This has always been a very happy and hard-working school, and we have been very conscious of the fact that we are a Catholic school in a loyalist area, and we have tried to open our hands in friendship to our neighbours. We've worked very hard at cross-community contact with our neighbouring primary school here. All the children have worked together from Primary One to Primary Seven, and even the reception classes worked with the nursery, so that we have all worked together over these years and we had established very good relationships here on Ardoyne road. We also established very good relationships with our neighbouring church here, which is the Church of Ireland church. And we have been in the church often, praying and visiting the church and the minister there has visited the school. And again, we did that very deliberately because we felt that this was a great opportunity for us as a Catholic school in such an area to show our neighbours that we didn't mean them any harm, no animosity, that we wanted to be friends and neighbours.
And what does it feel like being the headmistress of a school with the fact that the children have to be escorted to school?
I feel this great sadness because I can see that the children are being affected. I can see that they're upset, I can see they're worried. I can see some of them are coming into school in fear, and I think it's absolutely disgraceful that children should come to school like this and that they should have to live with this kind of fear.
And how has it manifested itself, Mrs Tanney? What sort of things might the children say to you to try and - in their little minds - to get some explanation? Do you see it in their school work, do you see it in their behaviour? How does it manifest itself?
Well, I've noticed that some of them are quite subdued and quiet and introverted, and those are the children we have been trying to get to speak to us. We have made a special effort to talk to those. And any child that we've found was very badly affected or that we could see was affected, we have spoken to the parents and we have offered counselling for them - they've gone for counselling with their parents. But the unfortunate thing is, it's very difficult to deal with this when it continues to go on and on. They talk about post-traumatic stress and how to deal with that, but this is not post-traumatic, this keeps going on, so we can't really start a healing process until this stops.
