Photo: Billy Beggs
John Malone, the estimable former headteacher of Orangefield Boys’ Secondary in East Belfast whose alumni included Van Morrison, wrote a comprehensive paper on the role of schools in community relations in 1972. He noted that the spirit of integration which had begun to emerge in the 1960s had been ‘overlaid’ in Protestant and Catholic schools ‘by the recrudescence of traditional antagonism and suspicion.’ Malone stated that it was not only the growing influence of the fledgling loyalist paramilitaries that was having a negative effect on Protestant school children at this time but noted that political influences were also at work with large numbers of children walking out of school to attend meetings and rallies that corresponded with school hours. Protestant schoolteachers had, by the early 1970s, begun to sense emotional frustration emanating from their pupils who had begun to demand commemorations for soldiers, just as the IRA dead were being commemorated in nationalist areas. Malone bemoaned the sudden eradication of tolerance and understanding in schools and made direct mention of the Vanguard movement which he supposed had contributed to ‘much more aggressive militant attitudes’ being displayed by pupils at the time. One young man who was attending Park Parade Secondary School at this time remembers a UDA march passing the school along the Ravenhill Road. As the teacher tried in vain to direct the pupils’ attention to the blackboard and their books one of the pupils opened a window in the classroom and ran out onto the road to watch the UDA. Scores of other pupils followed him and the lessons were abruptly finished for the day.