Brian Garrett

Launch of History of All Children Together in January 2010.  Thelma Sheil, Brian Garrett, Jonathan Bardon, Cecil Linehan, Margaret Kennedy & Bill Brown.

With the recent death of Brian Garrett, the Integrated school movement in Northern Ireland has lost one of its strongest voices and key legal counsels.

When Jonathan Bardon’s book on the history of ALL Children Together (ACT) The Struggle for Shared Schools in Northern Ireland was launched in Belfast Central Library in 2010, Brian Garrett, chairman of the platform party, looked out at the very large room filled to overflowing and said to all present he had never seen so many people attending a book launch since the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.  The entire room exploded with laughter.  Even some minutes later Jonathan Bardon could hardly get his words together he had been laughing so much.  Such was life with Brian Garrett – expect the unexpected.  However, behind that fun-loving exterior and warm companionship was a steely worker for reconciliation in almost all the groups and organisations he joined or initiated.

ACT began in the North Down area in 1972 with a group of Catholic parents trying to provide catechism classes for their children not attending Catholic schools for various reasons, parental choice being high on the list as well as a commitment to ecumenism and a belief that if Catholic and Protestant children grew up in school together community tensions in time would lessen.  The Catholic authorities did not hold Sunday schools as they had committed fully to establish an all-inclusive system of Catholic schools and reading the history of partition and some of the ugly sectarian comments passed in those days, few would have blamed them.

During 1973 and 1974, ACT received so many requests from parents of all backgrounds requesting an opportunity to join the movement that a meeting of the original all-Catholic group was held in the autumn of 1975 and a resolution passed to open membership to people of all backgrounds and religious affiliations, maintaining its original principles but adding ‘the long-term aim of the development of integrated education by consent.  Thus it was that Brian Garrett became a committed member of ACT and little did the founding parents realise just how much he would contribute to development of the movement.

Having worked all through the 1970s and ‘80s to secure the future of its’ first planned integrated school, Lagan College, ACT was hugely relieved when the college was granted maintained status in 1984 as the first three years with no state funding cost over £500,000.  Maintained status gave the college 100% state aid for current expenditure and 85% towards capital.  ACT then went on to open its’ first integrated primary school, Forge (known as Forge Integrated Primary School or FIPS) on the site of the former Malone Primary School which had closed due to falling enrolments in 1984.  All went very well with numbers growing yearly and like Lagan College some three years earlier, FIPS was granted maintained status in 1987.  But all was far from well and in the early 1990s, both ACT and FIPS were on the brink of bankruptcy.

Enter Brian Garrett.  His simple task was to try to untangle the most intricate problems facing the nascent Integrated school movement.  There was a quagmire of interests to satisfy: a large UK Trust which had given ACT a grant to buy the premises for FIPS and rightly needed to have the grant repaid and with compound interest; one of the Education and Library Boards which was refusing to pay grants to FIPS which were due under maintained education legislation and the Department of Education

Under Brian’s guidance and his partners in Elliott Duffy Garret, constructive summonses were served on the non-compliant education board in 1993 and the case set out in the High Court of Justice in Northern Ireland, Chancery Division, in February 1997.  As a result, all monies due to ACT and FIPS were paid.  ACT was able to repay the UK trust which had funded the purchase of the FIPS premises, all FIPS liabilities were settled, but above all ACT was enabled to give five figure sums to the Northern Ireland Council for Integrated Education (NICIE) for three new parent groups which were setting out on the same path as Lagan College some 16 years previously: Malone College in Belfast, Ulidia College in Carrickfergus and Strangford College in Carrowdore, North Down.

Now in November 2023, Lagan College has 1486 pupils.  Bangor Academy and Sixth Form College, the largest school in Northern Ireland with over 1860 pupils, opted to transform to Integrated status in June 2023 with almost 80% of parents and guardians backing the change.  And in the weeks before Brian’s death, in late October 2023, government approval was given for the establishment of a new second level integrated college for boys and girls, Catholic and Protestant, of all religions or none in mid Down.  Despite declining health, Brian was aware of all of these encouraging developments.  He also followed with great interest the passage of Kellie Armstrong’s courageous bill on Integrated Education through Stormont in 2020/2021 and its final passing into legislation in April 2022.

There are now 71 integrated schools right across Northern Ireland, 21 post-primary and 50 primaries.  Brian loved hearing these statistics.

While many struggles may remain for Integrated Education in Northern Ireland, the movement is in a much stronger position now than in some of the dark days during the ‘Forge Saga’ which lasted for twelve years from the mid- 1980s to 1997.

ACT’s ‘Bleak House’?  Perhaps.  But even Dickens couldn’t invent the person, character and tenacity of Brian Garrett.

Ni crioch ach ath-fhas.

Tribute by Cecil Linehan.

Co-Founder of All Children Together 1972 – the original movement for Integrated Education by consent in Northern Ireland

ACT was Inter-denominationally incorporated 1974.