Upon reading the Belfast Telegraph last week to learn that Bill and Hillary Clinton, alongside other political notables such as Senator George Mitchell Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, have backed the newly-established Goliath Trust to provide additional aid to schools in deprived loyalist areas, I thought to myself, “finally!”

The recent debate surrounding ‘rights’ and ‘inequalities’ in Northern Ireland over the past 14 months has been so small-minded it has underplayed the huge gaps that continue to exist in our post-conflict six counties. For me, in nothing moreso than educational underachievement among the Protestant working class is this masked inequality ironically most evident.

British colonial history on this island, exacerbated by Unionist hegemony post-partition, and an arguably Unionist-led Assembly post-1998, has peddled a narrative that Protestants have it all and Catholics have nothing. If you think that by having favourable outcomes on parading or authorities turning a blind eye to unsafe and (sometimes, but not always) offensive bonfires that Protestants are somehow living the ascendency dream, then it’s time for you to take a drive into some of the most deprived Protestant areas in Northern Ireland.

Last week, the Northern Ireland School League Table (2018) highlighted the trend that Catholic Grammar Schools tend to come out on top and state (Protestant secondary schools) tend to come out last. Catholic Maintained Schools have a history of obtaining excellent grades; irritating though it is that the most integrationist of people hold a juxtaposed and likewise protectionist view when it comes to discussing the loss of the CMS sector for the greater good of integration – though an insurmountable mindset to challenge – the answer has to lie in increased funding for education in deprived Protestant (and Catholic) secondary schools.

In 2011, a group led by former Independent Unionist MLA Dawn Purvis published their work ‘A Call to Action’, highlighting the gross educational inequalities among Protestant boys living in East Belfast. Yet still there seems to have been no fast route out of this hamster wheel.

Educational underachievement, deprivation and aspirational poverty are inextricably linked. Everyone wants to talk about high suicide rates among young men, but people are less up to the challenge of changing the trajectory that results in this harrowing cycle – educational inequality. I’m no sociologist, but I would be confident in saying that the link between low educational performance among young boys in areas such as East Belfast and high levels of suicide in young men from the same areas is no coincidence.

It is worth remembering that Brexit, agonizing as its consequences may be, was born out of a discontent among communities that felt left behind. While the global villagers marched on to bang the drum of cultural and liberal human rights, families in certain parts of the UK have been struggling to put food on the table.

Whilst the Catholic working class have their own problems of inequalities to contend with – a shortage of housing being an imminent threat to the mental health of young people from nationalist areas – for the Protestant working class, inequalities can and do manifest slightly differently. Nonetheless, the injustice of it all still results in the same chaos and harmfulness.

On the cusp of the 20th Anniversary of the Good-Friday Agreement, therefore, I believe it’s so, so commendable that the Goliath Trust have set about tackling this monumental task. For me, it is indicative of a movement fighting for the future in a time so fixated on hearking back to the past.