Europe’s on a journey

Earlier this week I wrote that Europe needed to reconnect with its history and its humanity if it was to provide the necessary leadership in the ongoing refugee crisis. There are signs that leaders and citizens alike are indeed starting to reflect and reach out. David Cameron announced that the United Kingdom will take in 15,000 additional refugees. Politicians from across the political spectrum in Northern Ireland even managed to agree that we can and should welcome a proportion of these. Most poignantly, the scenes of despair at Keleti Station in Budapest have been replaced with scenes of hope at Hauptbahnhof Station in Munich.

Pledging his solidarity with the people of Berlin, John F Kennedy famously proclaimed, “Ich bin ein Berliner.” How appropriate that, over five decades later, German citizens are in turn pledging their solidarity with modern seekers of freedom; welcoming them with applause, sweets, and warmth.

Huge challenges remain. In Europe, much greater coordination is urgently required. Angela Merkel’s announcement that refugees could register in Germany rather than in their country of entry to the European Union has successfully put pressure on other member states to recognise their own obligations, but the focus now must be on establishing a set of procedures that are both uniform and fit for the present challenge.

More daunting is the challenge that lies beyond Europe’s borders. European countries have a deep responsibility to respond to the refugee crisis, but the fundamental causes of the crisis are unrelenting. As long as civil war rages in Syria, and particularly as long as ISIS mercilessly controls large swathes of territory, innocent people will be driven from their homes and livelihoods in search of refuge. Difficult as it will be, European countries will have to seriously reconsider their essentially laissez-faire approach to ISIS. Europe has come a long way in its response to the refugee crisis, but sadly there appears a long way to go before the suffering will end.

 

Stormont faces another roadblock

Stormont has survived another week. No other parties in the Executive have followed the Ulster Unionists into opposition, and the DUP was unsuccessful in its bid to adjourn the Assembly for a temporary period. But all is not calm on the Hill.

There has been no improvement to the crucial DUP-Sinn Féin relationship. The former insists that it cannot be ‘business as usual’ as long as PIRA involvement is suspected in the murder of Kevin McGuigan, while the latter insists that it should not be punished for the criminal actions of individuals. That’s the first crisis.

Let’s not forget, however, that Stormont was already in crisis before the summer recess. The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Theresa Villiers, reminded us of precisely that in a speech at the British Irish Conference in Cambridge yesterday. In June a ‘fantasy budget’ was agreed by the Executive, allowing it to temporarily pretend that welfare reform has been implemented. It hasn’t been, of course, and very soon the money for vital services will run out. The Secretary of State has made her most direct intervention yet: if the parties of the Executive cannot agree on welfare reform, then Westminster will take the decision for them.

The Secretary of State is the unpopular traffic warden of these two intersecting crises. She is unpopular with the DUP for, so far, not taking any action against Sinn Féin in light of allegations of PIRA involvement in the Kevin McGuigan murder, and she is deeply unpopular with Sinn Féin for now threatening to bypass the locally elected Assembly on welfare reform. In talks this week between Northern Ireland’s five main parties, the stakes, as always, will be high. When she chairs these talks, the Secretary of State has only a handful of carrots and sticks at her disposal. If she pulls out a carrot for Sinn Féin, the DUP will protest that it’s not a stick – and vice versa.

Northern Ireland politics is always complicated, but especially so whenever different crises intersect. That is part of the price to be paid for letting one crisis drift hopelessly into another.

 

Higher education goes into reverse

Ulster University announced on Wednesday that it is to close its school of modern languages. It is just one of many real-world consequences of the budget impasse at Stormont, and it sends a disastrous message.

It says that languages are expendable subjects. Some people might argue that in an age where more and more people around the world speak English, native speakers of the English language can afford to let the rest of the world learn how to speak to us. If the ever-globalising world is converging on English, then why bother putting in more effort than is required? The reality is, in fact, a paradox: during the present age of rapid globalisation we have the ability to come into contact with more people than ever before, but that still does not mean that we can communicate with them. English is by far the world’s most spoken language, with 1.5 billion speakers. The problem is, the world’s population surpassed 7 billion in 2012.

We can sit back and wait for the rest of the world to speak to us, or we can recognise that at present three-quarters of the world’s adult population do not understand us. Taking the initiative would be good for business, international relations, and mutual understanding.

Ulster University should not be closing its modern languages department. It should be expanding it. Not only do we need speakers of French, Spanish and German, but more than ever we need speakers of Mandarin, Arabic and Russian. Sadly, the decision is not surprising. For too long in Northern Ireland we have been used to decisions based on narrow considerations that ignore any sense of broader perspective. Now is not the time to go into reverse; it’s time we moved up a gear in our outlook.