Peace and Conflict Studies - Spring 2014

Peace and Conflict Studies Volume 21, Number 1 34 addition, Catholic school leavers were less likely to have qualifications in scientific and technological subjects. These issues were visible in the civil rights riots in the 1960s. Significant progress has been made in reducing these inequalities through the introduction of a common curriculum and the 1976 and 1989 Fair Employment Acts (Stewart & Langar, 2007). The recent Northern Ireland Peace Monitoring Report finds that “those who have entered the labour market operate on a level playing field and amongst the older age cohorts the numbers of Catholics and Protestants who are unemployed are proportionate to their population size” (Nolan, 2013, p. 8). However, it also notes that “the growth of youth unemployment has opened up a new communal differential: 20% of Catholics aged 18-24 are unemployed as opposed to 15% of Protestants” (p. 8). Further, whilst progress has been made with regards to equality of educational outcomes, the system remains highly segregated. Education is mentioned twice in the Good Friday Agreement, once in relation to support for the development of integrated schools and once in relation to support for Irish language education. However, recent figures indicate that almost half of Northern Ireland’s school children are still being taught in schools where 95% or more of the pupils are of the same religion (Hansson, O’Connor-Bones, & McCord, 2013, p. 47). Peacebuilding in Practice: Non-formal Youth Education in Northern Ireland The previous section has highlighted the contribution of education to peacebuilding in terms of social, economic and political transformation. This provides a theoretical framework for the analysis of three youth programmes that have been implemented in post- agreement Northern Ireland. Recent data from the 2011 census indicates that there are 227,634 youth in Northern Ireland between the ages of 16 and 24, making up 12.6% of the population. As in many cases elsewhere, youth in Northern Ireland have suffered in the context of the current economic crisis. Between November 2007-August 2010 the number of unemployed young people (24 years and younger) increased by 171%, compared to 145% in the general population. There was an even more dramatic rise in the percentage of young people experiencing long term unemployment of more than a year, with the figure increasing by 688% from July 2008 to July 2010. More recent evidence from the Labour Force Survey (Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment, 2013) also identified 42,000 young people Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEETs). At the same time there is evidence that youth are switching off from politics. In a survey of 1434 sixteen year olds 62% of sixteen year olds responded that they had “not very