Addressing the problem of underachievement among disadvantaged children in Northern Ireland: what the dogs in the street know.

Our MLAs have made much of their determination to enhance the academic attainment of those children in Northern Ireland who live in disadvantaged circumstances.  Our universities have been given large sums of money over the years, and have developed a succession of failed progressive teaching models.  Public money has been squandered in looking to higher education to identify the most effective teaching method for levering up the life chances of the poor.  What should be shocking to the general public is that this problem has already been solved in one of the most sophisticated experimental studies in the history of education.  We know precisely how to raise the academic performance of poor children to middle class standards.  Furthermore, this highly effective teaching method is the very antithesis of the progressive methods advocated…

South Armagh victim’s campaigner William Frazer lambasts the Irish Government for their continued lack of cooperation in relation to the Kingsmills inquest.

Mr Frazer says “As of today the Irish Government have still not provided requested historic documentation which could be beneficial to the Kingsmills inquest or indeed offered any information in relation the one hundred and ten murders and attempted murders that were linked to the same murder gang who operated within South Armagh and were allowed to travel back and forth across the border with ease.

Their lack of cooperation is hardly surprising given the worrying sentiment of provisional support which was expressed by an Irish supreme court ruling in 1990 at the extradition hearing of Dermot Finucane and James Clarke. The majority of judges ruled that political exemption from extradition should apply to “Persons charged with politically motivated offences when the objective of such offences was to…