August has gone. Autumn has arrived. Winter, lurking with intent, is just around the corner.

Children have started yet another school year without the protection of an anti-poverty strategy that has action for ending child poverty at its centre.

This – more than anything else that happened in school last year or will happen this year – will generally determine the life chances of at least one in every three children passing through our school gates this week.

That reality is, to put it mildly, a thundering disgrace.

If Keir Starmer’s pseudo-Labour government removed the ‘two-child cap’ – which limits parents claiming Universal Credit, or child tax credit for any third or subsequent child born after April 6, 2017 – it would add about £17 per additional child per week.

This is not a negligible sum for cash-strapped working or non-working parents, and would relieve many schools of the financial stress of diverting school funds into ensuring their pupils are adequately fed.

School budgets are already also stretched beyond endurance.

The best way to make the education budget go further, never mind enrich the school experience for all children, would be to end our divided and divisive triplicate delivery model.

A comprehensive secular and inclusive system as the core of our education system would be a lot more cost-effective.

Where might we have been by now if 25 years ago, the Department of Education, supported by the Northern Ireland Executive, had developed and built community and political support for a 25-year visionary strategy to bring our separate, fragmented and hierarchical education systems and its estates into one coherent and integrated one?

Where might we be if such a system existed and ensured that every child’s social, cognitive, intellectual, emotional and physical development and education was the priority, and was one that enabled children – regardless of their class, creed, colour or academic intellect – the equal opportunity to grow and learn together, and achieve their individual potential?

What happened was that the tsunami of peace funds, provided by international goodwill, were, for the most part, tailored to pacification rather than the difficult task of transformative peace-building.

Patching up the discriminatory politics of the economic system which had failed us in the first place was prioritised, as was reconciliation in its narrowest definition along with demilitarising discontent.

Powersharing was designed to share power on one axis only – Unionism V. Nationalism, tied to each other’s ankles like children in a three-legged race – to the exclusion of existing or new alternative ideas. Jobs for the boys, primarily!

I questioned the sanity, ethics and sustainability of it all at the time, and I remain unapologetic for opposing and voting against the deal.

I assessed its viable lifespan as ‘about 20 years’.

The Liberals and women peacemakers avoided conflict and debate with whispered concern that I was possibly temporarily unhinged, given ‘I had suffered and lost a lot’, or alternatively put it down to my being ‘of a certain age’ – ‘menopausal’ was a whispered word, then!

The warriors-turned-statesmen ironically declared that I was simply opposed to peace, or perhaps resented not being at the table, never having been one of them.

Those of us who supported peace, equality and justice, and who opposed the settlement agreed, did so because it was clear to us that peace – as in the absence of war – was the only one of those things that was effectively on the table for everybody.

I also cautioned that a hyped-up settlement agreed in the middle of the night when people were sleep-deprived and hungry was probably against international law!

Nobody cared. The much vaunted ‘creative ambiguity’ of the language which pulled together a vague consensus of double-speak concluded almost ten years of secret shenanigans on all sides, between those who parleyed and plotted in posh places during the day, and those who plotted and simultaneously practiced war in the darkness.

The end result was not a strategic road map to peace, justice and equality, but a managed absence of war and political violence.

The treatment of those of our neighbours whose religion, skin colour or place of birth appears, yet again, to upset the Empire Loyalists and Little Irelanders who are the main driving force behind the recent racist violence, would indicate that the mind-set of supremacy has not gone away, you know.

“To what, rather than with whom, have we become reconciled?” might be a question worth asking ourselves at this point.

Okay. My timing is slightly out, in regard to a 20-year lifespan, but we cannot much longer sustain the pretence that the fossilised regional administrative unit of the United Kingdom that is Stormont is a viable medium- or long-term option.

It is flat broke – out of resources, hard cash, ideas and time alike.

If we start now to sensibly discuss what other options we might have on a whole-island basis – a much bigger question than a Border poll – the children of the children starting back might have a brighter future than looks feasible right now.

On the wider world stage, let us not forget the children of Palestine who have no schools to which they can return; no homes to set out from, no parents, no food, no water, and are now facing the scourge of Polio.

Are we also to be passive and reconciled to the idea that Israel must be allowed to do as it pleases even beyond the point of the genocide? Even to the point of global war?

If that is where we are, and what we have become, then may whatever God might actually exist to judge us all in the fullness of time, show us no mercy. None at all!

*****

Speaking of Palestine, war and peace, my holiday reading this year included Robert Fisk’s book, ‘The Age of the Warrior: Selected Writings’.

Fisk, who died in 2020 at the age of 76, worked as a journalist from the age of 17.

His writing style and the arrangement of the individual articles makes reading the content easy.

The content is factual, ethical, compelling and educational. Everybody should read it and learn

I’d bet it is not compulsory reading in the schools of journalism.