El Cavador

Northern Ireland’s Sunday trading law made one compromise about shop size and another about Sunday morning. Belfast can change neither, so it has declared itself a holiday resort instead. At eleven o’clock on a typical Sunday morning in Belfast, a shop worker in a small shop will be serving customers. Next door, a shop worker in a large store will not, because the law prevents her employer from opening. Both work in retail. Only one of their employers is restricted. …

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The Democratic Unionist Party’s exposure over Jeffrey Donaldson is not only a matter of individual wrongdoing but also a failure of institutional process. Its employment of relatives, lawful but now disproportionately visible within the party, exemplifies a reliance on privately held knowledge where formal disclosure was needed, the same weakness implicated in the escalation failure the case has revealed. A leadership-commissioned review cannot yet answer for that record while its essential arrangements remain unpublished. The controversy that has overtaken the …

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The Department says its revised Religious Education syllabus is objective, critical and pluralistic, and the draft is a substantial improvement on the 2007 arrangement. But the Supreme Court’s objection in JR87 was to how Christianity was taught, not to how much of it there was, so adding breadth does not by itself answer a confessional mode of delivery. Two difficulties remain unaddressed: a statutory question about teaching denominational difference in controlled schools, and a withdrawal circular whose wording still assumes …

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An inquiry into white working-class underachievement in England published its report this week. Northern Ireland will be tempted to read it as a study of its own working-class Protestant boys. The disadvantage transfers, the category does not, and the structure that distributes it here is one that the English inquiry was not designed to confront. The Independent Inquiry into White Working Class Educational Outcomes, commissioned by the Star Academies, supported by the Department for Education and chaired by Sir Hamid …

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The DE has made equity the promise of its new knowledge-rich curriculum, and the case for clearer, sequenced content is real. But several of the elements that would actually deliver that equity, religious education, Irish-medium and special-needs provision, and the statutory assessment that should align with them, sit outside this consultation, and the equality assessment certifies the benefits of a system that has not yet been finished. The reform deserves engagement rather than rejection, but not a blank cheque for …

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The government has made an age limit its answer to a system it says is failing children. But the social-media harm on display in Belfast over the past week was made by adults and amplified by platform design, and an age gate reaches neither. The danger is not that the ban is wrong, but that restricting who may use these platforms will be mistaken for regulating how they rank and spread content. Keir Starmer has announced that under-16s will be …

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Northern Ireland argues about special educational needs as a problem of delivery. The first question is where in the school system the need is concentrated, and its selective structure has already decided that before any reform has begun. The long-awaited reform of special educational needs (SEN) in Northern Ireland is now being pursued from several directions at once. In February, the Education Minister, Paul Givan, wrote to every school leader, requiring all mainstream schools the Education Authority (EA) considers suitable …

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Police are treating the anti-Islam mural at Tulleevin Walk as a hate incident, not a hate crime. This softer approach could make the law seem outpaced by AI, but it is better explained by a decision the courts here reached a decade ago. Newtownabbey was exposed to two pieces of anti-immigration intimidation within a few days of each other. The first was crude “locals only” graffiti on shop shutters at Abbots Cross, misspelt, with an apparent threat to burn residents …

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The previous article in this series closed by noting that Circular 2026/09 had made the right of withdrawal workable for the first time in forty years, but that the harder question — whether the curriculum from which parents may now more easily withdraw will be reformed to the point where withdrawal is no longer necessary — remained open. That question is now being answered from two different directions. The Minister of Education, addressing the Assembly on 3 February, set out …

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By the end of this term, every grant-aided school across Northern Ireland is required, for the first time, to inform parents that they have an absolute legal right to withdraw their child from Religious Education (RE) and collective worship, in full or in part. The right must be set out neutrally, the standard form included, and the process described — no meeting required, no reasons sought, no approval process. DE Circular 2026/09, issued on 3 February 2026, set a compliance …

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  When Declan Kearney, Sinn Féin MLA and former party chairman, accused Gordon Lyons, the DUP Communities Minister responsible for the Irish language strategy, of presiding over a ministry hostile to the language, Lyons responded with an inversion. It was Sinn Féin, he told the Assembly on 17 February, that had done more to damage Irish language development — and his evidence was not some executive delay or budgetary shortfall but a local government signage policy: the 15% resident-signature threshold …

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Avoniel In December 2025, Paul Givan opened a new £16.5 million controlled primary school on Avoniel Road in East Belfast. The building — a Grade A listed structure designed in 1933 by Reginald S. Wilshere, the architect responsible for a significant number of Northern Ireland’s inter-war school buildings — had been refurbished, extended, and equipped to house Elmgrove Primary School, which relocated from its original Beersbridge Road site following the closure and absorption of Avoniel Primary School a decade earlier. …

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Paul Givan has been moving quickly on education reform. His recent announcement of a new statutory body for controlled schools is the most significant intervention in that sector’s governance since 1989. It also makes an argument the Minister has not yet followed to its logical conclusion: that the four church-nominated seats on controlled school boards of governors (BoGs) — guaranteed by statute since 1930 — have been rendered redundant by his own proposals. The consultation, running from October to December …

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The Department of Education has opened a Call for Evidence as part of its Review of Religious Education in Northern Ireland, with a closing date of 20 March 2026. The review is not a routine piece of curriculum housekeeping. It follows directly from the UK Supreme Court’s judgment in Re JR87 and DE [2025] UKSC 40, in which the Court found that RE as delivered in a Northern Ireland’s Controlled sector was not conveyed in an objective, critical, and pluralistic …

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The Education (Northern Ireland) Order 2006 requires that any core religious education (RE) syllabus be prepared by a drafting group of ‘persons having an interest in the teaching of religious education in grant-aided schools.’ In 2007, the Department of Education (DE) interpreted that phrase to mean only the four main Christian churches. In July 2022, Mr Justice Colton found this arrangement produced a syllabus that breached the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). In November 2025, the Supreme Court unanimously …

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The Department of Education (DE) has published its draft attendance strategy, Attendance Matters: Supporting Children and Young People to Attend School Every Day. It runs to several dozen pages. It acknowledges a crisis. It proposes six priorities, including a welcome focus on Emotionally Based School Non-Attendance (EBSNA) — the phenomenon of children whose absence reflects distress rather than disengagement. It commits to data-driven early intervention. But it contains not a single line of sex-disaggregated attendance data at the post-primary level. …

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On 3 February 2026, Education Minister Paul Givan responded to the Supreme Court’s JR87 ruling with an Oral Statement and a Circular on withdrawal from Religious Education and collective worship. As with the curate’s evaluation of the rotten egg served to him by his bishop, the Department’s response is “good in parts”. The circular substantially improves withdrawal procedures. The Purdy review promises proper curriculum reform through consultation, with a new RE syllabus by September 2027. These represent genuine progress. But …

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Given that shootings are rarely out of the news, a recent BBC News story on firearms ownership in NI should be a cause for concern. NI has approximately 53,000 licensed firearms holders—roughly one for every 36 people, or about 2.8% of the population. In England and Wales, the figure is closer to 0.8%. The PSNI seizes firearms from more than one licence holder per day due to concerns over continued suitability. These figures prompt an obvious question: why does NI …

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Peter Shirlow’s border poll analysis, recently serialised by Slugger, offers insights that reach beyond the usual constitutional considerations. The most significant discussions emerging from this issue concern not only the more obvious practical considerations but also the increasingly prominent ‘Other’ category—a segment of voters who choose not to identify as either unionist or nationalist. They are presented with nothing but a binary political framework that fails to accommodate their perspectives. Education presents a comparable dilemma. El Cavador highlighted a transformation …

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A follow-up analysis to ‘Time to Flip the Switch: An Opt-In Model for Religious Education in Controlled Schools’. A four-year-old girl came home from her Belfast primary school and started reciting prayers before meals. Her non-religious parents had not taught her this. Her school had. That girl came to be known as JR87, and her legal challenge against mandatory Christian religious education and collective worship ultimately reached the Supreme Court. In paragraph 88 of his judgment, Lord Stephens delivered the …

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