‘Integrated education is a desperate hope or prayer for peace in a still-separated place’ - Oakgrove Principal
‘Peace is the result of anxious daily care to remove the causes of conflict from our hearts, our school, and eventually our world.’
Addressing Oakgrove College’s senior celebration of success, the principal, John Harkin, has paid tribute to the ‘massive achievement’ of ‘the simple, daily coming in and going out of this school of different people determined to be different together.’
‘An integrated school just by its existence is teaching HOPE and hope, we are told again and again, is the most powerful force in the world,’ he added.
‘The everyday endless effort to promote reconciliation under this roof is doing what we are meant to do in the small print of a document which is celebrated on the world stage, the Belfast Good Friday Agreement. In here, we model the reconciliation which on the bigger stage people hope to dare to begin.’
Welcoming the new CEO of the Council for Integrated Education, Sean Pettis, Mr Harkin paid tribute to the organisation as ‘our voice, our advocate, and our guiding light.’
Reflecting on the past twelve months, the Oakgrove Principal continued, ‘The terrible events in Southport this summer showed how quickly violence can spread, how quickly people’s fears and angers can spill over and harm the fabric of the society which is our home. That violence reminds us of what simmers beneath the surface, and reminds us that peace is the result of anxious daily care to remove the causes of conflict from our hearts, our school, and eventually our world.’
Reflecting on the city, John Harkin spoke of ‘this still-separated place, desperate to come closer together, yet still frightened of a future together, and still haunted by a past which has never been resolved, reconciled, restored.’
Oakgrove, he added, represents ‘a desperate hope or prayer for peace one day.’
This year, he reminded the audience, is the 400th anniversary of the Religious Society of Friends, the group known as The Quakers, famous for their contribution to social justice (not least in Ireland in the famine) and to peace. ‘We remember one of our school’s early supporters from that tradition, Jerry Tyrrell whose life’s work shaped so many of the early practices in both the Oakgrove schools’, the principal continued. ‘I mention Quakers because their number across the world is small, yet I would say their influence is vast. So can ours be, when we direct our efforts as we do to modelling togetherness and reconciliation. The efforts in this school will never be written large on the world stage but that does not mean we do not celebrate them.’
‘I have quoted to our students the Red Cross maxim ‘Never despise the simple act’. Never underestimate your power in choosing this school. Students, never underestimate your privilege in being in a school where we are together. ‘And,’ he concluded ‘those of you about to leave us to take your place on a bigger world stage, never, ever forget the life lessons you learned in Oakgrove: we are better together, and there is nothing, nothing which determined hearts and minds working together cannot overcome.’
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