When the Northern Ireland assembly closed for the elections a few days ago, the atmosphere was one of self congratulation. Ian Paisley, who is bowing out as father of the house, treated us to a resumé of his career in which the earlier, rougher part was scarcely mentioned.
Once a political outsider, Paisley will now be welcomed into the bosom of the establishment at the best gentleman's club in the UK, as the House of Lords is known. To be fair, his former partner in government, Martin McGuinness, also drew a veil over his years in the IRA as he recalled his negotiations with Tony Blair, his latter-day friendship with Paisley, and his joint achievements with Peter Robinson.
It would have been all the more impressive if the two leaders had reminded us of their more belligerent phases to illustrate the distance they have travelled. For the first time since 1972, when the old Stormont fell, few people in Northern Ireland now feel that the province can slip back into anarchy. There is still sectarianism, but it is at least contained and managed, and the institutions seem secure.
The problem with politics is that the goalposts keep shifting. The electorate is fickle. So as one problem is solved, another emerges. As political concern moves decisively away from the life and death issues that dominated during the Troubles and the peace process, many people, especially Protestants, have stopped voting and want a new focus.
Analysts often talk of the "Prods in the garden centres", the middle classes who want to get on with life and who consider politics either a dirty game or just boring. They tend not to vote any more. Lower down the social scale, dissatisfaction is, if anything, more acute. A shock was delivered to the system last year when working-class estates in east Belfast deserted Robinson, the DUP leader, and voted in large numbers for Naomi Long of Alliance, who took his seat.
The move away from the first minister was partly due to the "Swish Family Robinson" parliamentary expenses furore, in which neither Peter Robinson nor his wife Iris were ultimately found to have done anything wrong. However, Long's ability to capitalise on Robinson's misfortune was boosted by the intervention of Dawn Purvis, an independent unionist of leftist bent, who is now the nearest thing the assembly has to an official opposition.
Purvis used to lead the Progressive Unionist party, the political wing of the UVF, but left when it failed to sever its links with the paramilitary group. Freed of that albatross, she has carved out a distinctive political niche and has been widely praised for her work on assembly scrutiny committees. Last week, she and Mark Langhammer, a Labour activist, launched a report entitled Educational Underachievement and Disadvantaged Protestant Males. It is academically rigorous, quality-proofed by Dr Peter Shirlow of Queen's University, and much of it is based on published research.
The picture that emerges from the report is disturbing. In a province used to congratulating itself on its educational excellence, 52% of Protestant boys leave school without achieving the minimum qualification of five GCSEs at grade C or above. The percentages aren't good in Catholic areas either, and overall the lack of suitably educated and skilled workers is a big problem for Northern Ireland industry.
A public accounts committee report last week found that "the proportion of unqualified people within the working-age population in Northern Ireland is still the highest in the UK and needs to be substantially reduced to improve our economic competitiveness".
However, there is a particular problem in Protestant housing estates. As Shirlow points out, "the evidential base for the under-performance of Protestant working-class boys is unmistakeable. Disadvantaged Catholics are twice as likely to attend university as Protestants".
The reasons for this reach back to pre-Troubles days when heavy industries such as the Harland & Wolff shipyard, Shorts and the Sirocco works provided employment disproportionately to Protestants, often on the basis of an old-boy network of personal recommendations.
Shirlow explains that "generations of working-class Protestants were heavily involved in the manufacturing industry, and viewed getting a trade as the main form of educational requirement. The collapse in this labour market and the movement towards a consumerist, service-driven economy has, to a degree, left elements of the Protestant working class stranded with redundant skills sets and abilities".
Before fair employment laws, ambitious working-class Catholics, at a disadvantage in the industrial jobs market, saw education as the way out of poverty. For Protestants, education and book learning was a distraction from the immediate priority of securing an apprenticeship in the shipyards where their fathers or uncles could put in a good word with the foreman. The Catholic strategy may have been born of necessity and discrimination, but in the long term it was the better one.
Those days are long gone; the labour market is now heavily regulated. Even in the police, Catholics now comprise 30% of the force after a period of 50/50 recruitment. However, the old attitudes will take generations to dispel. Parents who don't value education or read books tend to pass on those attitudes to their children.
To make matters worse, working-class Catholics who become lawyers, accountants and the like tend to come back to nationalist areas to help with social projects. Their Protestant counterparts are more likely to talk nostalgically about their old neighbours and how they had come up the hard way, but not go back to give others a helping hand or a good example.
The report warns that, especially in areas where social structures have broken down and single parenthood is high, young men lack role models and can be easy prey for paramilitaries and criminal gangs. Schools, such as Boys Model in east Belfast, try to bridge the gap. Jim Keith, its headmaster, speaks of the need to provide leadership and to work with parents to impress upon children the importance of education to their lives.
Last week's report highlighting underachievement and disinterest in education is a wake-up call for a province used to congratulating itself on the excellence of its grammar schools, particularly state grammars which are mainly attended by Protestants.
The results are good compared with the rest of the UK, but it is clear that more people are slipping through the net altogether. And it is not often remarked that Catholic grammars get somewhat better results, even though they have a more mixed intake in terms of social class.
You wouldn't realise this from listening to education debates in the assembly. They have been dominated by the totemic issue of the 11-plus and the maintenance of excellence. The debates overlook the fact that the challenge is to encourage educational participation, regardless of the intake mechanism.
As Langhammer puts it, "socially imbalanced intakes are more prevalent within predominantly Protestant schools than within predominantly Catholic schools . . . the tendency to elitism comes with a heavy price tag for working-class Protestants".
So congratulations to the assembly on getting through its first term, but there is no time for further back-slapping. Old problems have receded, and just made room for new ones.
