups, who inevitably carry less clout in the corridors of power, to campaign for this part of the Belfast Agreement to be implemented.
The Education Minister, Martin McGuinness, has in the past expressed cautious support for the idea of educating children together. But don't hold your breath. Sinn Fein does not have a good record of challenging the interests of the Catholic Church, preferring to put the blame for all our discontents on the British.
A report published in 1996 by the University of Ulster's Centre for the Study of Conflict was extremely critical of the role played by schools in promoting better understanding between the two communities. It showed that only one child in nine met a person of the other religion on a regular and planned basis - 40,000 out of a school population of 350,000.
The report was also scathing about the government's Education for Mutual Understanding. It found there was little training for teachers, governors or ancillary staff in handling emotional and divisive issues and that, as a result, most schools took a minimalist attitude to the programme.
There has been some progress. The first integrated school, opened in Belfast in l981, was Lagan College. It had 28 pupils and owed its very existence to the determination of the parents involved. Now it has over 1,000 pupils and is turning away applicants.
The Northern Ireland Council for Integrated Education (NICIE), which was founded in 1991 in response to demand from parents, has experienced a huge boost since the Belfast Agreement was signed. There are now 44 integrated schools with about 13,000 pupils. NICIE hopes that, by the year 2008, 10 per cent (or just over 30,000) of Northern Ireland's children will be educated together.
The real achievement of such schools lies in their power to show children that it is possible to live and work with "the other sort" without experiencing any sense of threat. This was shown very eloquently by a l3-year-old Protestant student at Ulidia Integrated College in Carrickfergus who told this newspaper's "Education & Living" supplement: "I used to be a terrible bigot. I didn't really want to come to Ulidia and when I first arrived I used to talk about `taigs'. Then, one boy said `I'm a Catholic.' I'd thought he was a Protestant. That's when I found out Protestants and Catholics are the same."
What Northern Ireland's children and their parents need now is somebody with serious political and personal clout to drive the campaign for integrated education right through the corridors of power. Mo Mowlam has those qualities. During her time as Northern Ireland Secretary she never shirked from making difficult decisions (remember the visit to the loyalist prisoners in the Maze?). Even those who criticised her political judgment never doubted her commitment to the plain people of Northern Ireland and their children.
It would (surely?) be better for her than the struggle to survive in the increasingly unsympathetic environment of the Blair government. The brave English journalist James Cameron was once asked about his decision to leave a newspaper whose values he no longer respected. He replied: "It was a case of the ship leaving the sinking rats."
Think about it, Mo. There is still an important job to be done to secure the hopes that lay behind the Belfast Agreement. Perhaps it is time to jump ship and come back to people who know your worth.