RE Northern Ireland

Congratulations are due to Norman Richardson and Tony Gallagher for the provision of an excellent new publication, Education for Diversity and Mutual Understanding: the experience of Northern Ireland . Bringing a wealth of experience, locally and internationally, in the fields of inter-cultural education, peace education and education for mutual understanding the editors, along with other contributors, provide a much needed overview and analysis of developments in these fields in Northern Ireland. While the editors acknowledge in their Introduction that the story of mutual understanding and diversity work in education in Northern Ireland has not been without its difficulties, they are keen to draw out the valuable legacy of this work and the need to learn from both the positive and negative aspects of it. In this way the book points to the future as well as reflecting on the past and reminds educators and policy makers about the need for continued attention to these important iss

The RE community is mourning the passing of Terence Copley. He was an important and influential scholar who as teacher, author and teacher-educator contributed much to the RE community in England and beyond and whose work inspired many local RE teachers during their studies in Initial Teacher Education. In relation to Northern Ireland Terence will be remembered for his challenging comments on the aims of the first Core Syllabus for Religious Education, when he questioned the nature of the 3 Attainment Targets (Revelation of God, Christian Church, Christian Morality). More recently his vision of a broader, more open form of RE that acknowledges wide diversity has given food for thought in our local context (see Nelson 2007, p. 13 ): 'What British religious education needs to do… is not to continue teaching a sort of disembodied world-religions course as it is currently doing, but to engage with the complex cultural realities of religion in Britain, including popular spiritualiti