Exhibition: Time to Think

As the peace process evolved, Loyalist and Republican students applied their knowledge and skills to understanding their situation politically, and changing it. In the early 1990s, in the first audio clip on this page Republican Séanna Walsh explains how studying the Treaty of Versailles in a history module allowed him to recognise a tactical shift in the position of the British Government.

Knowledge and skills acquired through studying in the H Blocks in the 1990s also proved useful when negotiating the Belfast Agreement, now more commonly known as The Good Friday Agreement. In the second clip on this page, Loyalist Student C gives one example of how his education was useful in translating documents and the language used in the Agreement into plain English.

By July 2000, under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, early release was granted to remaining Loyalist and Republican prisoners. A number of OU graduates continued their studies upon release or applied their academic knowledge in different ways.

For example, both Loyalists and Republicans had studied the works of the educationalist Paulo Freire, whether informally through their own political education, or formally with The Open University. Some describe how they have applied Freire's liberation theories of education in their lives and transformative community work upon release. Paulo Freire was also one of the honorary graduates of the OU at the first graduation ceremony in 1973.